Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the medical testing company Theranos, reported to prison to begin her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors, she invited a camera crew into her rented home in Southern California in an effort to clear her name. Yet the two people she chose to chronicle her life were Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian behind “Nathan for You,” and the documentary director Lance Oppenheim.
That decision turned into a three-year odyssey for the filmmakers and a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything” that may upend the documentary genre itself. The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in a secret screening on Sunday night that was not revealed until audience members took their seats. It will make its theatrical debut, courtesy of A24, on Oct. 16.
The movie features long, intense conversations between Fielder and Holmes with extreme close-ups. It also reveals that while Holmes serves her time at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, she and her partner, Billy Evans, are making plans “to launch a new and improved Theranos,” the company that collapsed after its deceptive claims about blood-testing technology were exposed in The Wall Street Journal in 2015.
What can’t be featured in on-camera interviews is depicted in innovative recreations. Two weeks before she leaves for prison, Fielder moves into the home and is there for moments many would consider off limits. There’s also a surprise plot point that shouldn’t be spoiled.
“I don’t know why I’m there,” Fielder said in a post-screening question-and-answer session at Telluride. Throughout the film he gives the couple many opportunities to turn off the cameras, he noted. “I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced,” he added. “I’m excited for this movie to come out and for people to help me with what I experienced.”
Holmes has been the subject of two other feature documentaries, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” (2019) and “Valley of Hype: The Culture That Built Elizabeth Holmes” (2021), and the fictionalized Hulu mini-series “The Dropout” (2022), starring Amanda Seyfried. But Holmes never participated in those chronicles.
She did sit down for a May 2023 New York Times article titled “Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth,” which is cited frequently in the documentary. Holmes and Evans take issue with how she is quoted in the feature. In the documentary, The Times stood by the reporting. Fielder says in the film that he reached the author of the article, Amy Chozick, who also stood by the article.
The initial plan for the documentary, the comedian said on Sunday, was for Fielder to remain behind the camera with Oppenheim, whose work includes “Some Kind of Heaven,” about the Villages in Florida, and the forthcoming “Primetime,” a fiction feature about “To Catch a Predator.”
But the interactions Fielder had with Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, became so strange and unnerving that Fielder wound up taking a central role in the film, he said.
“We are all smart, operating at the top of our game yet no one could reach a consensus on what was happening in the house,” Fielder said after the movie ended. “That drove us to keep going.”
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