The audience that walked into the Werner Herzog Theatre at the Telluride Film Festival on Sunday night didn’t know exactly what they’d be watching because the screening had been kept top secret all week. Many wondered if it could live up to all the hype. And honestly, even after it was revealed by festival director Julie Huntsinger that it was You Can See Everything—a top secret documentary about famed Theranos founder and felon Elizabeth Holmes, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim—some in the audience still weren’t sure if that was a big enough deal. Holmes’s downfall has, after all, been chronicled in multiple storytelling forms, including the podcast The Dropout and the popular Hulu series of the same name starring Amanda Seyfried.
But the 174-minute documentary was indeed worth the wait. It’s full of unexpected twists and turns and shocking reveals, with Fielder and Oppenheim having incredible access to Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, in the weeks leading up to her prison sentence for her conviction of defrauding investors. The enigmatic and controversial Holmes and her husband say they want to give Fielder and Oppenheim unrestricted access to their lives so that they can refute the narrative that they claim has been created about Holmes in the media, including that in Hulu’s dramatic adaptation.
Fielder, who appears on camera as a part of the documentary, speaks at length to both Holmes and Evans, who were raising their two children in San Diego before Holmes turned herself in to begin her 11-year sentence in 2023. In the days leading up to her having to leave her family, Fielder actually lived at their home with them. The documentary reveals that the couple are planning on pursuing a new version of the Theranos health technology, despite the fact that Holmes is days away from going to prison for fraud.
After Holmes begins her sentence, the documentary continues, but takes an extremely unexpected twist that involves the appearance of a notable Hollywood actress. The audience was asked by Fielder and Oppenheim to not reveal the person who appears in the doc because of the overwhelming shock of that twist. Fielder uses a technique similar to that in The Rehearsal, in which there are reenactments of scenes he was unable to film.
From there, the documentary offers many surprising revelations, especially pertaining to Holmes’s husband, whom she married in 2019. Fielder discovers that Evans seems to be very involved in—or perhaps even controlling over—many aspects of Holmes’s image, including her Twitter.
During a Q&A after the screening (moderated by Emma Stone), Fielder and Oppenheim revealed that they felt they had a story to tell after they began filming Holmes and her family, and realized that everyone on the crew felt differently about what they’d just witnessed. “Lance and I would talk with the rest of the crew about what we thought happened or what we thought these moments meant, and no one could reach a consensus,” said Fielder. “And that’s when we really realized, Oh, this is really interesting to follow this. We’re all smart and we’re really working at the top of our intelligence. Why can’t we make sense of what’s happening in this house?”
During their three-year journey in making the film, Fielder says they didn’t get all the answers about Holmes, and the documentary attempts to dig into if she’s a master manipulator, or being manipulated. “I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced,” Fielder said. “And one of the things I’m genuinely excited about is for this movie to come out and for people to help me understand what I experienced. Truly, to this day, I don’t quite know what I went through.”
Fielder and Oppenheim also revealed that they had reached out to numerous people who knew or had worked with Holmes, but really struggled to get anyone to participate. “Liz is toxic to people,” said Fielder. “People did not want to appear in this, or people from the past were just sort of done with her.”
A24, which released the first trailer just after the screening, will release You Can See Everything in October. Fielder and Oppenheim said that Holmes and Evans have not yet seen the finished film, but are aware of its existence. “Near the end of the process, Billy was trying to exert, we felt, a lot of control over the process,” said Fielder, “and what he sort of had desired, and it sort of caused our communication to break down a little bit.”
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