Robert Pattinson paid tribute to the real Chris Hansen at the Venice Film Festival premiere of his new film “Primetime,” saying he hopes the “To Catch a Predator” host likes the movie even though he’s been vocal about the film after refusing to sign an NDA to view an early preview.
Hansen has yet to see the finished cut — though that hasn’t stopped him from taking out ads for his boutique true crime streaming network, TruBlu, which will play exclusively ahead of “Primetime” for the film’s first four weeks in theaters.
“I hope he likes the movie,” Pattinson smiled at the Venice press conference. “I’d hope that the amount of inspiration his character has given so many of us involved in this, over the years, comes across as some kind of compliment.”
“There’s something magnetic about his presence,” he continued. “Even after watching literally thousands of hours of everything to do with him, you still can’t quite put your finger on what it is. I think what we were trying to capture was our collective enthusiasm for that mystery. He’s always the most interesting character to me — there’s an energy every actor wants to play, that kind of vibrant magnetism.”
Director Lance Oppenheim echoed that praise.
“I think of Chris Hansen as a journalist, as an entertainer, but also genuinely as an artist,” the filmmaker said. “Hansen came up with this unbelievable apparatus — actors pretending to be children, converted houses as props, cookies, sweet tea, pepperoni pizzas — these mundane things that became almost mythological in the show and in the culture.”
“I can probably point to ‘To Catch a Predator’ as the first thing I ever saw on mainstream television that mixed those two forms: truth and fiction, artifice and reality,” Oppenheim continued. “I thank him for making this thing, because without it, I probably wouldn’t be making films the way I do today.”
Pattinson also has a message for social media users everywhere: meme away!
The English star embraced the wave of line-reads and repurposed clips — from “The Odyssey” and the “Primetime” trailer — now circulating online.
“It’s fun to repurpose them,” he said.
“You can never tell the audience how to feel about what you’re doing,” he added. “But you can give them things to attach to, and the more attached they are to a movie, the more rewatchable it is, and the more it endures.”
That idea traces back to Pattinson’s own love of cinema.
“When I was younger and started going to movies, I remember if there was a big film out, everyone at school would remember individual lines and do impressions of them. I felt like that had completely disappeared from culture for years, and then I realized it’s been replaced by memes — and I actually quite like that.”
