Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s wild Elizabeth Holmes documentary, “You Can See Everything,” screened at the New York Film Festival Wednesday night after it received rave reviews and Oscar buzz from its surprise Telluride Film Festival premiere weeks ago. The packed New York audience was laughing, gasping and cringing throughout the entire three-hour documentary, which takes several unexpected turns as it shows the days leading up to Holmes’ prison sentence and her family life with partner Billy Evans. Holmes and Evans invited Fielder and Oppenheim into their home 34 days before the Theranos founder’s 11-year prison sentence for fraud.
Despite being convicted of defrauding Theranos investors, Holmes has maintained her innocence as she stepped out of the public eye. In the post-screening Q&A, which avoided the many shocking scenes and spoilers in “You Can See Everything,” Fielder and Oppenheim explained how they met and got in touch with Holmes for the film. Oppenheim had cold-emailed Fielder after learning he’d watched part of his documentary “Some Kind of Heaven,” and the two filmmakers became friends.
They had visited the Magic Castle together a few years ago, and a magician asked the audience for a celebrity’s name for a close-up magic trick. Someone suggested Elizabeth Holmes, which reminded Oppenheim that the Theranos fraudster had reached out to A24 about someone documenting her life. Fielder, who had read the 2018 novel “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” was “fascinated” by Theranos’ downfall and set up a meeting with her via A24.
But then I’m like, ‘no,’ and clocking and tracking my thoughts and being like, ‘Okay, I know she’s a liar.’ It was a weird mental thing. From there, we were like, ‘Can we roll the dice on something if they were open to having cameras in?'” Fielder said. Holmes and Evans agreed to let Fielder and Oppenheim film them, and A24 gave the small crew a chance to “pull the plug” on the doc if they couldn’t find a story to tell.
Then we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting. If we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.” “Every person that worked on this movie was going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance,” Oppenheim added. Everyone had a different point of view.
So Nathan and I started thinking, ‘If we can just try and get out of the way of this and capture this and attempt to bring people as close to that experience of being there as possible, then maybe there’s an interesting project to be made out of this.” The first teaser for “You Can See Everything” went viral as the camera focused on Holmes’ face and she told Fielder, “I don’t have anything to deceive you on. Of course I’m not deceiving you. I’m engaging with you as a human being.
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