This should be a moment of triumph for Lance Oppenheim, who on consecutive weekends this March conquered crowds at True/False in Missouri with his latest feature “Spermworld” and SXSW with the first episode of his three-part series “Ren Faire,” but as has become his habit, he has an unexpected way of keeping it real.
“I’m excited because I’m so proud of the work and I hope people respond to it,” Oppenheim said. “But the sad truth in some ways of making a movie or whatever it is [is that] it’s such a stressful experience to make them, and then once they’re done, you start to feel disconnected from it. And then you start to remember that maybe the only real true beautiful parts of the process were when you were making the movie with the people that you made it with, the people that are in the film and with the crew, so it’s a bittersweet feeling.”
Most filmmakers will say the first part publicly, but you all too rarely hear anyone acknowledge the second, which is one way that Oppenheim’s a rare talent. Another is his approach to nonfiction, which may sound like it’s pushing the definition of documentary to its limits — and in fact is exhilarating in its maximalism — when with a longtime team of collaborators he sets about recreating experiences his subjects have had, placing them back in time but surrounding them with a heightened sense of atmosphere to reflect their mood, not only finding the cinema in them for the viewer, but on many occasions, revealing to the person that lived them emotions that they may never have been able to articulate.
His dazzling debut “Some Kind of Heaven,” set in the Florida retirement community the Villages not far from where he grew up, toyed with the idea of artificiality to expose real regret as he looked at senior citizens who sought out a prefab home for their golden years where they thought they could leave their history at the door, introducing them via the dizzying array of activities they could indulge in before settling into the realization that inevitably they remain preoccupied with the past. “Spermworld,” Oppenheim’s second feature, starts at the opposite end of the spectrum when it involves the conception of life, delving into the wild world of unregulated sperm donation where strangers meet over social networks to plot a pregnancy and engage in the most intimate of acts with mostly no intention of seeing each other again.
Although the sex may not have any strings attached, there is plenty for the people to think about that Oppenheim trains a camera on when putting themselves in such a potentially vulnerable situation, revisiting these moments where their emotions can be amplified by neon lights but their far more subtle self-reflection is where the power is. Whether it’s Ari, the seemingly indefatigable father of over 50 kids who is starting to grow tired of dashing around to donate as he ages out of his sexual prime, or Rachel, a 28-year-old with cystic fibrosis intent on reproducing and seemingly has a generous donor in the much older Steve, but has to start wondering whether this is what she really wants when their attempts fail to take, their decisions have lives of their own that become what the director follows after the events themselves have passed.
When freed of the particulars of capturing such a ephemeral moment, the filmmaker affords the people involved to room to consider pivotal times from angles that are typically impractical to include, from wizened perspective from afar to the ability to plunge audiences deep inside his subjects’ subconscious when they share their dreams with him. The effect becomes transfixing and only more potent as Oppenheim has continued to pursue it — “Ren Faire,” which is set to unfurl in full later this year on HBO, makes ample use of its milieu as it imagines George Coulam, the 80-year-old looking to give up the business of his Texas Renaissance Festival, presiding over a kingdom that is suddenly up for grabs. In “Spermworld,” it turns the clandestine meetings between strangers — including the audience — emotionally vibrant, leading to epiphanies that happen in front of the camera when the ultimate feelings surpass the fact of them.
As Oppenheim would tell me, that soul searching ended up extending to himself, when taking stock of the last three years in which he was working on it and what he’s ultimately chasing after in his work.
“I feel like the experience I’m going through in some ways [now] is exactly the experience probably that led people to the Facebook groups [in “Spermworld”] to some degree, which is like, why am I here?” Oppenheim said. “I’m searching for something maybe that can be bigger than me that’s not from my lived experience, I’m looking for a way to to contribute maybe to society by making films, and without making films, I have literally no idea who I am. I see it now, and in ‘Ren Faire’ as well, which is about legacy and proximity to power and what it does to you, that a lot of these themes and questions are all things I’m experiencing in my own life as well.”
With “Spermworld” set to premiere on FX this evening, Oppenheim generously took the time to talk about the methodology and the team of collaborators that have brought such distinctive and engaging works of nonfiction to the screen, as well as his other partners on this project including journalist Nellie Bowles, whose New York Times essay “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem” became a launchpad for the project, and the subjects themselves who could have an entirely new way to frame their experience when describing what they felt in cinematic terms rather than other limiting languages.
How did this come about? From what I understand, you may have known Nellie Bowles before the publication of her article that the film is inspired by.
I was looking for another movie [after “Some Kind of Heaven”]. I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life and Nellie Bowles and I had known each other a little bit and she sent me an outline with some notes for what an article would look like for this whole world. The subject matter didn’t strike me as something I would be immediately interested in, but I discovered that people were leaving sperm banks. They weren’t happy with the options they were finding and going to this unregulated Facebook group world to get little to no cost sperm. And I looked at the Facebook groups and I was able to join a few, just starting seeing these posts and behind every post, I just saw this very deep fundamental human need being expressed. Everyone was searching for something. It felt like they were sending out tendrils of connection, just hoping to be recognized or seen as valuable or worthy of replication or wanting to matter.
That was really profound to me because you see these posts that are extremely poignant and profound — someone advertising themselves, talking about their journey to wanting to have a child. And then I saw right underneath it, someone gives it a thumbs up and says, “I’m available. Here are my times.” So there’s this amazing [exchange] of something so tender and intimate and something also so uneasy and transactional about all of these interactions. And I started thinking, “The tone of the movie, if I could make one, is right in front of me. I should try and do something.”
So I started researching while Nellie was writing the article, and I would come back to her every now and again with, “Hey, I just talked to this person and this is what I learned,” and it would dovetail with some of the things that she was saying in her article, which ended up being this very beautiful diaristic essay about her own experiences as a lesbian woman trying to find sperm, even if it’s not a one-to-one adaptation. The themes of loneliness, of people searching to be bigger than themselves, and of trying to figure out a legacy of some kind, of feeling out of place with their lives, hoping that something like this could be a solution to that, were what I feel like I took away from my time researching and also talking with Nellie when she was writing the article.
It’s interesting to hear how you could emotionally connect with the Facebook posts because one of the most remarkable parts of the film is how gripping those scenes simply watching text and emojis are in the film, not to mention riotously funny at times. Was it difficult to convey?
It was. I’m so fortunate to be working with so many great collaborators. Daniel Garber, my editor and really the co-author of the movie, is very skilled in speaking the language of Screen Life. He’s made a lot of films, including “Cam” with Daniel Goldhaber several years ago where he dabbled with portraying digital life and I think for the two of us, we were just trying to figure out, how can we tell this story with the least amount of context so that you can just drop people inside of these interactions? You’re basically watching it the same way the person in the moment is going through it. No one really has any information. These are two complete strangers meeting in places [both] surreal and familiar, but also unfamiliar as parking lots or malls, outside of these suburban housing communities.
We knew that we needed something to keep the stories together and I ended up going through the Facebook posts [with] Daniel and Emily [Yue], who also co-edited the movie with Daniel and I, just looking for things that seemed to rhyme with the stories that we were telling and what were motifs that would continue to pop up. Like how could we show that this isn’t just a marketplace, but also a place where it really ends up becoming a community for a lot of people [where] there’s this shared [desire], but also a isolated sense of loneliness. Everyone is experiencing it in that same way together.
We tried a few different things. And then we brought in Dan’s partner, Elena Lee Gold, and also the great graphic designer Teddy Blanks, and he and Elena just took a lot of the things we were trying to do and just made those messages just be as simple as possible. But it was great to see it at True/False because I never really found them to be that comedic. Maybe they just lost their power on me, but it was interesting to watch it with an audience and see people finding humor in those moments.
How did you end up finding your subjects? Not necessarily individually, but relative to one another?
That was everything. It takes time. Right after I started researching, I met two people that are in the opening scene of the film. We shot that at the end of 2020 and then we took a hiatus just so I could figure out how to set the project up and find the partners that would be willing to take the chance. That’s where FX came into the whole scene and really were pretty bold in supporting the movie and after they came on, I knew I wanted essentially to recast the film because the first donation ended up proving to be successful, so I just started thinking, the way these groups work, most of the men — the donors — they’re there indefinitely in this sort of purgatory or neutral gear, fulfilling all these other people’s desires. They experience this amazing dopamine rush doing something great for somebody, then they return back to their normal lives. And the women in the groups would be there with the same goal to have a child and they’d either accomplish it and leave or they wouldn’t and it would take them a much longer time to leave, but they would eventually leave too.
I knew that I wanted to start by finding the right donors and through the donors, we would find the right recipients, and when I start a movie, I like to be very honest with everybody. It’s almost an invitation into this process and very, very collaborative [where] I constantly share movie references with the subjects that are in the film. Like for Steve, for example, I bought him the book “Transcendental Cinema” by Paul Schrader and I gave him my Criterion Collection login. And the movies that I was always referencing with our crew, I would be referencing with Steve and Rachel — I showed Rachel “Paterson” for the voiceover montage. All this is real, but I’m almost adapting people’s real lived experiences with them in real time to make something that feels like bigger than life. It almost accomplishes the desire that they maybe had when they first got to the groups. For the casting, it goes back to that collaborative spirit [when] they know why I’m interested in their story and they’re willing to pursue that with me, even though we both don’t know where it will go and lead us.
The other thing is there was almost this longing or yearning for something [amongst our subjects]. With each person that I would pre-interview or the producers on our team, Lauren Belfer, who really ran the process, and Christian Vasquez and Sophie Kissinger and David Malmberg, who were also really instrumental, the criteria was I want to know what’s going on in someone’s life and I want to know what’s stopping them from accomplishing that. For each person that’s in the film, those desires change over time, but the sense of longing [doesn’t such as] Ari wanting to have the validation from his own nuclear family and not really getting it. For Steve, he had just left his marriage and I knew he was interested in kind of finding a partner, but also just at a crossroads, and donating was going to be something that would change him. For Rachel, I knew that she was really willing to sacrifice everything to have a child, but at what point do you sort of sublimate how you feel about yourself and [engage in] an unconventional and sometimes uncomfortable relationship to get what you want. And for Tyree and Natasha, how do you make your relationship work when your partner is completely attending to other people’s wants and desires and prioritizing them over yours.
Those were the conversations that after I spoke to each person initially, I would come to them and say, “That’s what I’m interested in filming. Are you interested in letting me film that? It’s going to take a lot of different permutations and we’ll see where things go. And every single person that was in the film said, “Yes, let’s do it.” And we went on from there.
It dawned on me from hearing a bit about the process that the self-reflection is really the reality that you’re capturing, and I wonder if you’ve figured out whether you’re better able to locate the moment where that happens for your subjects so you can actually get it on screen.
Every movie is different. I’ve worked with the same crew, from “Some Kind of Heaven” to basically my short films to “Sperm World,” and every time we work together, I think our shorthand improves. For all of us, the desire is to just completely lose ourselves in the process and just congeal in a lot of ways and make ourselves extremely present and emotionally in everyone’s lives. That process also continues even when the film is done, because we form our own family in a way, not just the crew, but a lot of the relationships with the people in the movie.
In some ways, this film proved to be more challenging from a production standpoint, just because of the amount of locations and the budget, knowing that I can’t stay in this one location for 30 days to wait until something happens. I needed to let even more time pass, probably what ended up becoming almost two-and-a-half years to come back and forth into everyone’s lives when I knew there was probably going to be some entropy that would happen. But in the moment itself, a lot of it really just goes back to knowing that something undeniably real — a desire, an emotion — is going to be expressed. I’ve talked about it at length with the people in the film. We’ve done an interview that goes on for a really long time, almost none of [which] makes it into the movie and then I try and create these sequences that reflects their real experiences that they’re willing to take part in, ultimately with the goal of trying to inhabit the subjectivity in their inner lives and not just observing an emotion from afar, but really inhabiting it with them, using all the bells and whistles we have, [such as] the music, the way we’re shooting it, the color, the edit, the sound design to really just be inside of that feeling and the thought processes that everyone has.
The one thing that we just keep trying to do when creating these sequences that are real is [ask ourselves] how do you make sure that the people in front of the camera become less camera shy or not so aware of the camera so there’s a performance happening. And I think a real part of it just goes back to trust. [When I say] “This is what I’m interested in, and you told me this is what you’re feeling and that you want to have a conversation, I’m not telling you to have the conversation, but I’m going to put the camera down right here. I have a nice shot framed up. I’m going to walk away a little bit and I’m going to let you guys figure out your stuff.” And once everything is forgotten, we’re here and I’m going to start moving the camera a little bit. And if we did our job right, they know exactly what we’re looking for and then that also changes over time because of the nature of reality and documentary, which is beautiful in a lot of ways — it always changes. I can go into one thing looking for something and it completely defies expectation otherwise.
You mentioned the experience around the opening scene changing your ideas, but was there anything that took this in a direction you didn’t expect?
The opening sequence was still probably one of the most unbelievable things I’ve been privy to filming, and a big part of it is it really captured the whole reason for making a film in the first place, which is two strangers meeting in a really unremarkable location and having a really unremarkable conversation that leads to like one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring and life-altering experiences one could ever have, which is having a child. I don’t take the credit for this at all, but also I’m very flattered and honored to hear Annika, the recipient in the film, really credits the crew in some ways. She has told me in the past, “I don’t know if I would have had Ella,” her daughter, “if it wasn’t for the fact that you guys were there that night because who’s to say if you weren’t filming, if the donor would have showed up. Who’s to say if I would have showed up?” That’s probably one of the more beautiful and strange things [to hear] – being credited with helping create a child as a film crew. It’s pretty weird and pretty remarkable. I don’t think you can top that.
“Spermworld” will premiere on FX on March 29th and stream on Hulu thereafter.