By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — No longer a secret, “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, premiered Wednesday at the New York Film Festival.
Since first debuting in a surprise, no-phones screening at the Telluride Film Festival on Sept. 6, “You Can See Everything” immediately transformed into one of the year’s most buzzed-about films.
Shot secretly over three years, the nearly three-hour documentary captures Holmes, founder of the medical testing company Theranos, in the 34 days before reporting to prison. But as fans of Fielder would expect, little in how “You Can See Everything” follows a conventional route.
Moviegoers lined up outside the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center as early as 3 a.m. in hopes of attending the sold-out 8 p.m. screening.
“You Can See Everything,” which A24 will release Oct. 16, is a hard-to-believe coda to a preposterous saga. Even Fielder isn’t sure what to make of the surreal odyssey he and Oppenheim captured.
“I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through,” Fielder said in a Q&A following the screening.
After her conviction on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy, Holmes entered a Texas prison in May 2023. In a headline-grabbing scandal that rocked Silicon Valley, one of the most surprising and surreal twists was revealed only this month.
Holmes chose to let Fielder, the absurdist comedian of “Nathan For You” and “The Rehearsal,” and the documentary filmmaker Oppenheim, intimately film her life with her partner, the California hotel heir Billy Evans, and their two children.
At this dramatic moment in their lives, Fielder lived in a guest house at their Del Mar, California, beachside home. The filmmakers shot from morning to night. Fielder interviews the couple while in bed, or the bathroom.
“I mean, I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder said. “I wouldn’t think I’d be, like, the person that you would want for your final 34 days of freedom. I’m not the most, like, comforting.”
The filmmakers happened to hear that Holmes and Evans had reached out to A24 about the prospect of making a documentary. Fielder didn’t initially think it would amount to a feature film, but he was curious just to meet Holmes.
“When I met her, I remember having this weird experience,” Fielder explained. “She seems so genuine at times but then I’m like, (expletive), tracking my thoughts and being like, ‘I know she’s a liar.'”
“Every person who worked on this movie was going through a similar cognitive dissonance,” said Oppenheim, who directed the just-released “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen. “We would unpack the day’s events and no one could agree on seemingly mundane moments that would transpire.”
In “You Can See Everything,” Fielder seeks not only to grasp what is true and not true about Holmes, but to grapple with deeper questions of identity, performance, fiction and control.
Holmes founded Theranos with her then-romantic partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. They promised the company would revolutionize healthcare with a technology that could quickly scan for diseases and other health problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.
The hype helped them raise nearly $1 billion from investors. By 2014, Theranos was valued at $4.5 billion.
But after the company’s purported technology advances were exposed in a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal, the company collapsed. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department charged Holmes and Balwani with a litany of white-collar crimes.
Balwani was separately convicted in 12 felony counts of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to nearly 13 years in a South California prison.
The filmmakers more than once asked the Alice Tully Hall crowd to preserve the surprise twists and turns the movie takes as it shifts. That includes dramatic recreations with the aid of an A-list star and other elaborations, all in an effort to get closer to the truth.
But even as Fielder and Oppenheimer pleaded for viewers not to discuss the film in too much detail, they were clearly eager to debate and try to make sense of “You Can See Everything.”
“As each scene that happens, it’s happening and we’re documenting it. There’s no plan of what’s going to happen next at any point,” Fielder said. “This is a path that opened up to us and we just followed it.”