The saga of tech founder Elizabeth Holmes is one of the strangest downfalls in recent decades. The self-made billionaire, who built her fortune on the back of fraudulent medical testing devices, is in prison serving an 11-year term, but before entering custody, she invited filmmaker Nathan Fielder to document her final days of freedom.
News has been trickling out about the film, titled “You Can See Everything,” since its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Sept. 6. A pair of trailers followed, revealing an unrepentant Holmes, wide-eyed and emotional, claiming she did nothing wrong.
On Wednesday at a screening of the movie at the New York Film Festival, co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim revealed more details about their experience with Holmes in a Q&A, as reported by Variety.
It turns out that it was Holmes who reached out to film distributor A24 about making the documentary. Having read the expose by journalist John Carreyrou, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” Fielder was interested in Holmes as a subject and, through A24, set up a meeting.
“When I met her, I remember having this weird experience where she seems so genuine at times,” Fielder said in the Q&A. “But then I’m like, ‘no,’ and clocking and tracking my thoughts and being like, ‘Okay, I know she’s a liar.’”
Fielder and Oppenheim were invited to live in Holmes’ house for the 34 days before she surrendered herself at a Texas women’s prison in 2023. They noted that, throughout filming, they would have different interpretations of even “seemingly mundane moments,” a dissonance that made them think they had an interesting movie on their hands (A24 had offered them the chance to pull the plug on the project if they thought otherwise).
Oppenheim compared the experience to the 1979 Soviet film “Stalker,” about a mythical zone where the laws of physics are moot and people’s deepest wishes are granted. The film was notably an inspiration for Burning Man.
“The laws of reality and everything that we thought was going on outside just evaporated, and no one could agree,” Oppenheim said.
According to Vanity Fair, Holmes’ fiance, Billy Evans, ends up being something of a villain in the movie and tries to exert control over it near the end of shooting. Communication with him “broke down” after that, Fielder said. Evans reportedly has not seen the film.
After the screening, Vanity Fair reported a truck parked outside Lincoln Center with an LED screen bearing the text “Free Elizabeth Holmes.” It was related to an online campaign at justblood.com, which proclaims Holmes’ innocence and that her testing technology is functional.
“You Can See Everything” is set to be released in theaters on Oct. 16.