David Osit’s Predators makes supremely challenging viewing. In a world of snap judgments, the film, which premiered at Sundance this January and opens in theaters this Friday, suggests that the TV show To Catch a Predator may have helped victims of child sexual abuse while also coarsening American culture by turning pedophiles’ punishment into entertaining content. Airing from 2004 to 2007 on ABC, it featured host Chris Hansen turning up at the houses of men who had chatted online with a decoy pretending to be an underage boy or girl. It was made in collaboration with the group Perverted Justice and law enforcement. Its run is overshadowed by an incident where the crew followed a Texas district attorney to his house when he didn’t show up to meet a boy with whom he talked about sex. Rather than face the police, the man killed himself. Yet it has inspired dozens of copycat channels on YouTube.
Divided into three parts, Predators begins with the history of To Catch a Predator, then follows Skeet (a YouTuber inspired by the series to conduct his own stings), and speaks with Hansen about his practices. Watching the film is a whiplash between repulsion towards the depths to which pedophiles sink and the gleeful amorality of Hansen and other predator-catchers. When Osit raises the issue of figuring out how to prevent child sexual abuse, no one has any satisfactory answers. One of the decoys who works with Skeet is a victim herself, who finds her duties cathartic. Speaking with Hansen, whose persona is polished to a slimy sheen, Osit raises questions about his current show Takedown (broadcast on YouTube). Despite his misgivings, Osit admits that he got something positive out of watching To Catch a Predator.
Osit’s fourth feature-length documentary Predators follows Building Babel, Thank You For Playing, and Mayor. The first one captured the controversy over the construction of New York’s Park51 mosque near the former World Trade Center site, while Thank You For Playing (co-directed by Malika Zouhali-Worrall) follows a video game designer as he creates a new project inspired by his son’s terminal-cancer diagnosis. Mayor, a portrait of Ramallah mayor Musa Hadad navigating the absurdities of holding power under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, brought Osit to a new level of attention.
Predators tries something new for the director, falling into a small group of meta true-crime documentaries that attempt to subvert the genre, e.g. Kitty Green’s Casting Jon Benet, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, or Charlie Shackleton’s The Zodiac Killer Project. I spoke to Osit over Zoom in August ahead of Predators’ theatrical run beginning at Film Forum this Friday, September 19.
The Film Stage: You’ve made four documentary features, with the last three five years apart. How much time went into pre-production on all of those?
David Osit: I had no pre-production on my first film; I had to just start right away. It was a verité film about an unfolding story. The second: I’d say three or four months of pre-production. I spoke with the star of Thank You for Playing. I spoke with the video game team and chatted with them about my intentions, and then we set a date to go out for our first shoot. So that was pretty quick. Mayor was my third feature, and that was a good chunk of time. I spent four to six months talking to people involved, building up a base because I was in a different city and country than where I lived. On this film, Predators, I’d say I had two or three months of pre-production and a four-month development period where I went out and shot a lot of what ended up in the film.
Did you live in Ramallah before the Mayor shoot?
I didn’t live there, but I was editing a film in Ramallah before I made the film. So I had friends there, and I spent a bunch of time there. I was working on a film with a Palestinian filmmaker. That director and I became friends. One day he came to New York and we were talking, and that’s when I got the idea for Mayor. Then I went back to start pre-production for that film after that.
In the time that you’ve been working, how has the landscape for making documentaries and getting them out into the world changed?
Substantially. To put it really simply: I felt like, when I first started making documentaries, I was at the beginning of something, and now I feel like I’m at the end of something. I don’t think any of us know exactly what the end is yet. To be clear: the reason I got into making films is because of DV cameras. For the first time in the history of the medium of film, really, you could––for a small amount of money––shoot an extremely large amount of footage. I am not independently wealthy. I didn’t come from money. I remember hearing about the film Iraq in Fragments, 2006, and learning that James Longley shot that film on a $1,500 camera with a $200 shotgun microphone and a $200 lav, and thinking for the first time ever, “Oh, I could do that, too.” And I was right: I could make a longitudinal verité film for a small amount of money, which wasn’t the case prior to that period of time in the early 2000s.
Now things are different. Not in the same exact way, but the grant spaces that I felt like were just starting to open up in the early 2000s for filmmakers such as myself are now closing. The studio system is becoming really one of the only ways to create films and––more concerning and sadder in some ways to me––the desire for certain types of films is ebbing. The films that I loved as a young person, the verité films that I kind of grew up on, are no longer in vogue and are very hard to make these days.
Yeah. I wondered if Mayor could get distributed in the U.S. if the film were made this year?
I have a hard time believing it would have the same life, for many reasons, not just because of everything I just said regarding the state of the industry and the changing taste of gatekeepers. I think the other issue is a political one, which is that Mayor was a film for audiences who weren’t initiated to Palestine. I made the film for people who didn’t know much of anything about Palestine. Obviously, there’s been issues with Gaza and in Palestine for decades. There was still a generalized lack of knowledge that made me feel like I could make a film that was almost a fable for audiences that would get something really emotionally charged out of it. I also made something that was largely comedic, prioritized the experience of a Christian mayor. All these things that were really compelling to me at the time, because they felt like they would be ways to reach an audience that would be unexpected.
We’re not in a neutral time anymore. We weren’t then, but we really aren’t now. People have a baseline understanding of the fact that this is an issue now. They are no longer really interested in the kind of take that Mayor offered. Things are fraught to a degree that the sort of neutral curiosity that Mayor invited people to have is no longer fitting.
Do you think Predators has received a lot of attention because it’s more or less true-crime, even if that’s not how you think of it?
I conceived of Predators as a film trying to use the popularity of true crime to get people to see it. If this makes sense: the audience that I wanted to see Predators most is the audience that wasn’t going to expect what it is. It’s not an accident that Predators is getting the attention of people who like true crime. I wanted that.
Did you show Predators to anyone, any of your interview subjects before concluding the final cut?
I don’t believe so. I assume, now, that everyone who appears in the film has seen it.
Have you had any negative reactions from them?
I’ve shown it to several people who appear in the film, and I’ve been really touched by some of the reactions that they have had. Some people have found it really surprising and moving. Chris Hansen really appreciated the film, which was nice to hear. It was important to me, and will be important to me in any film I make, that people are giving something of themselves to me, whether I agree with them or not. I feel like it’s really important to not punch down in a movie. Regardless of the world at large, if I’m the filmmaker, I have power over the people who appear in my movie. I don’t want to disrespect trust that someone’s putting in me. So I’d like to think that I’m being fair and honest in my representations of everybody in my film; I’m gratified when people see that. The best compliment someone could give me is “that’s fair.”
Hansen seems like he’s been through extensive media training. He talks as though he’s planned everything that could possibly happen in front of the camera. Did you spend enough time with him to get any sense of his personality beyond the persona?
I think there are certain people for whom their persona and their personality are linked inextricably, and Chris is one of those people. If you’ve been in the public eye as long as he has, it’s part of who he is. If you ever spent time with a famous person, it’s something similar. There’s a certain point to which we can remove our own third eye, and we can only see ourselves the way others see us or the way we perceive others see us. I spent a bunch of time with Chris when the cameras were on and off. He truly lives in front of the camera, as do many people like him. It’s just part of who he is.
How much research did you do on YouTube predator-catchers before settling on Skeet?
I didn’t do that much research on them because, when I found out about Skeet, I felt like I found my guy because he was so clearly coming from Chris’s lineage. He’s quite literally imitating him. That was the thing that felt most in line with my interest, which was: how did To Catch a Predator influence this next generation. In my mind I was thinking, “Why not go to the person who uses an impression of Chris Hansen to do what he does?” Once I spent time with him, he was the first person that I filmed with in terms of the predator-hunting. I got what I needed from spending time with him over the weekend.
I looked up a couple predator-catcher channels, and what I found was much meaner than Hansen or even Skeet. There are guys who just go up to people in a parking lot or a Walmart and start screaming “you’re a pedophile” without giving any proof. It’s obvious they’re just trying to start a scene in public for content. Also, because they’re supposed to be fighting pedophilia, they can bully people and even start physical violence and feel like they’re doing something good for the world. Did you watch a lot of those?
The rabbit hole is pretty deep. I have some of those in the film, when I first introduce the concept of predator-hunting. The movie begins with some of those very moments going up to a guy in the Walmart and making a big public-shaming fuss. And there’s absolutely tons of those. But I didn’t see it as the film’s job to be an exposé on the entire industry of amateur predator hunters. There’s a lot more that could be said if I were doing that. There’s also a lot more that could be said if I were doing a film about the entirety of To Catch a Predator‘s history, of course. But I wanted to give an audience what they needed to know, which is that a lot of people are doing this, and a lot of them are doing it because they were inspired by the OG, so to speak.
How much interest in general do you have in other forms of true crime or reality TV?
On a personal level––and I really don’t mean this to be disparaging to anyone who disagrees with me––I’ve just never found true crime or reality TV super interesting. I’m more interested in why we watch it than watching it. One thing I actually find most interesting is said in the film by someone that works with Chris. He says one thing that I never stop thinking about, which is that we watch true crime or reality TV sometimes just because we don’t like our lives and we want to feel better about the way we live. So we like seeing people at their worst or having a hard time. It’s not like we enjoy what’s happening to them, but it makes us feel better about where we are. I find it interesting that that feels like it’s pretty globally true in a lot of scenarios.
Then there’s times where we forget the humanity of some of the people who we’re watching because they’ve been turned into characters for our entertainment. I haven’t watched Love Island, but I imagine that that’s why stuff on Love Island can be entertaining––it’s because it’s happening to these people, and we can’t wait to see what happens next. It’s our human nature. We’re not invited into these rooms, so it’s pleasurable to enjoy the fact that we’re allowed to see stuff that we shouldn’t be allowed to see.
Do you see a connection between that and the documentary-verité approach, the movies that inspired you?
100%. I think they’re all in the same family reunion, for sure. One might be getting vegetarian food, one might be at the grill, but they’re all part of the same lineage, which is that we like seeing characters rendered onscreen. I think documentary and To Catch a Predator have more in common than, for example, the show Cops and To Catch a Predator. Cops is really just footage of stuff that the audience just gets to watch. It’s just material. To Catch a Predator tells stories; it invites you to consider the world for a moment. You get to identify with different characters: the police, the decoys, Chris Hansen, or the men showing up to the houses. There are worlds there that challenge the pathways in our brain that get entertained by storytelling.
So yeah: I think that those things are all related. It’s just one or the other has kind of a different moral bar, but it’s not a huge difference. And I think that anyone who says otherwise is usually just of the mindset that what they do is more righteous or moral than the other.
At the same time, Hansen created his image as a hero going around avenging pedophilia and getting justice done to these horrible men. I watched maybe one or two episodes of To Catch a Predator when it was on and found it kind of creepy and exploitative. He comes off like a fictional character. That’s what I was getting at when I asked if you got any sense of what the real person is.
Just that he comes off as a fictional character, you mean? Or he’s the hero of this narrative? Well, Chris does lots of interviews, and if you were to ask him “why do you think people like true crime,” he would say what he always says, which is that these stories are as old as the Bible. They’re about good and evil. Part of the trappings of the kind of entertainment that he makes––and predator-hunting in general––is that it’s very easy to cast people in the light of heroes and villains and and the White Knight and the Dark One. The appeal is that he gets to be the knight in shining armor rescuing people. You’re not invited by the format of those shows to question if it’s okay that the cops and Chris are doing this.
The shows are structured to reaffirm themselves, which is true of a lot of documentaries, by the way. Just to be completely fair: a lot of documentaries align you around an idea of a moral wrong that occurred. There’s not a journey in a lot of our media these days. As we watch something, we’re not expecting it to be changing our minds. It’s more often the case, based on the limited attention spans of viewers, that we just try to give people what we know they want for 80 minutes.
Even with explicitly leftist or progressive documentaries, they tend to have black-and-white politics and a firm sense of good and evil, whereas this film is really unsettling no matter what your position on To Catch a Predator is.
I completely agree. I’m sure right-wing documentaries are like this too. I don’t watch as many. If you feel embattled because of this ascendant rise of fascism, you want to make something that other people can latch on to and find reaffirming. That means that you’re not trying to make a film about the nuance of people on different sides of an issue. You’re angry. You want to hit a hammer. To get back to your early question: one of the reasons I think Mayor would not be a film that people would be as interested in seeing these days is that they’re pissed off. There’s a genocide happening. It’s not the time to be thinking about nuance and the idea of a fable in a complicated place, which is what I always talked about Mayor as being.
People are pissed off, people are angry, they’re furious, they’re indignant. The reason why those films get made is because nothing else feels affirming sometimes. I thought, with Predators, what if I can make a film that is just a little more complicated than that, which maybe gives you affirmation, but also makes you maybe wonder why you need it so much?
How have audiences responded to the film at public screenings so far?
I’ve been really struck by the reactions to the film. Granted, we haven’t released it yet, but during 100 screenings at film festivals, some people are furious that I’ve asked them to consider having empathy for a child predator. To me, that is not the point of the film at all. It’s really about just asking people to consider: how do we treat people in our society and what are we okay with? I’ve had some people also come up to me and really confide in me afterwards about some pain that they’ve experienced, which the film really makes them think about or sit with.
The reactions have been so diverse and so mixed, too, that it really shows me how often we’re desiring that kind of connection to ourselves while we’re watching a film. The self-questioning and the internal monologue that you can have when you watch a great narrative film is often just reserved for fiction. We don’t get that as much in non-fiction because it’s so often it feels like it has to be tied to an agenda in some capacity. And I genuinely think the only real agenda I had for this film is just to make people question themselves.
Did you start out with an idea of the kinds of people, from cops to academics, that you want to speak with in Predators?
I always like to cast a really wide net at the beginning of a film. I like to think bigger and try to narrow it down. At one point, Mayor had a much larger cast than just the mayor of Ramallah. With Predators, I was thinking wide. That’s why I spoke to an academic in the first place, who ends up being a big part of the movie. My golden rule is: if it’s interesting to me, that means I can find a way to make it interesting to an audience. So I’m always trying to look and see which characters can be going to be most compelling to me.
Do you think To Catch a Predator helped pave the way for QAnon and Pizzagate?
I mean, there’s a lot of distance between those two things. I will say: it’s like that game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” There are, like, a lot of steps in between Pizzagate and QAnon and To Catch a Predator. I think there’s a world where you can, if you really want to make that connection, say that what To Catch a Predator did was introduce the idea of child predators to, like, a wider audience. But there’s 20 years before we start to see that becoming an issue that’s otherwise weaponized by the right wing. The one thing I would say that really connects these two issues is that everyone can agree child predators are bad. And it then can become a really easy political cudgel to basically say, “How could you support what these people do, because they’re bad?”
I would say that QAnon, like a lot of modern libertarian thought, is a sort of cousin to true crime more than it’s a direct descendant of it. You have this faith in a police state, but a frustration with what they can’t get done. They’re not achieving their goals, so you have to do something on your own, which explains more of the modern-day predator hunters. So I think there’s a closer lineage there.
Yeah. There’s also no concern for systemic causes or trying to prevent crime from happening.
It’s trusting that law enforcement can be our social safety net, which gives it more power, which makes it more violent, which makes it more powerful again. Then that makes it more justified and acceptable for law enforcement to be the thing that replaces our social safety net because of how much authority we give it. So it’s all just trust in the idea that we can fix our problems through the state telling us what’s good and what’s bad, if that makes sense.
Predators opens in theaters on Friday, September 19.