“You Can See Everything” co-director Nathan Fielder bluntly revealed Tuesday that he still has no idea why Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans chose him and Lance Oppenheim to direct the documentary about them.
Fielder and Oppenheim participated in a Q&A Tuesday following a screening of “You Can See Everything” at the Savannah Film Festival in Georgia. Speaking to the screening’s crowd of attendees, Oppenheim said Evans and Holmes offered little insight early in the making of “You Can See Everything” into why exactly they had invited him and Fielder into their lives in the first place.
“Before we started shooting, Billy showed us a video, ’cause he would sometimes video things on his phone, just of him and Elizabeth, like, on a couch. He’d be like, ‘Look at this moment.’ And it’d be like a video of Elizabeth crying, and he’s like, ‘We just watched ‘Pride and Prejudice,’” Oppenheim recalled.
“It was just like, ‘Are these the type of moments that you are interested in having us [capture]?” Oppenheim continued. “Like, ‘What do you want us to see? What is the object of your guys’ inquiry with this?’”
Fielder echoed Oppenheim’s confusion, revealing that part of what made the experience of making “You Can See Everything” so “weird” was the ambiguity surrounding Evans and Holmes’ reasons for wanting to make the documentary.
“Why us? Why are we there? I mean, I like myself enough, but I would not want me there for my last moments of freedom, if that makes sense,” Fielder explained to laughter from the audience. “What was also weird about it is we felt like there was some game going on that even we couldn’t make sense of. But we were like, ‘Well, let’s just go along with this and see what comes out,’ I guess.”
When the moderator asked him if he feels like he has gained “more clarity” since finishing the film about why Holmes and Evans picked him, Fielder succinctly replied, “Uh, f—k no.”
“You Can See Everything” has taken over the pop cultural zeitgeist in the weeks since it was released in U.S. theaters on Oct. 16. The film follows Holmes in the final month before she is sent to prison as, upon her and Evans’ invitation, Oppenheim and Fielder interview her and document her every move throughout her last days of freedom.
To say that the film has quickly emerged as a hit would be an understatement. “You Can See Everything” has not only garnered rave reviews across the board, but it also earned the biggest opening weekend for a documentary at the box office since 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It then topped its opening weekend’s numbers by 23%, thanks in no small part to the ongoing buzz surrounding the film and an expansion to 2,655 movie theaters across the country.
