Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison to begin her 11-year sentence for fraud, she invited documentarian and director of the upcoming Chris Hansen film Primetime, Lance Oppenheim, and comedian Nathan Fielder, of all people. If the latter name threw you for a loop, Fielder himself is still trying to figure out why he was asked to be a part of this, according to his talk at the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
According to Deadline’s glowing but tight-lipped review, what followed became a three-year filmmaking experiment called You Can See Everything, a 174-minute documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim focused on Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans. Holmes, you might remember her as the head of Theranos, the company that claimed to have invented a revolutionary blood-testing tool that required only a small blood sample to run a wide range of tests.
It was all found to be fraudulent in a court of law, and Holmes was sentenced to prison… but apparently not before giving the filmmakers near complete access to every aspect of her life for the month before she was locked away.
The film secretly premiered Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival, where audiences entered a theater without knowing what they were about to see. Phones were locked away, security guarded against spoilers, and A24 announced the movie’s existence and October 16 theatrical release only after the screening began.
Nathan Fielder Secretly Made a 3-Hour Documentary About Elizabeth Holmes
Fielder reportedly moved from behind the camera into the doc itself after his interactions with the couple started getting so weird that no one, himself included, could figure out exactly what the hell was happening.
That uncertainty seems to be the documentary’s entire point. While the Deadline review is thankfully scant on details, it describes bizarre stretches throughout its three-hour runtime where Fielder just stares as Holmes talks, seemingly trying to figure out whether he’s bearing witness to a moment of brutal truth or convincing fiction.
Telluride audiences have already been clued in on the secrets, but the rest of us are going to have to wait until mid-October to find out what all the fuss is about.
The post Everything We Know About Nathan Fielder’s Secret Elizabeth Holmes Documentary appeared first on VICE.
