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!
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
When we went [to Texas], I sent Dave and Abby the Joshua Siegel book on Frederick Wiseman. There's a forward that's like an autobiography that Frederick Wiseman writes. And he talks about what he needs when he makes a film. And one of the first things he does is that he goes to the power brokers, the leaders of an institution, and he lays out a plan of what he would like to do when he makes a film. And I said to Dave and Abby, “We need to do that here. To do the story justice, we need to find the person who will become our confidant and lead us there.” And the first two days were more of reporting, meeting folks. There was a lot that was going on. We met a lot of wizards and jousters and dragons and artists. And then eventually we met Jeff Baldwin, and he was the person really that I think saw the potential in this project.
We started going around, and we kind of had this almost Ozian experience, where everyone told us that there was this man behind the curtain, that George was real but they hadn't seen him in years. Some people even thought he was dead; they'd never even met him. The thing we would always say was, "I haven't even met George. I want to meet him. But the question that's on my mind, and the story that we're ultimately telling is: What is going to happen to this place when George no longer runs it? Hopefully you can answer that for me, and if you can't, hopefully George can.” That was where it began. And as time went on and the years went by, that question deepened and had a lot of other tendrils that connected to other things.
In that first stint, we did six days of shooting, and at the end of it we met George, and I realized that everything Abby had discovered in the initial phases was real. And not only was it real, it was a lot more complicated. I was like, Oh my god, this is documentary gold, this is Heaven for a filmmaker. How do we gain the access necessary to make something as amazing as this place is and the people who live in the universe there?
Step 3: Building trust and gaining access
[Gaining access] took time. That really was the result of a lot of intensive investigative journalism that both David and Abby would do while we were making this project together. Every moment you see in the film is the result of numerous conversations I had with everyone, but also what David and Abby were discovering as they were investigating around town, in terms of the corporate drama of what would play out. Who would be the next heir? Would there be an heir?
Before we had been there, the community had felt burned because a few years prior there was a journalist who'd come to town and a lot of people in the community felt like that journalist did not represent them well. So we had to overcome that from the beginning. It was like, “I'm not here to make something that makes you look foolish. I'm really just curious, and I want you to help me shape the story. Because I don't know what the story is. I know what the conflict is — and I hope you're interested in that conflict too, and if so then maybe we can work together.”
Of the main players — Jeff, Louie, Darla — Jeff was always really interested in exploring what would happen to the place if George was no longer in charge. George was always, to his credit, extremely open with us. There were parameters, and we'd have to work around his schedule and things like that. But he was I think very interested in this as a way to preserve his legacy in a way. He always was interested in having a New Yorker profile written on him, and that hadn't happened. And Dave Herbert has written for the New Yorker before, and he was working with me. So I think George was interested in whatever we were doing — and it being a documentary that could capture the magic of the place, too.
Louie was skittish for a long time and remained skittish throughout the process because of the amount of variables at play and the amount of trust we had to build together. I was in the room with George when he'd be making decisions about Louie's deal. And I was with Louie when he'd be making comments about Jeff or Darla. I think he was always like, "God, I wish this wasn't happening, but also I'm happy that it is because my life is a real life Game of Thrones." He was the first person to even utter that phrase.
And Darla I think also similarly was not happy that a documentary crew was around to document the corporate drama of what was going on with George. But over time, as she was promoted and realized maybe there was this expiration date on her position in the festival, and also as George's behavior became increasingly erratic and he was much more cruel towards her, I think she felt that our presence was really important, actually. We were bearing witness to something she was going through in a way. And it wasn't just happening in a vacuum or behind closed doors.
Step 4: Bringing the story to vivid life, collaboratively
I knew I was going to bring steadicam down and shoot animorphically. And before we went down I was talking to Nate Hurtsellers, our cinematographer, about how we could make this visually come to life. I don't want to do anything that feels too static. We need to make this feel like we're making Kingdom of Heaven, but we're doing it on a documentary budget.
With Jeff, that whole opening sequence where you really get to know him, and he's talking about Daddy's Dyin’: Who's Got the Will?, that was the first time we ever filmed with him. That was the first time I even met him. I remember visiting his office and going, “Here I am, this is my work, I'd love to talk to you about it." I wanted to introduce him to the crew just to show him that we weren't these people there to give the festival a black eye or something. We were there out of curiosity around what could happen for the festival. And he was really excited, given that he was an actor and it's his background. Eventually I asked him, "You know, it seems like you're interested in this. Can we film a little bit right now?" And he was like, "Sure." And that's where that sequence was borne from. He was just on his computer showing us that he and George can communicate as artists. Jeff, illustrious performer that he was, was in a lot of different community theater shows. One of them was Shrek and one of them was Daddy's Dyin’: Who's Got the Will? And in that interview, I feel like he lays bare the whole logic of the series.
In a way, what [Jeff]'s doing in the series is a method performance. The things that are happening to him are real, but the way he can express them with us, it's like he's performing these events that are actually happening to him, but playing them to the camera as a great actor would in a movie. He was very interested in expressing those feelings through cinema.
So that was a really amazing moment. It made me zoom out and think, Every person in a documentary, of course they're performing. I feel like that's what Kiarostami's whole mission was as a filmmaker, and same with Makhmalbaf, and all that was going on in Iran at that time. It was about the futility of what nonfiction can actually capture. How can you embrace fictional techniques to embrace a deeper form of truth? And I could see immediately that was buried within Jeff. That was something he was excited about. He wasn't excited about a fly-on-the-wall documentary where we're just observing and not really saying anything to him. He was excited about the mind-meld and the collaborative spirit of really creating an artistic experience of what he was going through and what they all were going through at the Texas Renaissance Festival.
Everything that's in the show is real. And even with George, when we were following him around the house, he would tell me he'd talk to his angels, and his angels were these statues. And they'd tell him to do certain things and they'd give him advice. So I'd ask him what kinds of conversations he was having, and he'd describe what those are. And that's what you see in the show. I'm telling him, "Show me what you do when you speak to your angels." And he would do those things you see in the moment. Of course, the angels are not speaking to him in the literal documentary-observed part of what we're looking at there, but to him that subjective reality that he occupies, that was happening. So that was a moment where I had to tell him, "I'm going to do a zoom shot. It may take a little bit. Lose yourself in your meditation and I'm going to capture something." And of course through ADR, I'm laying in, "Don't sell the festival, George." or "Sell it." The back and forth. His brain moving like a ping-pong, which he says later on. The desire to get rid of it or to keep it — because without it, as Jeff says, he's nothing.
And working with Jeff as well, there was a lot of that. Like in Germany, Jeff was extremely terrified that Louie was going to take his position from him and he'd be terminated imminently. So the fear and how he learned about it and expressing that in cinema, that really came about as a collaboration between all of us. The boring way to express it would've been to have Jeff go, "I hope I don't get fired" in an interview frame. But we were in this German place, and it was like, How can we take this experience and make it feel like an ego death or the bubble bursting on his whole mission of going there? In the scenes before that, he was talking about how he knew every general manager who went away was let go. So obviously this paranoia is in the back of his mind. And then it's finally actualized. And that's the moment we're all thinking, "Let's express this and use the iconography of the faire and embrace the absurdity of the world to show that."
Step 5: Editing and collecting more material
I credited editors Max Allman and Nick Nazmi as writers on the series because I think all documentary editors deserve that. Max and Nick taught me how to tell this story. There was so much footage. I would wager only ten percent of what we shot is in the finished product. So a lot of this is them acting as sculptors. At the beginning of the process, it was a lot of discovery. It was a lot of, How can we fit a lot of the other dimensions of the universe there? How do we include their stories? Is there a place for that in this? Over time, we learned that the main propulsive story that keeps you engaged and works for a serialized television show is that central question, "Who will be the next king?" and then, "What is a king without his kingdom?"
The conversation you see at the end of the first episode between Louie and George — we missed that meeting. We were in Germany with Jeff. So I remember we were always saying, "Ugh, if only we had a moment with Louie and George where Louie says, 'I have my family, and they're going to try to buy the festival.'" That meeting happened, but we missed it. But because the story is a Möbius strip and everything you're witnessing is a cycle, that very conversation we missed that first time happened again, almost identically to the first time we'd missed. So that scene, not only was it profound on the level that it helped the episode in communicating Jeff's paranoia, it also cemented to us the power of this loop that we're experiencing and observing — that all of these people are more or less trapped in this cycle. They're aware of it but they continue to endure it out of the hope they'll be the one to inherit George's throne. So when I watch it back, I'm always so amazed that so much of this — the performance of Jeff, Louie's insistence at trying to buy the festival, which has happened for the past eight years, if not more, and is continuing to happen in this very moment — they all just repeat upon themselves. And the repetition I think is what makes the story so much deeper and more tragic and profound to me.
Step 5A: Working with Elara
The way Elara works is they dedicate one person to roll up their sleeves and get involved with any film they're producing. [For us,] Ronnie Bronstein was the most involved with the project. And Ronnie is an American treasure of a person, of an artist. I've never worked with anyone like him before. He's the most generous collaborator I've ever had the pleasure of working with. He would watch every single cut. He would live text me almost always his reaction to scenes. And I think the thing that really compels me in the collaboration that Max and Nick and I had with him, is this is a guy that really invented the idea in Heaven Knows What of the cell phone turning into the firework. He is someone who can take events that are so grounded deeply in authenticity and reality and express them emotionally. Sometimes through surreal means. So a lot of the collaboration was amazing because he's a writer. He writes all the films with Josh and edits them with Benny. And he's also, as I said, an amazing editor. So it was a real mind meld in a lot of ways. He let us cook for a long time and get these edits together, and then at a certain point he got extremely involved. I've never had that degree of collaboration before with someone. And the series is all the better for it.
Step 6: Deciding it’s complete
I've worked on every film I've made with Christian Vazquez. He was my best friend from film school, and he produced this on the ground alongside Abby. When the Greek deal was happening in the third episode, Christian and Abby looked to me, and they were like, "You need to tell HBO and Elara that this deal is not going to happen. And we're close." The reason they said that is I was under a lot of pressure. I kept saying, "Look, we haven't filmed that much with the Greeks. And if they do become the new owners of the festival, we're going to probably need to get another thirty days of production to do that." After Darla said to her employee that George moves in cycles but she was still confident a deal was going to go through, we all realized, "Oh, that sentiment she's expressing is something we've witnessed other people expressing before. This is exactly what Gwenda the Fairy Godmother had said to us on the second day of shooting. She said, “Do you know how many people thought they were going to take over and now they're out? That's why George is the king. It's a game that he plays. These are pawns on his chessboard that he moves around as he sees fit." That was the moment we were like, OK, George isn't going to do this. Ultimately, he needs the place.
And if you zoom out from this entire series I think his desire to own the festival and remain the king is a relatable feeling and you see it across American culture, especially right now. A lot of leaders in corporate America and politically — people who have built these amazing kingdoms of their own, it's hard for them to give it up. Because in giving it up, what's their life’s purpose? Is there anyone who can match the magic they brought to the institution they had a hand in shaping? Even though George is an extreme example of that desire, and you certainly see him lash out and become a very unpredictable and scary person, I think he's ultimately operating on a desire that we're seeing in America all the time. There's a reason we're in this moment in time. It's almost like the George effect is happening all around us. In that moment with Darla, it all hit me. It was like the They Live sunglasses came on or something. I realized the story isn't just specific to this place, it's happening everywhere.
The featured interview has been edited and condensed.
Listings
Sister Salad Days, a dramatic-magical realist (10-min) short funding by the Resisting Narratives of Erasure Fellowship, is filming in Atlanta end of June and casting for the following roles:
ELIJAH: (late 20s-early 30s), Black Man (sound, sensitive)
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