{"id":899187,"date":"2026-10-29T21:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T21:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/899187\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T21:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T21:30:10","slug":"nathan-fielder-on-unconventional-doc-techniques-in-you-can-see-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/899187\/","title":{"rendered":"Nathan Fielder on Unconventional Doc Techniques in You Can See Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn Wednesday at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival<\/a>, Nathan Fielder<\/a>, the co-director of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything<\/a>, found himself, for the first time, in conversation with a bunch of other directors of top 2026 documentaries. And the unconventional nature and tremendous box-office reception\u00a0of his and Lance Oppenheim<\/a>\u2019s film was a hot topic of discussion.<\/p>\n

\n\tFielder was part of the fest\u2019s The Hollywood Reporter-moderated Docs to Watch panel \u2014 the full video of which will soon post, but the relevant clip of which appears below \u2014 and was seated alongside nine other doc filmmakers: Chai Vasarhelyi (Everest: Other Side), Rory Kennedy (The Trial of Alec Baldwin), Amir Bar-Lev (The Last First: Winter K2), Julia Loktev (My Undesirable Friends: Part II \u2014 Exile), David Greaves (Once Upon a Time in Harlem), Poh Si Teng (American Doctor), Jack MacInnes (One in a Million), Alysa Nahmias (Cookie Queens) and Ron Howard (Avedon).<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was noted by the moderator \u2014\u00a0yours truly \u2014 that the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which solely determines the best documentary feature Oscar nominees, has, in recent years, become controversial. The branch has consistently passed over docs that feature celebrities and\/or get wide releases and\/or make money, almost punishing popularity \u2014\u00a0examples include Won\u2019t You Be My Neighbor, Jane, Life Itself, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, American Symphony, Will & Harper and Billie Eilish: The World\u2019s a Little Blurry. And the branch has also been very resistant to docs that feature filmmaking techniques that are a bit adventurous, including reenactments \u2014\u00a0Stories We Tell being a recent example.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt a time when those are the very sorts of docs that the public is gravitating towards \u2014 You Can See Everything has grossed nearly $50 million so far, after having the highest-grossing opening weekend from fewer than 1,000 locations since 2006\u2019s Borat and for a doc since 2004\u2019s Fahrenheit 9\/11 \u2014\u00a0the question was: does the branch need to broaden its idea of what a doc is?<\/p>\n

\n\tBar-Lev, a longtime member of the doc branch, enthusiastically weighed in in support of You Can See Everything: \u201cIf you haven\u2019t ever read a Werner Herzog thing called The Minnesota Manifesto, he says that verite films, which have this reputation as being the most truthful \u2014 he says, \u2018Yeah, it\u2019s the truth, but it\u2019s the truth of the Yellow Pages, it\u2019s the truth of facts, it\u2019s like an actuarial truth, it\u2019s not ecstatic truth.\u2019 You can get at ecstatic truth with reenactments, playing to the camera, all these different techniques\u2026 And to just say, \u2018Because I didn\u2019t edit something, and I just aimed the camera,\u2019 that\u2019s not necessarily any more truthful. And it\u2019s a pity that the doc branch is narrow-minded at times. I\u2019m glad you brought that up. And a lot of times, they forget \u2014 we forget \u2014 that it\u2019s an Oscar for a film, not for an issue. We all care about issues, but that\u2019s not what this Academy Award is supposed to be about. It\u2019s supposed to be about technique and craft. And I\u2019m really happy that your film [addressing Fielder] is doing as well as it\u2019s doing because I think it pushes the boundaries and we all learn from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVasarhelyi, another member of the branch (who won the best documentary feature Oscar for 2018\u2019s Free Solo), interjected, \u201cJust a moment of appreciation: In Manhattan last weekend, you couldn\u2019t get a seat to see your film!\u201d Fielder replied, \u201cIt\u2019s wild! I don\u2019t know.\u201d She continued, \u201cI was like, \u2018What is going on?!\u2019 It was kind of like the most beautiful moment ever in nonfiction.\u201d She added, \u201cHow I looked at your film: the constraints became the opportunity, right? And that\u2019s formal innovation, and that\u2019s what was awesome \u2014\u00a0like The Act of Killing, one of the greatest formal innovations in nonfiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFielder, for his part, emphasized that he loves documentaries, and that he and Oppenheim did not set out to make a doc with unconventional techniques. \u201cHonestly, I am such a fan of documentaries, and I think so much about this stuff,\u201d he volunteered. \u201cThis project\u2019s different than the other ones, but I feel like the process of making it was just a process of including everything that needed to be included to make it as honest as possible. It was not a choice of trying to do anything different \u2014 like, we were very stringent about trying to be accurate, trying to portray things authentically. The only reason we started including these other things [such as reenactments] was because it felt dishonest not to. We\u2019d actually be hiding things from the viewer if we didn\u2019t let them in on what we knew or what we observed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFielder continued, \u201cI think everyone who makes docs can understand, and they\u2019ve experienced \u2014 when you\u2019re in the room with cameras, it\u2019s not the same as if you aren\u2019t in the room with cameras \u2014 you\u2019re part of the story, and the person is acting a certain way because of you and the camera, regardless of if you acknowledge it or not. And I think about those things when I watch docs. And Lance and I, putting this together, we were just like, \u2018What is the information that\u2019s missing that the viewer needs to know to try to make sense of this in the way we are?\u2019 And so it was just that process that sort of evolved.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe closed, \u201cI don\u2019t know, really, what makes something not a doc; I know what it would be if we didn\u2019t do those things: it would just be a less honest version of what the story was. But if anything comes of the movie doing well and all that, [I hope] it\u2019s that people are excited about docs and want to see docs in theaters and are just paying more attention to all the great docs that are being made now. That\u2019s, like, awesome; that\u2019s, like, a big win for me, because I love documentaries, and I\u2019ve thought about them my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, Nathan Fielder, the co-director of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":899188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88,351907,43115,146344,355314],"class_list":["post-899187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-lance-oppenheim","tag-nathan-fielder","tag-scad-savannah-film-festival","tag-you-can-see-everything"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}