Creating Contradictions: Lance Oppenheim Interview
The director of 'Spermworld' talks about his new film.
I recently had a chance to talk with nonfiction filmmaker Lance Oppenheim about his new film Spermworld, on the new wild west of sperm donations, which I also reviewed for Hyperallergic. Oppenheim was a guest on Wiseman Podcast last year on our Zoo episode, where we also talked a bit about his first feature, Some Kind of Heaven. His body of work at the age of only 28, which will grow substantially this summer with his three-part docuseries RenFaire, is already impressive.
We talked about how the perspective and shape of Spermworld came to be.
For Some Kind of Heaven, you said you started out trying to do the Wiseman thing of looking where the power was held, but the power of The Villages was a very well-guarded and legitimate system. In Spermworld, the system is unregulated and fluid, but the power is probably mostly held by the male subjects you follow. Did you think about the power dynamics when considering your approach?
Absolutely. It’s funny you bring that up because I forgot that was the starting place for this one too. It was sort of similar. Maybe that’s just the thing that I’m now realizing I've probably done across all worlds is locate the nexus of where people are controlling things. In this case, I started with Facebook groups and looking at the moderators and the politics of the moderation and how certain men donors would control that space and kick other men out.
An initial version of the film, when we were pitching this around, before we started making it, I thought I was going to make a movie about this competition where these guys are just essentially power mongers in a way. They may feel completely isolated and alienated in their lives but online they have this massive degree of control over people’s destinies. But over time, after we were able to get financed, I kind of drifted away from that mostly because I found it really hard to connect with any of the men. I felt like I knew what that movie would be and it would be a condemnation of that type of behavior. And the reason I make these films is that I’m trying to get to the heart of an emotion or a feeling that I also identify with. Even if that may be bad journalism or something for me, that’s just sort of, as a filmmaker, the thing that I’m drawn to — I’m drawn to people and I’m drawn to relationships I can forge with people and trust and a sense of collaboration with someone. I just didn’t feel like I could get there with the [previous plan], and I felt like it was going to be a fairly one-note portrait of a world that really defies categorization — a kaleidoscope of experiences.
One of the film’s strengths is a lack of judgment. There are plenty of ways you can judge the people in the film, whether you thought they were narcissistic or irresponsible on a personal or global level. And you talking about that first idea reminds of that shot of the guy who donates because he wants to replenish the workforce. So I could see where that version of the film could go, but it sounds like this lack of judgment is something that was important for you, ultimately.
Yea, definitely, and I think that’s the work of what a good movie, not just a documentary, can do: expand the horizon of the viewer and present a whole panoply of experiences and things that you may not know how to feel about. But ultimately, a great movie can require a great conversation.
So, for me, it was, “How can I get to these more complicated places where, essentially, when you’re watching two people try to forge their own roadmap for how to do this, how to exchange genetic fluid, it also says a lot about the two people doing it? How do they relate to one another? What are the ways in which they’re going about this process and how does that map onto the aspirational qualities they want to be or who they are already?” Those kinds of questions of desire and isolation and communal sense of loneliness and dream-fulfillment and the tradeoffs of fulfilling a dream with someone you really don’t know at all.
The tension and uneasiness and discomfort — to me, that was a lot more interesting than the power of it all. So, similar to Some Kind of Heaven in that it started in one place and then turned into something different.
Hearing about how Ari has been a documentary subject a couple times prior, I understand why, he’s so charismatic, but I get why it’s not just about him. The film could have just been about Tyree, there’s so much drama there, but can you talk about what it offered you to follow three parallel subjects?
Each story has its own strands inside of it. Steve’s is almost bisected with Rachel’s, and Tyree certainly starts the story but it becomes, in a way, more about Atasha and how she relates to him and relates to his hobby/profession of doing this.
When we were casting the movie, every time we tried to cast recipients first and then go to their donors, it didn’t really work because sometimes there were issues of access. Sometimes the recipient would be interested in participating but their donor wouldn’t. And I thought maybe it would be interesting to access most of these relationships from the perspective of the donor because they’re the ones that ultimately are fulfilling people’s dreams, and the recipients, once they’re wishes are fulfilled, they’ll leave the world and yet the donor still remains a constant presence in it.
So with each story, there was a metric of the timeline. With Ari, we’re meeting him at the tailend of his life as a donor. He sort of announces this declaration that he’s retiring at the beginning of the movie and you watch how hard it is for him to actually do that. And for Tyree, he’s sort of in the middle. He’s been doing this for a while; his fiancee is okay with it, but you see there’s a breaking point for her, and the concessions he’ll have to make in order to build a family that will inevitably also affect his life as a donor. And then you see Steve, who’s someone really at the beginning of his life as a donor. He’s the oldest of the bunch but I thought there was something kind of beautiful to the idea that here’s a guy who was trying to turn a new leaf and this is a new lease on life, essentially. Because he’s less experienced than the other donors, there’s a sense that we’re along the journey with him and this relationship he has with Rachel.
It’s an interesting question of whether or not that relationship would continue. Could Ari have a relationship like that with all these different [relationships] he’s already formed? Or is this something that’s maybe a product of being at the very beginning of this and maybe not knowing really how the process should work? But also, it could be something very different and I think for them it’s just a genuine, fundamental connection that goes deeper than romance or anything like that. I think they’re filling a void and both are two people who are really looking for a connection of some kind on a lonely journey.
Ultimately, because the movie is focusing on motivations — why does each person do this? — I wanted the film, every scene, every moment, to basically give you an answer that will maybe contradict the previous answer you thought you had in your head. I thought this would be a way to keep the propulsion, psychologically, alive.
The film’s structure is unique. It feels like it's building in narrative flow without really having a predetermined pro-filmic boundary. You talked about some of these beginnings and ends, but there is no reason to start and stop the film when you do other than out of your own preference. So, the structure that you ended up with…did that come out of conversations with your editors? How did you come up with this structure?
It’s a real testament to Daniel Garber, who I consider the co-author of the movie, the editor of this and Some Kind of Heaven. But I think in the earliest conversations of the movie, this was something he and I were talking about. How can we create something that gives the audience basically no context? How do we just draw people into these scenes? And we were looking a lot at Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, which I really love, and how you’re constantly trying to engage with it. That movie, for me at least, everytime I see it, I take away something different. That character is in a relationship that straddles the line between work and romance, or work and her personal life in such a profound way. So we were looking at a lot of the different ways of like, how can we create something where each conversation feels narrative, in a way. You’re learning exposition about something or someone but it’s all active and it’s not retrospective whatsoever. And if there’s any moments of retrospection, or even introspection, it would be in response to something that would be happening actively.
The way we shoot, cinematographer David Bolen, sound mixer Richard Carlos, [producers] Christian Vasquez, Sophie Kissinger, Lauren Belfer, this is my five-person crew that we would go place to place with. David and Richard are both technicians, they both have producer credits on the film too because it really felt like, at all times, not only in terms of managing and being so emotionally present with all the people in the film, but really trying to build and continuing to push. Like, okay that’s something really interesting we just heard in an interview, but how do we transcend the context of just seeing someone say that? How do we be with them when they’re exploring that feeling?
So [we were thinking] a lot of that construction of how do you get not just a better emotional understanding from somebody but how do you understand the world. How do you understand that isolation and how do the recipients feel when they’re inside these relationships, when they probably know just as much, initially, as the audience knows, which is very little. They glean things from the Facebook groups when you look at different posts, but in terms of your actual relationships or conversations with a donor, we’re seeing what they experience. So, depriving the audience of as much as possible and just letting them sink into these very awkward conversational scenes…that was, for us, the most immediate and engaging way of trying to tell the story.
The opening scene is super interesting. First of all, it’s shot almost identically to the Chris Tucker motel scene in Jackie Brown, and also because we never see these characters again. But I was struck by how the scene sets up this world that mixes risk and danger with intimacy and formality. But I’m interested, you said you started shooting this during COVID, but that’s not mentioned in the film. Was that removed consciously, or was it just something that was visibly or verbally not necessary to acknowledge?
Funnily enough, that scene is the only one that exists from the 2021 period of shooting. I remember we were all wearing masks, but when both [the recipient] and the donor, Kyle, were there, neither of them were. Not that we told them to remove it, it was just something that didn’t seem concerning to them. In the article, Nellie Bowles, who originally told me about this whole story, her interest in this came about during COVID because the sperm banks’ supply was low. There weren't as many men going in to donate. So, the inciting incident of the article and what she was looking at ended up becoming very different from what the film was.
To me, I don’t think this industry exists solely because of COVID, although I think that was a moment in time where it was booming. But I think it exists because it’s extremely cost prohibitive, for one, to try and get sperm from a sperm bank and I think there’s a lot of socio-economic factors that America has constructed. The ease of access for people is far lower. It’s a lot harder to get this type of stuff. So, I wanted that to be more in the foreground.
But ultimately, the other thing that, again, to us was just more interesting than anything else, was, here are people who have already made the decision to do this. And to see them fumble toward fulfilling their dream, their desire, this common goal, even though these are strangers, two very different kinds of people…how do they find and forge a tenuous connection to achieve that? That felt the most dramatically rich. And then through the screenlife moments, those were the moments where we were like, “Okay, well here we can poke a little hole and expand the world a little bit and get some more context, just for the tens of thousands of reasons why people are engaging in these groups.”
I wanted to ask about some of the logistics. I read you only had one camera, yet the editing on some of the conversations captured a lot of what appear to be reaction shots. Like you’re doing shot/reverse-shot but with one camera. It’s really impressive. I also noticed, like the first scene with Tyree, I believe, it’s shot out of sequence according to his soda, at least. So there’s a question here about “cheating” reality, and your perspective on that, and then that also leads into a question about why you make these formal decisions, rather than trying to make it look like a traditional verite doc?
To me, the thing that we’re always trying to capture, ultimately, in a conversational scene, and I think this is why I think having one camera is useful, is we want the camera, even though it’s so close to people’s faces at times, we do want the camera to basically fade away. And I think in a lot of these donation scenes that you see in the film, especially that Tyree one, there’s already a performance of self that he’s doing to these recipients. He’s performing this version of himself where he’s much more professional and much more formal than he would be normally. So in that specific scene, I think the more camera people and the more gear that you have immediately, for me at least, makes it hard to minimize the production, the feeling of being captured in that way.
But in terms of the way David shoots, he’s such an emotionally connected person to everything he’s filming and most conversations that you see in the film, there’s this natural rhythm to them where people will inevitably repeat themselves, like I’ve probably already done on this call. I think the way we speak, especially when you’re conscious of being recorded, people will circle back around and highlight things that they are attempting to say and maybe they'll say it better at the end of a conversion. There’s very few moments where it felt like we missed a moment and I felt like, “Oh man, I wish we were on someone else.” I remember David and I were looking at each other at the very end when Steve says, “I’ll hold your hand if you let me” and we were on Rachel and not Steve and that’s one moment where I wished we had two cameras. But also, if you have two cameras, maybe that conversation would have never happened or been able to happen.
Well at least you caught the facial exchanges during the Mulholland Drive scene.
Every moment, and I think because everyone was aware that we were capturing things, I’m trying to capture some form of…in terms of the mission, we’re trying to present real life and, ultimately, moments that you could never likely capture through sheer chance or sheer observation. It’s like you’re working with someone to basically present, really unflinchingly, parts of their life but you give them the agency to know why you’re shooting it and how you’re shooting it. And in there, there’s a lot of different stuff that doesn’t end up working, that feels almost like reality television and that doesn’t quite work. But there’s little glimmers and that’s really what the film is made up of — moments that are so unbelievably real and in this uncanny way, seeing reality presented in this cinematic lens that, to me, feels not just like I’m stealing moments as a fly on the wall and then stitching them together in post. It’s really like we’ve all contributed — not just the crew, but the people in the movie — to making this artistic experience come to life. So that, to me, is the mission. That’s what we’re after. And all these different bells and whistles and tools and tricks and stuff, we’re using it all to basically try and get you inside the headspace of people in the film to not just be objective but to be subjective and reflect that inner headspace.
It seems like lav mic work might be one of those big tools for you. Was it a big part of scenes like in the arcade or in the cars?
Oh yea, totally. Every time we’re recording, there are lavs that we’re using, and then Richard is just unbelievable. He’s recording on a boom, so even at the arcade and other places like that, he’s following them around, he’s just never in the shot. And he doesn’t have a monitor, he just instinctively knows, because he’s been working with David for so long, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Another example of someone who’s just extremely emotionally intelligent and aware of things on set.
Did you film the whole Mulholland Drive film watch? Were you there for the whole movie night?
No, it’s complicated, but we essentially had to do some pickups because we didn’t have the moments that you see in closeup. So I had to go get those later. But we were certainly there up until that moment and there’s moments as well, like the “Llorando” scene. That was another moment we were playing with because it was really…that’s one of my favorite moments in the entire movie and it’s just so bizarre. But there’s many movies that Steve and Rachel would watch together and there’s so many other scenes that we also shot and conversations where they would talk about movies when they were messaging each other, and with almost every film there was inevitably a moment, a sexual scene or two. So I wanted to capture that, because that was a really important part of their dynamic. It was him trying to get a sense of “Hey, I can’t tell if you’re interested in me but maybe you are, maybe you aren’t.”
But he wasn’t just showing movies that had sex scenes in them to show sex scenes. To him, they were works of art and Steve really is a cinephile, himself. I got him the Paul Schrader book, Transcendental Style in Film, and he would constantly be reading it.
That was a lot of the way we worked together, to get Rachel and Steve on board. Even with letting us record their messages, I showed them the scenes in Paterson where there’s all those beautiful lyrical montages of the poetry being recited and so I’d show him stuff and be like, “This is exactly what we’d like to do with that stuff. And of course, if there’s messages you don't feel comfortable reading, then we won’t do it.” It was interesting. And most of that stuff, the messages, were recorded with the two of them in the same room, sort of playing off of each other, which I thought there was a whole other reality to that too. It was really fascinating and uncomfortable but also, we would laugh at it afterwards.
Spermworld is available on Hulu.