Ren Faire

Walden Green in conversation with documentarian Lance Oppenheim.

When he set about the three-year process gathering the footage for what would become Ren Faire, Lance Oppenheim had never watched Game of Thrones, nor had he ever seen Succession. Yet those shows are brought up almost without fail in reviews of his new three-part HBO docu-series—set in and around the multi-million dollar Texas Renaissance Festival—probably as easy shorthand for power squabbles colored with Shakespearean high drama. Ren Faire is likewise a portrait of three hopefuls (Jeff, Louie, and Darla—our Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, if you will) all vying to take over the proverbial and literal throne of the festival’s founder, “King George”; the difference being this time, it’s real.

Well, mostly. As a documentarian, Oppenheim—whose previous credits include Spermworld, about the online sperm marketplace, and Some Kind of Heaven, about a retirement community in Central Florida—doesn’t abide by Attenborough’s Law. He gets to know his subjects, closely, and works with them to craft intimate, collaborative portraits of their inner lives. It’s a tricky balancing act but, if Ren Faire’s critical reception is any indicator, he succeeded. A few weeks ago, Lance and I connected over the phone to talk long-suffering assistants, founder syndrome, and what “authenticity” really means. —Walden Green

Watch Ren Faire on Max

Walden Green: How much of an obligation do you have to authenticity?

Lance Oppenheim: I think that you can be authentic while not being true, and I think that you can be true while not being authentic. With each project, I'm always trying to figure out, what is the reality that everyone belongs to? In the case of Ren Faire, every single person there is beholden to King George. Even in the first episode, where you see the chorus of voices that are describing how much they adore him, you'll hopefully start to feel like there's this reality distortion effect happening, where we're pulling back a little bit to reveal a picture frame, and, in that picture frame, you can see that all these people are fearful of him. 

To me, the truest way to make a film is to adhere to a theatrical authenticity that everyone would abide by, but my obligation as a filmmaker is to express real life in cinematic terms. I think many other filmmakers have done this before—right now, you have people like the Ross brothers, Robert Green, or Joshua Oppenheimer. But the tradition goes even further back to the origins of cinema, when cameras were so large that there was a struggle to represent real life without collaborating with the subjects. I'm somewhere in between, where I'm never staging things that don't happen. I'm working with everyone to express what is happening in real life but in highly stylized terms that hopefully capture a subjective feeling.

I think that most of these people, given that they're usually performing to begin with, needed to engage with that process. I needed to push past the looking glass, all the artifice, so that hopefully you're witnessing someone like [the festival’s General Manager] Jeff in a performance of pain that is in every way as real as real life is. But, it also harkens back to something he says in the first episode, when he was doing this play called Daddy's Dying, Who's Got the Will, and his father dies in the middle of rehearsals. He took all the emotions of his father dying and made it so that the emotions he experienced were real. That was the first day I had ever met him, and, from that point forward, I knew that I would need to engage with him in that exact way.

WG: It's important to get your sources to trust you, but do you always trust them?

LO: Yes and no. Editorially, I'm using all these images and sounds to reflect our position on certain things. I'm not trying to tell people how to feel or think about something, but I want to give them enough contradictory information about someone which, to me, is all real. We all say one thing, and maybe we act another way.

I do think Jeff is all about the magic, and I think there are certain things that keep the magic going; ultimately, you need money, and you need certain facets of the faire that are more commercialized to keep protecting some form of the magic. But, I think in terms of what his vision is for the faire versus Louie and Darla’s vision—they're not mutually exclusive. Each person could run the faire and do something great with it, but ultimately the show ends up switching gears. As you get closer to the end of it, this thesis of the show is revealed: it's not a matter of who is going to inherit the fair, but it ends up becoming a portrait of founder syndrome—a person unable to give up the thing that they desperately need to give themselves some sense of identity.

George, Louie, and Jeff all need the faire and this dream of it. For George, his dream is getting rid of it, but he can't. Jeff needs the dream of being the person in charge, but, by the end, he's content just being the loyal footstool to George. For Louie, I think he knows he'll never be able to buy the faire, but he'll keep chasing it ‘til the end of time. In a weird way, it's this cycle of abuse and acceptance of it, which is where the tragedy comes from. By the end of the show, you realize maybe this has happened a lot of times before, and is going to keep happening.

SPONSORED BY HYUNDAI ARTLAB

Discover LUCA’s world. With just a few clicks, you’ll join our global online community—helping LUCA transform from a basic cellular form to a fully realized digital creature.

WG: I'm so interested to know about George's reaction to the documentary once he was able to watch the full thing.

LO: Jeff just printed out the New Yorker profile of him yesterday. A dream of George’s for a long time was to be featured in The New Yorker, so even though they had some choice words to say about him, he didn't necessarily care. I think he just was so happy to have been recognized as a sort of American luminary. The reaction that I never could have expected was when I asked him what his favorite part was, and he said it was when Jeff sings “Who I’d Be” from Shrek the Musical. He called me again to ask me for the name of it, and then he called Jeff into his office and asked him for the name of it. Jeff gave it to him, and now he's added that song, apparently, to his playlist of music he listens to every day. I think the day after was when George supposedly apologized to Jeff, recognized how loyal he was, and gave Jeff his old job as general manager back.

I wanted it to be fair to him, too. In a way, it becomes an indictment of him and the sort of psychological mind games that he plays with people to feel anything. I think that he has trouble feeling empathy at all. But, I also wanted to show the way that he lives his life as an artist. He lives like an auteur or something and has teams of people enacting his vision; it's like an “if he sneezes, everyone catches the flu”-type thing.

The same goes for the subjects of my first feature, Some Kind of Heaven, and my second feature, Spermworld, because I'm really involving everyone in the making of these films. It's an invitation to turn their life into some sort of art. From the beginning, the invitation is to collaborate with me. I think everyone who's been in these films feel like they helped make something that they were a part of.

WG: The main figures within Ren Faire get built up into these larger-than-life characters, but throughout the series there’s this counterpoint to that with the presence of assistants and other festival staff. To me, at times, they almost felt like audience surrogates or a kind of Greek chorus.

LO: For George's assistants, there's four over the course of the series because he goes through them like he goes through his underwear. No one can provide what George needs on a daily basis, so, ultimately, he just gets bored and will fire you without batting an eye. In the first episode, there’s this sequence where George is talking about his goal to get screwed to death. I remember how he had just said that during one of his meetings with his assistant, who was taking copious notes of everything he's saying because he demands it from them. In the edit, I really wanted to emphasize him saying this pretty outlandish thing, then cut back to his assistant who not only has to listen and endure all this stuff, but also has to write it all down.

I think the challenge with the series format, especially the three parts, was that the solar system of the story was always: George makes a decision and that affects people. But, most of the decisions that he was making really were affecting these three specific individuals—Jeff, Louis, and Darla.

It felt like we were in this soup that felt very disorienting, and so we tried to find a happy balance where there's little moments that could puncture it. For example, in the second episode, when you're hearing from George's mechanic, Ruben, and he's talking about how, for the last several years, George has been playing the same Enya song every day—that captured some degree of this absurdist nightmare. This angelic, peaceful meditation song turns into this nightmarish hymn that follows people into their dreams.

But I think ultimately, in a way, you can also look at Jeff as a sort of long suffering, humble servant to the king. 

WG: Yeah, there's always a hierarchy. There's always someone who's getting treaded on, even if it's by someone who's also getting treaded on.

LO: Absolutely. 👑