Of course Hansen deals in real, often horrifying realities. To this day, he lures real, probable (and in many cases, later convicted) child predators into situations where they believe they will be meeting with underage children alone in a house. But it’s, again, the effect Hansen’s allure had on the media that drives the Primetime filmmakers.
“This is an internet figure,” Oppenheim considers. “He was a television news figure and he was very popular on television news, but his popularity only surged when he was on early YouTube, and it continued to grow and adapt.” Indeed, Pattinson similarly only discovered Hansen online at friends’ insistence when he first moved to the States back in 2008. “Everybody I know has a relationship to Chris Hansen, at least in America, but they only discovered him through one of these after images of him.”
Says the director, “I don’t know if it’s possible to actually make a proper depiction of the real person when the real person has fully subsumed himself into the meme and all of the serious work he does is sort of absorbed into this persona that has grown on the internet over decades. I want to adapt that. I want to adapt the persona of him.”
With that said, the goal, at least according to the director, was never to depict Hansen as a kind of monster—although Dracula has also been name-dropped as reference point and the real Hansen has made clear to the press his unhappiness with the film—but to study a character who lived life at the center of one of the 2000s’ most lurid media circuses.
“[When Ajon and I tried] to convince Rob to play the part, not just produce the movie, it was this idea that drew us in: When you get so close to the darkness, how does that affect you? I talked about this with Rob all the time, and I wasn’t sure how he was going to perform it, and what he did was so different than what I had expected… it was almost like channeling PTSD or these effects of having spent more time with predators than your own family, and the family that this kind of troupe of people that go from city to city become. They resemble more of a family than your own.”
In the film, Pattinson depicts interactions in the Hansen household between father and sons, and husband and wife, as frosty. Stilted. Alien. He seems more at home, if not necessarily more human, when taking on a paternal relationship with “Decoy Dan,” Gisondo’s 24-year-old actor hired to pretend he’s a prepubescent boy online. There is, in other words, an unknowable mystery about the figure.
