Chris Hansen says he was more confused than offended by Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, and is answering this dramatized version of events with his own documentary.
Chris Hansen has finally seen Primetime, which he watched in a Times Square theater alongside an audience of average moviegoers — and he says he was more baffled by the film than anything else.
He’s also got “a number of documentaries” about his life and career in the works, one of which is currently being shopped around to multiple different platforms.
Hansen delivered the news during an interview with fellow host and journalist Jesse Watters on his YouTube channel after watching Primetime, where he revealed the documentary’s title: I am Chris Hansen.
“It’s a project, a film, in which I cooperated, produced by folks obviously I know and work with, and it was in the works well before we even heard of Primetime,” he said. “It’s pretty good timing to have this thing out there with our agents shopping it on the West Coast to various platforms.”
Hansen went on to give his review of the movie, which he graded a D. (Hey, at least it wasn’t an F.) And while Hansen praised Robert Pattinson’s performance, he felt the actor’s portrayal of him deviated significantly from who he was as a person — to the point where it was like watching a totally different person on the screen. And that, for Hansen, makes it so separate from his own identity that it’s hard to be offended by it.
“What was in it, in my mind, was something that was so overly-dramatized, so detached from reality — as the director put it, a fever dream — that it almost hit me as something that was so far from reality that it wouldn’t even bother me, and I think other filmgoers will experience the same thing.
“In a way, it’s a hit piece on me and the series, which is weird, because all we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children. So in that respect, it’s sort of an insult to the thousands of men and women who want, every day, to do the same thing that I try to do in Takedown and did in To Catch a Predator. It’s so far over the top that it’s hard to come to grips with what they’re trying to do here.”
Hansen went on to mention a specific scene in the film where Pattinson sits in front of a vanity mirror, shirtless, rehearsing what he plans to say to the supposed predators when he gets them on camera. This, like “almost every one” of the other scenes in Primetime, “didn’t happen,” according to Hansen.
Hansen went on to reiterate that he was never approached by A24 about the film. Previously, he claimed that he’d refused to sign a waiver before entering a screening of the movie, alleging that the studio wanted him to “sign away my rights.”
Prior to seeing the film, Hansen slammed it as a “very dramatized version” of events and even purchased advertisements for his own true crime network to air before every single screening of Primetime. In contrast to Hansen’s opinion, we at IGN scored the film a glowing nine out of 10, calling it a “blast from the past with a sickly allure” that’s “as garish as its subject: Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator.”
Image Credits: Mike Pont/WireImage via Getty Images
