Documentary filmmaking can sometimes cross into a kind of hypocrisy, given this fallacy that non-fiction filmmaking allows for a direct, honest look at people’s lives. I believe you’ve discussed before—in relation to Some Kind of Heaven—this idea of “performative vérité,” creating a film that’s reflecting the headspace somebody’s living in: the subjective reality they’re experiencing in contrast to the objective reality they exist within.
That was especially interesting in the context of making a narrative film. In documentaries, it’s almost like the screenplay is reality; things are happening around you, and events unfold, and you have to be patient to catch them happening. If you’re listening, you’re active and you’re present, you’re moving with reality. It’s like a dance, and you have to adapt to it. That’s the fun challenge of it: how do you represent reality in a way that feels experiential? It shouldn’t feel like you’re taking human drama and making it feel like Hollywood drama; you’re making an audience care about the wants and needs of a person in a way that’s not distanced. You’re using cinematic tools to bring them into it, and not out of it.
I knew I wanted to do that with Primetime as well, so I brought all the same collaborators I normally work with. David Bolen, my cinematographer, who shot Some Kind of Heaven and SPERMWORLD, I’ve been working with him since way back, on short films since I was seventeen. Ari Balouzian, my composer; my producers, Christian Vasquez and Abbey Rowe—they were also that same team from Some Kind of Heaven and SPERMWORLD, and Daniel Garber, my editor, cut them both.
Most of that team also did You Can See Everything, with Nathan Fielder and myself, and that was a completely different process; it was an evolution, in a lot of ways, of this thought process that we’re discussing. But it’s funny; with making documentaries, up until this point, it always felt closer to making narrative films. Weirdly, making Primetime—which was a narrative film; I had a screenplay going into it, that wasn’t just real life—it felt more like a documentary, because I was dealing with an apparatus.