Nathan Fielder has finished a feature-length documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and he says he still does not understand what he lived through while making it.
“I still am not sure to this day what I experienced,” Fielder told an Academy Museum audience Tuesday night at an A24 screening of “You Can See Everything,” which he directed with Lance Oppenheim. The film opens in theaters October 16.
The event came one month after the unannounced documentary premiered at a secret Telluride Film Festival screening, where it drew strong reactions and early awards talk. At 174 minutes, it now holds a score of 95 on Metacritic. Bill Hader moderated the Q&A before a nearly full house that included Zach Cregger, Adam McKay and Hannah Einbinder.
Oppenheim said the project began when Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, approached A24 about documenting her final days before prison. The Theranos founder was sentenced to 11 years for fraud and had avoided cameras for seven or eight years, Fielder said. He and Oppenheim pitched themselves to the studio, which agreed to fund the shoot with no promise of a release.
Cameras rolled for about 35 days, mostly in 2023, with a crew of seven. Fielder stayed in the couple’s guest house. At one point, the filmmakers bought a $10 device to check whether his room was bugged, and it detected nothing. Fielder said he repeatedly offered to leave when tensions rose, and the couple, who have two young children, refused each time.
The experience unsettled him. “It was a really disorienting experience, talking to someone like that, when they seem so sincere,” Fielder said. He and Oppenheim often disagreed at the end of each day about what they had witnessed, and their crew held competing readings of simple moments. The directors decided that confusion was the story.
Oppenheim said Fielder moved into the foreground because the film needed someone to anchor viewers among Holmes and Evans. Critics at Telluride described Evans as a troubling presence, and some have questioned how much of the film is conventional documentary. A24 has asked reporters to call it a documentary, not a hybrid.
Oppenheim, whose film “Primetime” with Robert Pattinson also arrived this fall, said the aim was to put viewers inside the house and inside the feeling.
