Nathan Fielder Moved In With Elizabeth Holmes. ‘You Can See Everything’ Is What Came Out.

For three years, almost no one knew that Nathan Fielder was living in a guest house in Del Mar, California, filming Elizabeth Holmes from morning to night.

The result is “You Can See Everything,” a documentary Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim that A24 releases in theaters on October 16. It is one of the most talked-about films of the fall festival season, and possibly the strangest.

A Secret Screening at Telluride

The film was unveiled without warning on September 6 at the Telluride Film Festival, at a surprise screening where phones were banned. It went on to play the New York Film Festival on October 1.

Its premise is simple to describe and hard to believe. In the spring of 2023, Holmes, the founder of the collapsed blood-testing company Theranos, was weeks away from reporting to prison to begin a sentence of more than 11 years for fraud. She and her partner, Billy Evans, agreed to let Fielder and Oppenheim film them at home with their two young children during her final 34 days of freedom.

The access was close to total. Interviews took place in bedrooms and bathrooms. When Fielder asks Holmes whether she is being authentic with him, she answers, “I’m always being real.”

Who Is Directing Whom?

What began as a portrait of a woman about to lose her freedom became, in the filmmakers’ telling, a three-year descent. Fielder, best known for “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” becomes a character in his own film, openly questioning whether Holmes and Evans are giving him unfiltered access or carefully managing what he sees.

After Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on May 30, 2023, she largely disappears from the screen. Evans becomes the filmmakers’ main link to her, until that relationship, too, breaks down as production nears its end. The film also uses reenactments featuring an actress whose identity was kept under wraps at the premiere.

The filmmakers themselves still seem rattled. “I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder told the Associated Press. “I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through.” Oppenheim said that “every person who worked on this movie was going through a similar cognitive dissonance.”

Two Filmmakers Obsessed With Performance

The pairing makes sense. Fielder has spent his career building elaborate scenarios that expose the gap between how people present themselves and who they are. Oppenheim, who directed “Primetime,” has made a specialty of documentaries about people living inside their own carefully constructed realities.