Interview: 'Spermworld' director Lance Oppenheim

The director of 'Some Kind of Heaven" talks about his new doc for FX/Hulu, which explores the unregulated community of online sperm donation.

At the True/False Film Festival earlier this month, the new Lance Oppenheim documentary Spermworld premiered under unusual circumstances, at least as far as the press was concerned. Premiering this Friday on FX and Hulu, Oppenheim’s extraordinarily intimate and surprising film about the wild, unregulated world of online sperm donation screened for the public at True/False, but a review embargo was placed on critics until two weeks after the festival ended. In practical terms, what that meant for me—and for you, our readers—is that I couldn’t write about my favorite of the 14 films I saw that long weekend. And so I’ve done the next best thing: Interviewed the director for 45 minutes. 

Oppenheim’s follow-up to Some Kind of Heaven, his lush and offbeat 2020 doc about life in the Florida retirement community The Villages, Spermworld was spun off of Nellie Bowles’ New York Times article “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand.” Bowles’ piece delves into the unusual culture that has been built around Facebook groups like Sperm Donation USA and USA Sperm Donation, which provide a meeting-place and support community for male donors to offer their sperm directly to female recipients, usually for free. Oppenheim surveys the landscape before focusing on three very different donors: Ari, the cheerfully nomadic father of over 160 children (and counting), who spends much of his time traveling from family to family (and couch to couch) to visit the kids he’s sired and their mothers; Tyree, a mechanic who makes himself available to as many recipients as possible, but has struggled to start a family of his own with his wife; and Steve, a recently divorced 60-year-old who tries to forge a bond with Rachel, a young woman with cystic fibrosis who wants a baby despite the risks. 

Spermworld puts the audience in uncomfortable situations from the opening scene, when two strangers meet in a California motel room for an exceedingly awkward one night stand. Exchanges are made at roller rinks and abandoned mall parking lots. At one point, Steve and Rachel settle in to watch Mulholland Dr. on his big high-definition TV. But there’s humor and warmth, too, in the connections Oppenheim’s subjects attempt to make with each other and the longing, from all parties, to bring new life into the world. 

Still only 28 years old, Oppenheim has been making documentaries since he was a teenager, many of them for the New York Times, which produced this film and a number of Op-Ed docs that are available on his website (and highly recommended): “The Happiest Guy in the World,” about a man who lives on cruise ships; “Long-Term Parking,” about a community of airline employees living in trailers in a Los Angeles airport parking lot; “No Jail Time: The Movie,” about the production of leniency documentaries made for judges before sentencing; and “The Off-Season,” about a former NFL running back training to get back on the field. Oppenheim also has a three-part documentary series called Ren Faire, about the world’s largest Renaissance Faire, coming to HBO later this year. 

Oppenheim talked to me recently about building relationships with his subjects for Spermworld, the collaborative nature of documentary filmmaking, and the “tendrils of connection” that he discovered in these unique online communities. 

The opening scene of ‘Spermworld.’

Let’s just start with the opening scene. How did it come together? And what did it feel like to be in the room?

Weirdly, that was the second day of production. This whole film came together in the end of 2020. I was reached out to by this reporter [Nellie Bowles] who had found this whole world. And she brought me into the process while she was writing it. And I got to meet some of the subjects that she was profiling in her article. One subject who’s not really in the film, beyond that opening scene, told me there was this natural insemination donation that was going to happen in Santa Cruz. We were in Los Angeles. It’s like a six-and-a-half-hour drive. And I was like, “Okay. Well, maybe.” We had some other plans. “Can we do it another day?”

And he was like, “No, it has to be now.”

And so we all went. We probably left around 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. We drove however many hours. We arrived there around 1:30 in the morning. [One question we had for] the recipient in the scene, was what she was signing up for. Because I hadn’t even talked to her, really. So I had a producer go meet her, and we spoke for about 20 minutes just explaining, “Hey, this is not like a pornographic film, by any means. We’re making a documentary. Basically, you haven’t met this guy Kyle before. I’m very interested in how you’re going to go about this?"

And she’s an amazing person. We’ve kept in touch for a long time since then. And I basically described to her what the process would be. I was going to put a camera in the room. I wasn’t going to interrupt anything.

“You tell me when you’re ready to get to the donation part. And once that happens, the camera goes out of the room. And I’ll be in the room with you, but I’ll be tucked away and you won’t see me, and let’s see how this goes.”

And so, that’s what happened. I was sitting in the bathtub with another producer. I couldn’t stop sweating. And also, I think, in a way, I found the whole situation to be totally unbelievable. This was our second day of shooting! Then I also just found actual conversation to be totally unbelievable, because these people had never met each other before. And I was surprised that Kyle, the donor, had no interest in getting to know her at all. It was, to him, a just purely, almost robotically transactional experience.

The one thing I look back on, which is amazing and so strange: That was the only donation in the past three-and-a-half years of making this movie that proved to be successful. We followed so many other people, for different reasons, and it never worked out for them. They weren’t able to achieve the dream of conceiving. And Anika, who we went back and filmed with towards the end and you see her with her kid, she credits the film crew with the conception of her child. Because she was like, “Maybe if you guys weren’t there, he wouldn’t have been interested in driving all this way to meet me.”

I don’t know what to make of that. I feel weird hearing that. But I also feel honored, in a way, that she saw it as a positive experience, the film. And also she has this beautiful child in her life now that gives her whole world a lot of meaning.

As a viewer, that scene sets you up to expect a film about natural insemination, but the rest of the men that you follow, that’s all artificial insemination. Was there any thought about how one would transition into the other? Or how you might distinguish between those types of interactions?

I knew a little bit that there were three tiers. There was natural insemination, artificial insemination, and then there was a PI, which is partial insemination, which is a whole other thing that is not as common.

And to me, at first, it was just like, “Let’s just see what this world is like.”

That first scene was my orientation into the space. And so in a way, I always thought this was a successful donation. We captured it. Anika went on with her life. And therefore, her story ends. And so, the donor story, in some ways, ends there as well.

I wanted then to switch gears. I just didn’t have as much of a connection with Kyle, the donor. And his motivations to me seemed a bit more clear. He was into this for, maybe, not altruistic purposes. It really was a way for him to meet women and have these sexual experiences. And to me, I wasn’t as interested in something as unidimensional as that.

So after that sequence, and after learning that [the recipient] was pregnant, I decided I wanted to recast the movie, in a way. I wanted to find donors and recipients that had maybe this shared desire to bring something into the world, to find meaning in that, to be bigger than life in a way. And this whole dream and desire gives their life so much meaning that maybe it didn’t have otherwise. I think the motivations then are much more existential, right? It’s much more about, “Why do I exist? Is this the only reason I’m on this planet? Or is it a futile desire to try and change my life by creating new ones?”

As the movie progresses and as people meet up more often and are forced to get to know each other more, it becomes a lot more messy and complicated and human. And even in these conversations without pretext or blueprints, there’s this pervading feeling of humanity, of loneliness, of longing, these feelings that inevitably connect two very different people together.

And so, I think artificial insemination, in that sense, is probably pretty fertile for that, because it’s two people doing sexual things separately in two different rooms and then have this professional air about it afterwards. Like, “Thank you very much. I’ll see you later.”

You were saying this started with Nellie Bowles’ piece in the Times, to which you’re credited for additional reporting. I was curious about what your role in that piece was? How did the project grow out of that experience?

It was very generous for Nellie to give me any credit whatsoever because I don’t know if I’m fully deserving of it. She told me about the world, and I just immediately was fascinated by it. It was really after she sent me some notes and she sent me an invitation to join the Facebook Groups [USA Sperm Donation and Sperm Donation USA]. And once I joined, I just couldn’t help myself, I had to reach out to people because I just thought it was fascinating.

As I was scrolling through the posts, it almost felt like each thread contained a novel’s length of a story in it, right? It was this like these people—women, men, transgender folks—everyone was just sending out these tendrils of connection and hoping to be seen as valuable and worthy of replication, or something. Everyone at different crossroads of their lives was trying to settle into this very specific goal.

I would notice that the recipients who were in these groups were there to basically achieve a goal. And if they achieved it or they didn’t, they would leave. But the men would stay for years and they would remain in neutral. And it’s an interesting purgatory place.

When Nellie was writing her article, I started talking to different donors just to get a sense of, why are they doing this? What’s happening in their lives? Are there other factors that led them to this point? I would then go back to Nellie and share my thoughts. But by that point, after she pressed the publish button, I knew that I wanted to make something that wasn’t really about the children’s experience of like, “Who is my father, or mother, or what's going on here?” I knew I wanted to just focus on these very improvised relationships. I always loved [Jim Jarmusch’s] Broken Flowers, and I always loved [Albert and David Maysles’ documentary] Salesman. And I saw this movie in college, Chain, the Jim Cohen movie. [Martin Scorsese’s] Bringing Out the Dead, that was another one. These movies had these ideas of altruism and people that are struggling to help people. They’re helping people, but they’re not really helping themselves. That was enough to where I thought I could work on this for several years and remain inspired. 

Ari and his disapproving mother.

Then it becomes about building relationships, right? Because you are present for some pretty uncomfortable moments in all three of these men's lives, not to mention the recipients as well. 

Definitely. The way I hope to make films, especially nonfiction films, is that I’m always trying to get to something like “How do I show the inner life of somebody?” or “How do I express some degree of subjectivity in telling someone’s story?” Obviously there are moments where we’re privy to something and we’re observing. But there are also moments that are very much created in collaboration with everyone in it. I come to each person with basically, “Okay, well, I think we should make this movie together. This is what I think is interesting about you. Like ‘Steve, you just got divorced. What’s happening in your life that’s making you choose to do this? Is this a new lease on life?’ Or ‘Ari, everyone in your life tells you that you should stop doing this. But yet, you continue. Why?” Or ‘Atasha, you’re with your partner [Tyree] and you’re trying to conceive, and yet he’s too busy, in some cases, donating to other people. How do you make that work?” Or “Rachel, you’re risking your life to do this with someone who maybe has different goals than you do here, even though you’re both trying to do something together.”

I think that level of honesty, the questions, and me coming in expressing my position, as a starting place, and not knowing where things are going to go, or how moments will be shaped, but really always being like, “This is what I find interesting about you. Thank you for having us here. Let’s figure out how to express that feeling that you have that has gone unexpressed. Or a routine that most people don’t know that you do, but you’re willing to do for us. And would be doing if we weren’t here.”

With every documentary, when you drop a camera in someone’s life, they’re performing. But here, it’s like they’re very conscious of the performance they’re giving because it’s their real lives, right? They’re enacting scenes from their everyday life. And then, sometimes, and most times, chaos happens. That’s where reality underpins each moment. 

That’s something that people don’t often understand about documentaries, the level of collaboration that is happening between the filmmaker and the subject. You are making a movie with them. It’s not a lab experiment. 

Yeah. It’s interesting, because I was re-reading the foreword that Frederick Wiseman did for his MoMA book. And I remember finding it fascinating that even the way he talks about his films, he considers them narrative filmmaking. He doesn’t love the identification with it being just observational filmmaking. And that’s the irony coming from him, right?

Your short film “The Dogmatic” and Spermworld are both about subcultures that form around Facebook Groups. Is there something about that specific source that interests you?

Wow, you went deep. I forgot that “The Dogmatic” was even… I am embarrassed that you watched that. I should take that off my website.

You don’t think that’s a good film?

Well, I was 16 when I made that, so I feel like, I don’t know.

Very precocious work for a sixteen-year-old.

I appreciate you looking back at it. Well, look, I think the Facebook thing is interesting because the [sperm donation] groups are not just marketplaces. These are places where people are forming real, fundamental relationships with each other. And especially with this story, I always just thought it was so shocking, but also not very. I went from being like, “Wow, Facebook would allow that thing to happen?” But I also know several years ago, Craigslist used to have people offering their sperm for free. And I don't know if there's a way for them to fully police this. Maybe there will be. But I guess there’s an element to which people maybe don’t feel seen in their everyday lives or maybe they don’t have the support system or the friendships. Or maybe they do. But for whatever reason, they’re coming to these groups. And in a lot of cases, when they’re in them, it’s not just, “Hey, I’m ovulating. Is anyone available?”

It starts off in that way. But then it gets a lot deeper. And people start commenting and supporting one another, or informing one another of things. And I think when I was first looking at this, I saw so much uneasiness, it felt like, from everyone in the groups. But there’s also so much tenderness. I thought that tonally, if I could make a film that feels true to that experience, at least the feeling I had when looking through the groups, I could really leave the audience lurching for something. There’s so many uncomfortable moments in the film. But then also, I really wanted to do justice to how tender some of these relationships and the experience can be for some people that are going through having a child this way, too.

I think the fact that there are relationships at all surprised me. I think if you were to say, “There’s this unregulated place where donors and recipients can come together and a baby could come out of it,” you expect that transaction to happen, and then to end, and then you move on.” But here, certainly in Ari's case, and in Steve's as well, there are these relationships that are ongoing. I was surprised that either party would want that to even happen. 

In casting the film, I was looking for people that I knew would have three fundamentally different experiences in doing this. I knew Steve was someone who was just longing for connection. And he lives alone. And he lives in a fairly remote place. And he has a very set way of life. I knew what he was looking for more than anything, it wasn’t necessarily romance, it was more of just a friendship or just something that could be deeper than maybe what he had had before in his life with his ex-wife. Just some degree of being seen and recognized as a human being.

And with Ari, I had met him several times before we decided to make the film together. And I think the thing that interested me with him was that his life, by design, and how he's created it, almost reminded me of Warren Beatty in Shampoo. Every day he’d wake up in a new house, a new setting. It’s like the beginning of that movie, where that experience was so surprising to me because every time I'd go see him somewhere, he’s like, “Yeah, I just came from my house.” And I’m like, “You said your house was in Brighton Beach?” He said, “Oh, no, I got another house, other kids over there.” And I was totally fascinated by that.

And then Tyree, I think, is probably the one person in the film where most of his donations are very transactional and he prefers it to be that way. I think with him, I was very surprised by where things went, when he chooses to go forward with this adoption of one of his donor children. And seeing those two worlds collapse was very interesting to me.

But yeah, the whole story was just filled with surprises. I couldn’t have predicted Steve and Rachel to have had the relationship they had. We were following another recipient with Steve, who we briefly see in the film. We were following her for several months with him. And ultimately, it didn’t end up taking. And she ended up going back to Brazil, and pursuing IVF, and all this other stuff. 

But I knew that every person, at least my relationship with them, I could sense…  I’m someone who is a chronically lonely person. And I find a lot of solace in making these films where I bring the same people back together to make them—my cinematographer and editor and composer and a lot of the same producers.

I think we all feel the same thing. It’s like when we’re not making films together, and when we’re not working with really great people who share their lives with us, sometimes life can feel pointless. It gives us a North Star or a direction to be invested in. So I think there was a part of it where I was just like, “I want to hang out with people that I know,” however I feel about something. Maybe they’ll feel very different about it, but we can always have, at least, an honest conversation.

Rachel in ‘Spermworld.’

You’ve been making nonfiction films since you were a teenager. And they have a certain aesthetic sophistication that isn’t typical of more conventional documentaries. Where does that come from? How did you develop your sensibility as a nonfiction filmmaker?

I appreciate you saying that. I feel like I’m still working on it. A lot of it comes from the collaboration I have with my cinematographer, David Bolen. I’ve been working with him since I was in high school, really. I met him on Vimeo. And we watched a lot of the same movies. It came together in that way. But I guess in terms of an approach to each world, I’m always interested in finding something, a universe of a story that maybe is foreign to an audience. Maybe it's off-putting. Or maybe like in The Villages, it’s a place where a lot of people come into that story with a lot of their own preconceived ideas. And same with this one. And the TV series I have coming out, the Ren Faire series, that’s another universe where people come into it with certain associations. Then I’m interested in trying to go left where someone would go right. And be with people that inspire something surprising or something that feels just totally surreal. And in this case, I feel like so much of the film is surreal—and that sentiment and aesthetic and tone really comes from each of the people in it. 

But I guess the bigger challenge for me is always like, “How do I adapt as a filmmaker to the world, to the setting I’m in, and to the people I'm working with?” For me, it’s like watching a movie. I love narrative films. And I love a lot of documentaries. And I love the way documentaries used to be made and talked about. I love [Lionel Rogosin’s] On the Bowery. I’ve always been inspired by that degree of collaboration between filmmaker and subject.

But how do I make something that really captures the emotions, the inner life? How do I make an audience forget about their lives and just be completely invested with what’s on the screen? I think every time I’m making something, it’s like, “How do I use all the bells and whistles that we have as filmmakers? How do we use all this stuff to get [viewers] to just plunge into the emotions of the people in the film? How do I get someone to feel the same thing Ari feels when his mom is giving him some tough love?” And I think, over time, that desire has been the same. Just complete immersion.

Then I met Daniel Garber, who edited Some Kind of Heaven and this film. And he pushed what I was doing to another level. I shoot a lot of footage and there’s a lot of different ways a conversation can be going. And in a way, as all documentary editing is, we’re basically finding the story. We’re writing, in a way, in the edits, and trying to create as cinematic and expressive an experience as possible.

“How do I just use what we can do as filmmakers, not to just observe it, but to inhabit it?” 

The deeper you get into the shorts you were making for the Times and then the two features, I think the amount of incidental detail you include really increases. Even something like the doc you did about the running back (2014’s “The Off Season”), there’s a focus on how he lives, what his bed looks like, what his bedroom floor looks like. A lot of things that are just incidental details about the setting that paint a picture outside of just them sitting on a couch talking to the camera. 

There’s something so constructed about talking head interviews, which I feel is like the main staple of documentaries in the last 20 years. And it makes me feel, personally, very uncomfortable when I’m conducting them. Because suddenly they become so aware that they’re looking at a camera, even if they’re looking at me, but they have to ignore the camera that’s right by me. The crew’s all around. It’s suddenly the opposite of reality. That’s when you really feel someone performing. And so in this film, I wanted to come up with a way where people can be comfortable and free-associate, almost like they’re on the therapist's couch. 

I agree with what you're saying, though. It all comes back to fantasy. That’s the other thing. It’s like with the cruise movie [2018’s “The Happiest Guy in the World”], or the one about the football player or this movie or Ren Faire or Some Kind of Heaven. It’s all about unrequited dreams. Or just people who have these beautiful and blossoming inner lives that maybe they’re struggling to express. Or they’re on their path to expressing it and it’s maybe not accepted fully. And then the filmmaking has to respond. It has to respond and inhabit it.

There are some very uncomfortable moments in Spermworld. There’s Ari’s conversations with his mother, who very strongly does not approve of what he’s doing. Or you get a scene where Steve and Rachel are sitting down to watch Mulholland Dr.. What level of trust do you have to have with your subjects in order to get scenes like that into the movie?

I think with each person it’s different. Everything disintegrates when we’re making the film. There’s much of me that is in the movie, even though you don’t hear me or see me. But the conversations that go into each moment are somehow baked in, whether it’s musically or editorially or aesthetically. Lauren Belfer, Sophie Kissinger, and Christian Vasquez are the three producers that were on the ground with me while making the film. And the amount of time that it took us to make the movie was a large amount of it. Trust grows over time.

And even if we weren’t on the ground for every moment, there would be hours spent on the phone. Usually, when we’d arrive, there’d be a day where we all would just hang out before we shoot anything. We’d go to the movies. I went with Steve to see Asteroid City before we started filming. And when we were shooting, because Steve was so interested in the whole filmmaking process, I got him Paul Schrader’s transcendental cinema book [Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer]. And we started watching all those movies together, remotely. We also watched Paterson, which I was using as the reference for the voiceover messages. So in a way, it really feels like we’re trying to invite everyone, as much as we can, into the process.

But nevertheless, yeah, there’s still very uncomfortable moments. I think with Steve and Rachel, I knew that both of them wanted to have a conversation. And they hadn’t had it yet. And so a lot of it was, “How do I let this happen on its own time?” But then another part of it, eventually, was, “Okay, I’m setting a camera here. You guys should just chat for a little bit,” because I noticed they weren’t making eye contact all day with one another. And I just left, essentially, and it started pouring out and the conversation unfolded.

And with Ari and his mom, it was similar. It’s like entropy. You could feel a want and a goal from two different people and they’re separate things, and eventually they just reach a boiling point, where both parties can’t contain it anymore.

Ari’s mom is fascinating. She just passed away, which is really sad, to everybody involved. But the way I see Ari’s mom, she reminds me so much of my own mother and my relationship with my mother. And I feel like I would always tell her that and same with Ari. Her feelings towards him bothered him, but he always knew that she loved him. And the love they had for each other was so apparent to me.

It’s been interesting to show the movie to different groups of people. I’ve heard from people who find her so cutting. Then some people really wish someone would give Ari a walloping or something. But, it’s tough love in a very beautiful way. 

Tyree, with his Big Gulp, in ‘Spermworld.’

Ari is so interesting. Him feeling like a father to all of these children in some way is just so inconceivable, given how many children there are and what fatherhood actually means. If you’re a father, there’s a certain level of commitment that Ari cannot possibly pull off, let alone imagine. But he tries anyway. Then on the other side of that, what do the women who have had his children feel they owe him still? Why do they still let him into their lives and into the lives of their children? I guess it’s a lot of small stories that you can’t fully tell in a lot of ways.

There's 160-something of them, I guess, right?  [Laughs.] There’s a sequence early on with one of Ari’s recipients, Elaine. And she says something like, “How do you thank someone for giving you that, the gift of life?” The thing I always just found so beautiful in that is maybe one of the reasons he does this is he’s surrounded by so much love. Someone calls it an addiction in the movie, which I feel like probably part of that is true. But it’s this feeling of acceptance and this truly, in a way that I feel like none of us would probably ever understand.

And I think you hit the nail on the head. I think for so many women, they love being around him because when he’s around them, it reminds them that they are special. It’s like, “There’s 160 moms, but he chose to spend time with me.” But I think they feel a lot of complicated feelings, too—anger that he’s been missing so many of their child’s birthdays, excitement that he’s there. I think there’s just this, “How do I let this person know how thankful I am?”

And I think that’s complicated. You see a scene in the film where one of his recipients has the child with the cat litter. She’s upset. And she has every right to be. Because the way Ari sees his life—and that’s what I was trying to portray in the film—he sees it as a screwball comedy. He goes through every moment. There's always laughter. He loves finding joy and pain. It’s like this real, tangible comic misery feeling that you’re around when you’re with him. But when you leave and when he's gone, there’s also this sense that he’ll never probably fully fathom the emotional devastation or confusion that he causes for so many people. And I don’t think he's conscious of it, really. And I don’t think he’s doing this in a mean-spirited way. I think his heart’s in the right place.

But I think that walking contradiction of a person and also how free-spirited he is and how truly happy he is, those were things I was trying to remain truthful to. And just present it, knowing that he feels, if we’re doing our job correctly, we’re showing not just his choices in life, but we’re also reflecting the feelings behind them and the emotions. How he sees his life. And people can take from it what they will.

You have a lot of these films that are about subcultures, about people living in certain bubbles, under unusual circumstances. Is there just something that rings a bell for you on that? 

Legacy and fantasy are two things I feel like I’m always interested in coming back to. I think with Super Mario [Mario Salcedo, subject of 2018’s “The Happiest Guy in the World,” about a man who lives on cruise ships], it was the rejection of a legacy and the choice to live a life as hedonistically as possible. And to be a king. To him, what that looked like was being in this world of very transactional conversations. If he wanted to, at any point, he could just dismiss somebody, which I feel like you really can’t do in normal, everyday life.

So maybe there is something in common there. I think Ari and Mario and I think maybe Reggie, in Some Kind of Heaven, these are all people who are just totally uninhibited. And they say how they feel every moment. And there's probably a good deal of repression, the minimization of certain things in their life to just be able to live as freely as they can.

I don’t know. When I grew up in Florida, my dad was a real estate attorney. And then he tried to build this development that completely went under, right around the time of the recession. We were living almost in this Arrested Development-type life. We were the only house in the middle of the swamp, which is where he was trying to build this development, and all of his buddies went bankrupt. I don’t know if it’s like a manifest destiny thing, but this idea of trying to create something bigger than yourself. And what happens when it doesn’t work out. Where do you go from there? I think those are things I’ve always been interested in.

I’m so fortunate to be able to make films for a living. Now that I’m done with these two projects [Spermworld and Rem Faire] that have consumed so much of my life for the last three-and-a-half years, I feel that same feeling that probably brought so many people to the sperm donation Facebook groups, which is, “Why am I here? What should I be doing with my life? How do I feel better about myself? Or how do I feel meaningful in some way? How do I have some token or reminder that I matter?” I feel like I struggle with those questions all the time.