‘Predators’ Director David Osit on Why ‘To Catch a Predator’ is the Modern Template for True Crime

Director David Osit talks to The Contending about the genesis of his documentary Predators, which details the impact of NBC’s To Catch a Predator. 

Predators may be known as the documentary about Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, but director David Osit doesn’t necessarily see it that way. After viewing raw, uncut footage from the defunct series in an online fan community, he wanted to make a documentary about his reaction to it.

“I kept feeling this weird ping-pong of, I feel disgusted by what these men have done, and I feel sad for these men,” says Osit. “Then I feel disgusted again. And I remember thinking, Wow, I want to know what’s right and what’s wrong here. What if I could make that into what the movie’s about?”

Osit says it’s notoriously hard to get footage from reality shows, but this series has a passionate fan base who has worked hard for 20 years to acquire the materials, including FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and depositions from subsequent court cases.

“The point wasn’t to revisit the show, but to revisit how the show worked, how it basically inspired a new type of entertainment with journalism and law enforcement working together, which became the modern template for true crime in a lot of ways.”

Society Hasn’t Stopped Doing To Catch a Predator

Not only have true crime and reality TV changed in 20 years, but also the way we look at the police.

“We don’t really look at law enforcement as this monolithic good anymore. Sometimes people need more help than they’re able to get from the barrel of a gun. What if there were an army of therapists meeting these men instead of an army of police officers? What if the same effect happens? We get them off the street, but then we get to figure out why this keeps happening, or more to the point, can we stop the cycle of it happening? The reality is, is that so many of the men who do this themselves were victims of abuse or are disempowered in a certain way. So they’re looking for power over a child. There are so many awful reasons why this happens, but we don’t really get answers when we just put people in jail and hope that that’s just one more person off the street.”

Osit believes we as a society haven’t stopped doing the show; it’s just moved off television — on YouTube with wannabe Chris Hansens and even Chris Hansen himself with his To Catch a Predator-esque show Takedown on the TruBlu streaming network.

In the Predators documentary, Osit interviews Hansen in an intense, captivating exchange.

“I have a lot of respect for Chris,” says Osit. “He’s this really smart, caring guy. He’s a good boss. He’s thoughtful. I don’t agree with everything he does. He doesn’t agree with everything I do, but I’m trying to meet him where he is. And I try to do that with every person I film. There’s no one I’m trying to punch down at or make fun of. Even if I disagree with them, and there are people I disagree with in the movie, I really wanted to meet people with curiosity and openness, which is what I will assert is what the show did not do. And I think there are times in the film where you even see me as the filmmaker reckoning with, you know, am I that different than these other predators for a very clear reason? It’s the idea of what the definition of a predator is that’s a little more translucent than we might think when you first start watching the film.”

However, while Osit interviews Hansen and even the decoys used to catch the men preying on “teenagers,” he couldn’t bring himself to interrogate the predators themselves.

“I could just feel like my whole body rebelling against the idea. And I tried to think about what am I going to learn? Nothing I could learn is worse than what I can imagine, which is that, yeah, 20 years later, the guy’s probably still on the registry. Life sucks. I could find all that by Googling them. Ultimately, I decided to not pursue it further. Despite the fact I didn’t want to, I rationalized there are other predators in this movie. I didn’t want to go backwards in time when the whole point for me is that the film is constantly moving in a forward trajectory to unpack what these definitions are.”

Predators is now in select theaters.