You Can See Everything: Nathan Fielder's Holmes Film

Thirty-four days before she reports to federal prison, Elizabeth Holmes invites a film crew into her rented beach house. And says, essentially: film everything.

Why on earth would she do that?

Nathan Fielder, who co-directed it, was asked exactly that. He said it's so hard to understand. His only guess was that maybe they thought inviting someone who was a friend of theirs meant nobody would take it seriously.

Nathan Fielder. The Nathan for You guy. Who thought he was a friend?

That's the part he can't explain either. And the thing is, he wasn't supposed to be in the movie at all. He was going to stay behind the camera.

So what dragged him in front of it?

A technical failure. His co-director, Lance Oppenheim, arrived with a very specific style: one camera, anamorphic lenses, locked on a tripod. Beautiful. Useless here.

Useless how?

The house in Del Mar was tiny and they never left it, because of paparazzi. Holmes and her partner Billy Evans kept moving, and the operators couldn't keep up. Change a lens, throw on a diopter, and the moment's gone.

So the great documentary nearly died because of a tripod.

Oppenheim's word for it was "a disaster." But while the crew fiddled with gear, Holmes and Evans would start asking Nathan questions. Then the camera comes back on, and they're still asking him questions.

Oh, they're pulling him in.

By day two he's on camera in fits and starts. Then he turns to Oppenheim and says, we should direct this together. Oppenheim's reaction, roughly: are you kidding me, of course.

And that's a seven-person crew, right? That's nothing.

Seven people total. They went to three cameras, two operators, long zoom lenses, zones of the house, Oppenheim hidden behind the wide one. Sixteen-hour days, so nobody could tell what they were actually interested in.

That's kind of a trap, isn't it? If everything's rolling, you can't perform for the camera, because you don't know which one.

And they dropped the widescreen for a tight four-by-three, because what they wanted was faces. Microexpressions. Fielder said it plainly: when you say something to someone, you want to see their face the moment they hear it, especially when you're trying to work out if they're being honest.

Did they work it out?

No. They couldn't even agree with each other. They'd wrap a day, talk it over, and Nathan would say, that's not what happened. And Lance would say, I watched it on three monitors, that IS what happened.

On mundane stuff?

Mundane stuff. So they asked the crew to settle it, and the cinematographer, the camera operator, the sound mixer, all had different readings too. That disagreement is basically the engine of the film.

Honestly, that's a better pitch than any thesis about fraud.

There's a scene where Fielder shows them the Abbott and Costello routine, Who's On First, to explain why talking to her feels the way it feels. She says she finds it funny. Then when he presses, she says she doesn't understand the joke.

Wait. She laughed at it and then said she didn't get it?

And Evans explains that as proof she thinks differently. Then they put on The Dropout, the miniseries with Amanda Seyfried playing her, and Holmes gets distressed and asks them to stop.

Okay, that's a human moment. Does the film let her have it?

It does. Then she goes and has her body three-D scanned, because she's worried about her likeness being misused. Then she reports to prison in Texas.

And the film just... ends there?

Halfway. The movie is nearly three hours and splits cleanly in two. Part two picks up two years later, and she's inside, so she can't speak for herself. Evans is out here building the next device, a company called Haemanthus.

So she's silent and someone else holds the microphone.

He holds more than that. He has power of attorney. He licenses her image for an AI model and for billboards. He posts as her on X. He shuts down Fielder's interview with one of his own engineers when the engineer suggests Holmes lied about the technology.

That's grim. How does Fielder even make a film with the subject locked away?

He hires Amanda Seyfried to play her again, and reenacts the scenes he wasn't allowed to film. Including one from early on, where Evans asked the filmmakers for a cut of the profits while Holmes was in the other room.

They paid him?

They reluctantly agreed a profit-share. And later Holmes says, offhand, that she gets no money from the documentary.

So she may not have known. Her own film.

Evans says she knows "some" details. Make of that what you will.

And people turned out for this? A three-hour documentary?

Fifteen million dollars in one weekend, off eight hundred and fifty-five screens. Over two thousand sold-out shows. Biggest documentary opening in North America in twenty years, since Fahrenheit 9/11.

On a budget of what?

Seven million. It's grossed about forty-five. Seventy percent of the audience under thirty-five.

So the lesson for anyone making anything is, your careful plan collapsing on day one might be the best thing that happens to you.

If you're willing to be in the shot. He really wasn't going to be.

I still can't get past her saying yes in the first place.

Neither can he. He's said he's still trying to make sense of it, and he spent three years there.