Lance Oppenheim has had a breakthrough year in 2026. The Jewish filmmaker co-directed the smash-hit Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” with comedian Nathan Fielder. At the same time, he made his narrative feature debut in “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Phoebe Bridgers and Skyler Gisondo.
Here are 18 things to know about him.
1. He was born on Jan. 26, 1996 in Hollywood, Florida.
2. He’s an Aquarius!
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3. Lance dressed up as Steven Spielberg for Halloween in fourth grade.
4. He got his first DSLR camera at age 13 and started pitching short videos to the New York Times’ Op-Docs while in high school. “’Good job, not for us,’” is how Oppenheim later characterized the Times’ responses to his pitches.
5. He graduated from Pine Crest School in 2014.
6. One of Lance’s early short films is called “Quicksand.” It honors Lance’s grandfather Walter Oppenheim as he loses his memory due to Alzheimer’s disease.
“A week before he passed away, my grandfather shared with me his former aspirations of becoming a filmmaker. After many trials, a narrow escape from the Nazis and immigration to the United States, the dream slowly but surely came true,” Lance described. “After his passing, I discovered a treasure trove of dust-covered 8mm film archives that had apparently not been seen by anyone for at least a generation. Mesmerized, what unfolded before me was something something most people, myself included, had never seen before: the development and complete decline of the human body and mind. Motivated by my grandfather’s unrealized cinematic dreams, I decided to reconstruct a film that he had already made involuntarily.”
7. Lance graduated from Harvard University in 2019 after studying in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
8. Part of Lance’s senior thesis at Harvard was producing and directing “Some Kind of Heaven.” The documentary, which opened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, follows adults who live in The Villages, Florida, the largest retirement community in the world.
“I heard a lot about The Villages while growing up. The media always like to focus on the most outrageous stories — stories about The Villages supposedly having the highest rates of STDs in Central Florida. I wanted to see what it was really about for myself, and headed down to the community during the summer of my junior year,” he told The Harvard Gazette. “For 30 days, I lived in a rental room in The Villages with retired rodeo clowns and tried my best at living The Villages lifestyle. Once I got past how surreal the place was, I realized it was the people who lived there, especially those on the margins of the place, who were far more interesting.”
9. “I feel like there is some kind of Jewish humor in the film,” Lance explained. “Finding comedy in tragedy, and also finding the seriousness through humor.”
1o. Some of Lance’s other films include “No Jail Time: The Movie,” “The Happiest Guy in the World,” “The Paradise Next Door” and “Spermworld.”
11. Lance is married to producer Abigail Rowe. He proposed to his wife via monkey. Lance and Abigail have a son together.
12. The pair met while working on Lance’s HBO docuseries “Ren Faire.”
13. Abigail inspired “Primetime” by getting Lance a Cameo from Chris Hansen as a gift. In it, Hansen used a catchphrase from “To Catch a Predator” and started pitching Lance on his own projects.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh, he’s not just the crusading journalist, he’s also an entertainer, and he’s also self-aware of this media persona that he’s cultivated for a very long time,” he shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “That Cameo video almost crystallized the whole thing for me. In a weird way, this film is almost an adaptation of the Cameo video. He had been absorbed into this strange, performative version of himself.”
14. Lance says he never had Robert Pattinson rehearse for playing Chris Hansen in “Primetime.” “It’s not an exact imitation of Chris Hansen from the show. We weren’t necessarily interested in that. We were interested in like the essence of him.”
15. He directed the music video for Phoebe Bridgers’ single “Lost Boys.”
16. He got into contact with Nathan Fielder via a cold email. They later got the idea for “You Can See Everything” after attending the Magic Castle together in L.A.
17. You can listen to Lance and Nathan’s thoughts about “You Can See Everything” here:
18. Even Lance doesn’t fully understand “You Can See Everything.”
“Usually, when I’m done with something or I’ve worked on it for many years, I’m like, I know every part of this,” he told Vulture. “This is a mysterious object that keeps growing in meaning.”
