IN CONVERSATION WITH LANCE OPPENHEIM
In just the first half of this year, Lance and his incredible team of collaborators have brought us two documentaries in the form of ’Spermworld’ and ‘Ren Faire’ (2024). If you haven’t already, GO STREAM THESE ON @FXNETWORKS and @HBO NOWWWW. Lance is so good at toeing the line between fiction and reality. If you enjoy Nathan Fielder or John Wilson’s work, you’re going to love this. My brother walked in while I was watching ‘Spermworld’ and asked me if it was an actual doc or a movie movie, which to me, is a wonderful compliment to the work.
We talk about working with artists like Jake Longstreth, advice he got from Teddy Blanks, his relationship with composer Ari Balouzian, adopting his dad’s wardrobe, how his jacket serves as a portable pantry on set, his personal style being reflective of his documentaries, King George’s stolen valor uniform, and so much more.
Hagop Kourounian:
I was so excited to see the promotion for ‘Spermworld’ and ‘Ren Faire’. I thought you did such a good job with all the videos and stunts with Pablorochat and Chris Maggio and the various artist posters and prints with Jake Longstreth, teenage stepdad, Johnny Ryan etc… How did your relationship with these people come about?
Lance Oppenheim:
It's not dissimilar from just me reaching out to you right now. I was a huge fan of each person. Jake, I've been familiar with his work for a really long time. I feel like his paintings are really big sources of inspiration for a lot of the compositions in ‘Spermworld’. I actually had tried to reach out to him when ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ came out, because I was already obsessed with his paintings around that time. I think we were trying to make something happen, then the pandemic happened and he had a child, so things kind of got away from him. And then right when we were getting ready to finish ‘Spermworld’, I was trying to see if I could get FX to commission a painting from him and I really had to convince him, you know, he doesn't really do movie posters or anything. He works really photographically. He'll take a picture, then figure out the comp digitally, and then he'll get to painting it. I think it's one of the greatest feelings to make something and then go to artists you really love and see if they respond to it and what they take away from it.
"we found love in a hopeless place" by Jake Longstreth
Nick Drnaso was another one. I'm a huge obsessive fan of his graphic novels, Sabrina, Acting Class, and Beverly. That was another dream collab. How can I convince this guy who's just brilliant and has won a fucking Booker prize to do a movie poster because he doesn't do those. And that was also complicated somewhat, just by the demands of what the FX marketing team needs on a poster, but I really liked where we ended up.
Pablorochat I actually met through my sister. My sister and I work together a lot. She produces my stuff with me. Pablo and Chris Maggio did kind of like a guerrilla marketing campaign for Ren Faire. These guys know how to really engage digital audiences so Mel and I went to them to be like, Would you guys ever be down to work with us? We have these two films, let’s augment the more traditional marketing campaign that these streaming platforms are going to do. Can we reach the people that probably HBO and FX wouldn't normally be targeting. And then Victoria Vincent was another one. Teenage stepdad was another one. Johnny Ryan was another one. I just spend a lot of time on the internet, and I'm always searching for people that can help provide inspiration or to serve as a reference, at least compositionally or thematically for whatever I'm making.
Pablorochat and Chris Maggio for 'Ren Faire' (2024)
Hagop Kourounian:
Where did the logos and title cards come from? The ‘Spermworld’ title card is amazing. Same with ‘Ren Faire’, all the name cards that pop up introducing the different characters are gorgeous.
Lance Oppenheim:
An amazing, amazing title designer named Teddy blanks. I had been trying to work with him for a really long time. Teddy created the ELARA logo. He's basically the most prolific Title Designer that works today. He did the titles for Barbie and also the Green Knight. He's sort of everywhere. He does all of ELARA’s titles, he did Nathan Fielder’s titles for The Rehearsal. He's a brilliant guy. I think he's used to working with people that are really just amazing artists, and sometimes he'll find himself in situations where he's more or less just executing on a vision that they had. But with this, it was collaborative. Of course, he'd send me a bunch of ideas, and then I had a bunch of ideas. I think Teddy and I were just sort of like how can we do something that feels like it carries over the feeling of the film where it's not quite digital, but there's this cyber wave feeling of fundamentally human things happening through technology. But he said “I work with a lot of older artists. I execute their vision and I'm working with you, you're younger, so I'm not as scared to just tell you when I think you're wrong.” A lot of the collaboration really was that. It was really me pushing him, and then him pushing me way harder. I remember when he first sent me this ‘Spremworld’ logo. He's like, “I love this thing, but it might be too much with the O filled out with jizz or something.” and I was like, “that's perfect.”
Hagop Kourounian:
What an honor to have him work on all this stuff. It kind of feels like you went through a bit of a graphic design school with him in the process too?
Lance Oppenheim:
Oh, 100% I mean, you know Teddy is also teaching at Yale or some shit. I'm honored that he wants to do this stuff, but I think a big part of it too is our taste is similar to one another. I remember he watched a cut of Ren Faire and he's just like, “You gotta unleash. I know you're probably dealing with a lot of notes from HBO and other people but I see the YOU in this that's struggling to get out. Stop being so self conscious, and just unleash the beast man.”
Hagop Kourounian:
Can you tell me a little about your working relationship with Ari Balouzian? He’s composed all the music in your work and it’s so incredible.
Lance Oppenheim:
I've been working with Ari nonstop since 2017. The way he makes music is just like the most inspiring thing to me. It's automatic, it flows from him. But he's never working the picture. It's really based on just emotions and feelings and finding a sound. Even for Ren Faire. The first thing that we started off with was a lot of Bernard Herrmann but we also were talking about the feeling of a circus. So he brought in a lot of Looney Tunes sound effects and the drum machine, and all these really percussive dimensions to the score. But then it opens up into something much more romantic and then ultimately the romance gets corrupted and the magic dies by the end. So it was important to figure out a way to capture all of it, like the kind of impossible dream of it all. I think it's such a fundamental piece of converting raw pieces of life into cinema. He did that with some kind of heaven. I'll always remember the scene of Dennis, the guy who lives in the van. He's at a pool, and he's looking at this woman who he wants to see if she'd take him in because he's looking for an elderly lady to shack up with who can pay for his life. I just remember when we first were experimenting with it, I was like, “Holy fuck, we're able to tell a whole sequence here that's really immersive without any dialog, and it's just image and sound and music.” It felt like such a critical kind of skeleton key for unlocking some sort of inner life within the people in the film, like we know how they're feeling. What Ari is able to do is to evoke it and make music that is so evocative of that headspace and frame of mind. That's where the starting point is, what does the person feel? Then how do we kind of convert it and express it into the palette of the film?
King George and Lance Oppenheim (2024) photo by Wes Ellis
Hagop Kourounian:
I guess this is my director focused brain kicking in but King George in Ren Faire reminded me a lot of an auteur, he has such a specific vision. He’s built a whole world around his vision that so many people have bought into and even the way he talks or how he’s dressed reminded me a lot of David Lynch during his Youtube weather reports. Did you notice any similarities between his role as the king of the Ren Faire and your role as a director on set?
Lance Oppenheim:
I love that observation. I think George is an auteur in the most traditional sense of it. I don't believe, normally, in auteur theory, because I feel like most movies–especially the movies I make–need the teams of people that I work with to make them great, like my editors, Max Allman and Nicholas Nazmi. They deserve all the credit for making this as good as possible and as repulsive as it can be. But George is different. I mean, George is not a collaborative person. He sees something he likes, he gets obsessed with it, and then he mandates that everyone in his universe incorporate it instantly in some way. Someone was telling me about Kanye recently, about how they had been working with him, and that if he sees someone that looks cool he'll pull them aside and give them a job on the spot. George is very similar. I could see similarities between those two people 100%. Max Allman also cut the ‘jeen-yuhs’ Kanye series on Netflix, so the last six years of his life have been involved in these two towering figures and the psychology of them and what makes them tick. Ultimately, maybe there's a world in which the only way to create, to become like a self made king as someone calls him in the show, is to be as dogged and cruel and brutalist as he is. He suffers no fools. He enjoys the punishment of others to basically get where he needs to be. I feel like there's a lot of times where in seeing him, I had to be cautious, because as much as it was disturbing at times to be around him, he was really funny, and he had really great comedic timing. I'd have to be cautious to not let the parts of him where he was a leader in the classical sense rub off on me, because the way I make things is so different. It's a very democratic experience. If my cinematographer or my producer or my sound guy or whoever's on set, if they have a good idea, then that's the idea we run with. I'm never someone who pretends to have an answer. I'm usually the opposite. I try to lead with honesty so if I'm feeling really shitty about something we just shot, I'll let it be known. In other cases, if I don't know where the story is going, I'll also let it be known. We all kind of put our heads together to figure it out
Hagop Kourounian:
That leads me to the military shirt he constantly wears, can you tell me about it? What division of the army or military, or navy, etc, is it from?
Lance Oppenheim:
I feel like George himself and his shirt are so iconic. It's like a weird combination of Stolen Valor…maybe. I know he served in the military when he was in his teens, he was in Germany, but he never was given any awards or anything like that. I think one day 25 years ago he just decided to start making a uniform that he wears every day. He has that shirt in black and in red. And once he finished filming, he gave me one of them. I had to pay like 200 bucks for it but… If George is willing to share the design with us I'm trying to get Elara to remake it. I think it's an original design. I think he took some medals from an American military thing and combined them with some British military designs. It’s made out of fabric appropriate for the jungle and humidity. Like Columbia camping gear or something. So it allows him to be really limber, he could dress it up, he could dress it down. When I first met him he sounded a lot of the times like David Lynch, especially in the last season of Twin Peaks The Return when he's playing Gordon and he's shouting things. But also, I would always think of him as John Houston’s character in Chinatown, Noah Cross. Very similar character in a way. A guy who controls everything and everyone around him, who seems very kind and sort of like a classic bouncy elderly man. He's fun to be around and silly, and then he snarls, he'll show you his teeth, and everything changes. It's almost like there's a demon inside of him that needs to come out or like the devil has found his new clothes in the form of this man. Not to say that George is that person, but I think there are dimensions of him that operate in such a way. He’s such a hedonist. I think part of hedonism involves the cruelty of others, which I think is just so outside the bounds of probably any type of behavior that you, me, or most people normally experience. But the shirt is like a classic. I wonder if part of it is because he read the Steve Jobs book. He's a big reader. I'm sure he was inspired by the fact that a lot of great leaders wear uniforms to work every day. We would go and film with him at the Olive Garden and he’d be wearing the shirt and people would come up to him to congratulate him for his service. I think he kind of enjoyed people congratulating him, he always would just smile and get back to eating his Mediterranean chicken. That shirt is all he would ever wear and honestly as a filmmaker it was godsend for continuity sake.
Hagop Kourounian:
I’ve been to a Ren Faire here in Pomona, CA and you can tell there's such an emphasis on clothing and costume. I'm curious if you learned something new about clothes being involved in that environment for so long. Just watching Louie and Jeffrey and all these guys go from Houston Astros gear to their Ren Faire gear. It's such an interesting twist. I'm curious what you learned about those characters and those people.
Lance Oppenheim:
It's a great question, I think for George it's all about maintaining an illusion, right? I think part of the thing that became so interesting in the filmmaking of this was, “how do you riff off the reality of these people that are reenactors.” That's their job and the theatricality of what they do for work ends up bleeding all the time with the theatricality of the drama that is going on outside of the fairgrounds. The sort of Game of Thrones-like fiefdom that George has created for all of them. I think in terms of clothes it was always like an extension of the magic, right? There is a way to be anachronistic, but you have to do it consistently. You can't just be wearing a Jason Voorhees mask and then also have Freddie fingers. Jeff would be pissed off. He'd be like, That's not Renaissance related. I think George's rules always feel somewhat arbitrary. I have no doubt that he's very well researched but also I know that he's sort of one of those guys that whatever the last thing he reads is the dogma. I saw that happen many times for Jeff, Louie, and Darla. They all code switch when they enter their performative garb and I love the idea of finding the moments where the performance was interrupted, when Jeff is getting a hit on his walkie talkie or Louie gets a phone call. Things like that I always thought were great, finding the little cracks in the performance. As a crew we mostly operated without being in costume, just because there was already so much to manage. There was a day where we were filming with these full metal steel knights armor. You know, knights beat the shit out of each other with swords and stuff and I wanted to get in the ring and so in order to do that they made us put on chainmail, just in case we got hit with a sword. But in terms of blending in we would put certain things on steadicam carts like a cape, to try and make it feel like it's not just fully out of the world. But in a way, it was nice to enter and emphasize that we were with a job to do. We didn't want to be invisible in some ways. We wanted to make our presence known.
Lance Oppenheim on set for 'Ren Faire' (2024) photo via Lance
Hagop Kourounian:
Your films are so immersive, you're enveloped in these specific worlds for a few years… What kind of items do you gravitate to on these extended trips, constantly being away from home. What makes you feel grounded, comfortable, confident on set?
Lance Oppenheim:
I have a construction vest that I'll wear just in case. It's not a government mandated thing, I just bought it off Amazon because I feel like sometimes, if you're in a place that you're not really supposed to it makes people think that you're legitimate and you're doing something that you should be, rather than the opposite. But for the most part I wear Blundstone boots. I was inspired by every cinematographer I've ever worked with. They always wear them. I love the those fucking things. I also have these Sundance socks that are from the year that I had my film play there, they kind of feel like, good luck.
I grew up with this thing called sensory processing disorder, and I did years of occupational therapy to get it basically trained out of me. I was like a kid on the spectrum, I probably still am. It was very much certain senses, like if I go to a hockey game and I'd hear the buzzer I'd poo my pants. It was uncontrollable reactions to overwhelming stimuli. And so now I don't know if it's because I've gone through so much exposure therapy that I kind of seek out versions that can really push my body to the limit. It's like the Ren Faire being one of them.
Hagop Kourounian:
Could you describe your personal style? Do you think about clothes often?
Lance Oppenheim:
You know I'd say 90% of my wardrobe comes from my dad. He has all of these great shirts that he'd wear in the 80s and the 90s. It's almost like having a personal vintage collection. Someone once asked me, “why do you dress like a 60 year old golfer or something?” My dad doesn't play golf, he doesn't exist in a country club, but he is a lawyer, so I figure there's parts of his wardrobe like casual shirts and button downs that are probably a little square by traditional means. It's not hypebeast wear, it's very classic clothing. He's got some cashmere sweaters that I always try to steal. I'm always trying to look for something functional. My sister got me this jacket that was really nice. It's probably the nicest garment I own, it’s from Acne Studios. It's like a denim jacket and I would wear that thing every day. It just has a lot of pockets in it, two on the inside, two on the outside. On set, when we're working, I usually don't eat a lot. I'll have a banana or something, or maybe I'll just drink a lot of coffee or eat some chocolate covered espresso beans. I never drink enough water. And all these snacks go in those pockets. I usually have a bagel and a bottle of water in there and it's the middle of the day and I'll be like, “why is my shirt so heavy?” I'll look at it and be reminded of the food and I'll eat. It's like a portable pantry. There's other times when I have the headset on, I got a monitor, and a release form in my hand and I have to stuff all this shit down somehow and let it all hang out. But yeah, a lot of my style comes from my dad. I think he dresses really well. He has this really old Brooks Brothers shirt from when he was in his 30s, it must be from the 80s and it's shown a lot of wear. It's this really nice denim shirt and the colors have all faded but it feels so comfy. There's something kind of timeless about it.
Hagop Kourounian:
That's the beauty of good clothes, right? They kind of last forever. I love that you're taking your dad's clothes and making it your own. There's something beautiful about the garment being passed generation to generation. I feel like that's something that is sort of getting lost just because clothing quality sucks nowadays.
Lance Oppenheim:
It's true I take a garment that's new, then pair it with a sweater that was my dad's. I think he takes pride in that too. Taking something that is someone else's and you making it yours. In a way that's kind of like documentary filmmaking or the type of shit that I'm trying to make. I'm finding these real stories and I have to protect the reality of it, but I also have to find ways that I myself relate to the story. That's ultimately the well of emotion. The feelings that you'll get from it are their stories but also you'll feel the force of me and all of my collaborators.
Hagop Kourounian:
I think this is a beautiful place to end this conversation. Thank you, Lance!
