Nathan Fielder is still struggling to process what happened during 34 days inside Elizabeth Holmes’s home.
The comedian and filmmaker, 41, spent more than a month with the disgraced Theranos founder, 41, at her San Diego residence in 2023 just before she began an 11-year prison sentence for fraud. Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim kept the entire documentary project hidden from the public until a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, a secrecy effort that lasted roughly three years from filming to release.
“Keeping it under wraps was very important because we never wanted to get in front of what we were capturing,” Oppenheim said. The documentary, titled You Can See Everything, officially came out Friday, October 16.
The small crew of about seven or eight people helped maintain that silence. Oppenheim explained that the lean operation was essential to letting life unfold naturally around Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two children during her final days of freedom.
Fielder emerged from the experience with genuine confusion rather than clarity. “I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced,” he said during a Q&A after the Telluride screening, per Vanity Fair. “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.”
Oppenheim voiced similar disorientation at the New York Film Festival. “I feel like our brains were scrambled,” he shared. “We were also unsure for so long if we even had anything that was worthwhile to make and put together.”
The directors faced repeated opportunities to abandon the project entirely. Holmes had initially reached out to A24 to collaborate, and throughout filming the team retained the option to pull the plug. What kept them going, Oppenheim said, was a shared psychological state: “Every person that worked on this movie was going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance.”
That dissonance stemmed partly from Holmes’s own behavior. Fielder described tracking his shifting perceptions of her moment by moment. “I remember having this weird experience where she seems so genuine at times. But then I’m like, ‘No,’ and clocking and tracking my thoughts and being like, ‘Okay, I know she’s a liar.’ It was a weird mental thing.”
The comedian’s bewilderment extended to the basic premise of his own presence. After a Los Angeles screening this month, Fielder posed a question he could not answer: “I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” He continued: “why you would want to spend your last month of freedom in a decade with this guy. Even with no cameras—I like to see myself as like a nice person overall, but still, I wouldn’t choose me.”
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after leaving Stanford University, attracting more than $700 million from investors by 2014 with promises of revolutionary blood-testing technology that could run multiple tests from a tiny sample. Wall Street Journal reporting the following year exposed that the technology never worked as claimed. Criminal charges followed against Holmes and former business partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, and she was convicted in January 2022 of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts of wire fraud. She began her sentence on May 30, 2023, and is currently incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, with a reduced release date projected for February 2030.
