“I guess we should just start at the beginning, and tell us how this happened,” New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim asked filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim at a Q&A after a screening of You Can See Everything on Wednesday night.
It was the second public showing of the documentary, which was filmed in and over years and blew the roof off the Telluride Film Festival (see Deadline review). It’s a hard-to-describe flow of verité filmmaking unspooling in real time at the San Diego home of disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she reported to Bryan federal prison in Texas. The Stanford dropout and Theranos founder is still serving a 10-year sentence for defrauding investors in the high-profile case.
Fielder and Oppenheim said the project, oddly, was launched during a magic show the two friends attended in L.A. in 2023, at the height of Holmes’ notoriety. “A magician there asked for a celebrity’s name, and someone called out ‘Elizabeth Holmes’,” Oppenhiem said. “I was like, so interesting. Elizabeth Holmes.” He said he “had just heard that she was looking for someone to document her life and that she had reached out to A24.”
Fielder was also curious. “I knew that she hadn’t… spoken to anyone in, I think, seven years. Total silence.” He didn’t necessarily see a documentary brewing “because it felt like the story was very told. But I was really curious to meet her, just as a personal thing.”
Holmes’ epic rise and fall was the subject of an HBO documentary and a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried.
Fielder called A24, and went to meet Holmes. “I remember having this weird experience… where I’m like, “She seems so genuine at times. But then I’m like, no… I know she’s a liar… It was a weird mental thing.” Homes has always insisted she did nothing wrong.
She agreed to let the cameras into the home she shares with with her partner Billy Evans and their two young children.
Fielder made no promises to A24. “We don’t know what the story is. But we want to see what happens,” he said. The studio said, “‘OK, that’s fine. And if you want to pull the plug anytime, you can.’ Which was amazing.”
They started filming. “And after, Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there, and we’d completely disagree on… what we thought was happening. And 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.”
The filmmakers ultimately moved from one camera to three, shooting 16 hours a day with two small crews of which no more than four individuals were in the house at any one time. “We had a wide lens that would cover the whole house so if something happened, we wouldn’t miss it. And then the other two … lenses could be wide but then also zoom, so we could basically capture everything,” said Oppenheim.
“We were trying… essentially, to just take all the pressure away from any moment, so they wouldn’t really know what we were interested in necessarily.”
“Actually, we didn’t always either,” Fielder added.
“One thing we realized with the [initial] one camera that’s panning, which you see in some of the earlier scenes, is that the moment you say something to someone you want to see their face the moment they hear it. Especially in a movie like this, where you’re trying to evaluate if someone’s being honest or not. And when you have to swing, you’re missing a few seconds. And you realize this is maybe a problem in this kind of thing,” Fielder said.
He himself went from solely behind the camera to very much on, registering reactions to Holmes, including to her circular responses to questions like did she know her claims about Theranos’ blood-testing kit were false.
Fielder said he has no idea why she and Evans granted them the access they did.
“It’s so hard to understand… Maybe there was a sense that inviting someone who was a friend of theirs, no one would take that seriously. So I don’t know. It’s so hard to speculate as to why.”
You Can See Everything opens in theaters October 16.
“I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder said. “Why I’m excited for the movie to come out is I’m really curious to hear what everyone else thinks and what they make of certain things. I think it will actually help me understand… So I’ve been looking forward to this release for a while.”
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