Lance Oppenheim Breaks Down Making of 'Ren Faire'

Plus what he learned along the way.

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The first episode of Ren Faire, from director Lance Oppenheim, premiered on HBO last night. The show is of a piece with Oppenheim’s previous documentaries, in that it’s about an eccentric American subculture; and in that it enjoys that subculture’s absurdity while maintaining empathy and respect for the subjects. But Ren Faire is also a departure. The show — a succession drama reminiscent of some of HBO’s biggest recent hits — is immersive in a way that’s rare among documentaries. Oppenheim’s camera floats around the Texas Renaissance Festival, zooming in on and tracking its main players, catalyzed by a relentlessly propulsive percussion score and lots of voiceover. It’s the type of doc that makes you wonder: How the hell did they pull that off? So, I had Oppenheim take me through the various steps involved in making the series. Huzzah!

Image credit: HBO

Step 1: Find the people who will help find the story

Lance Oppenheim: I met David Herbert because I was a big fan of his longform journalism. When I first started making documentaries, I read this David Foster Wallace nonfiction piece "Big Red Son," and I remember thinking, Holy shit, this is amazing. The idea of taking nonfiction storytelling but finding this very expressive, almost narrative way of telling it. And when I read David Herbert's stuff, I thought he had such a knack for finding these amazing worlds — people obsessed with controlling a universe, controlling something they could create for themselves, and then eventually becoming entombed by it. So I was a big fan and I reached out to him after seeing one of his articles was optioned by a filmmaker. I had messaged David around the time Some Kind of Heaven had been released, so it must've been the beginning of 2021. And after I messaged him, he responded and said he'd just finished watching Some Kind of Heaven. It was this kind of kismet thing. And we became friends and we tried working on a few things and we couldn't quite work it out.

Lo and behold, David was working with this really talented story researcher, Abigail Rowe. I think David had a friend who went to the Tuxedo Renaissance Festival, who had told him about it. He said, "Oh I wonder if there's a story to be told in that world?" And he asked Abby to find something for me set there. And Abby discovered, after doing some google searching, that there was a man named King George Coulam, who created the biggest renaissance festival in the country. And not only did he create it, but he served as the king of it and really created a real life fiefdom. He incorporated the city around the faire, he was the mayor, and she also noticed that he was eighty-six.

So Abby started calling a few people at the festival, ex-employees, asking them just preliminary stuff at the beginning. And a lot of people confirmed that he was this true eccentric, iconoclastic dude, who really defied any characterization or categorization as a leader. And also there was this existential question that no one knew the answer to: What would happen to the place after George was no longer in power? So around that time, Abby and Dave collaborated on this treatment, a one pager that they sent to me. I read it and I thought it was all made up at first. It was like, There's no way this can all be real. I decided the next day to go to Texas. The November 2021 festival was finishing up. David knew Dani Bernfeld at Elara Pictures, who kind of took a chance on this idea, and she gave us some resources.

Step 2: The Wiseman Plan