Reminding us all that “mash-up culture” can fester in the brains of celebrated creators just as easily as it can in the fevered collective imagination of the internet, Curry Barker revealed today that he’s reached out to fellow “Unlikely Cinematic Hitmaker, 2026 Division” member Nathan Fielder about a potential collaboration. This is per Variety, whose reporters, we have to assume, were not expecting such an immediate affirmative from Barker when they asked him if he was thinking about working with Fielder any time soon.
Barker claimed that he has, in fact, already reached out to the You Can See Everything co-director about such a team-up, saying, “I told him that. I said, ‘Hey!’ … I just put it out in the water.” The Obsession director was, after all, full of praise for Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, calling it, “freakin’ insane and awesome,” and adding that, “I feel like I missed certain tiny things, but it was three hours long and I wished it was longer. That’s rare, you know?”
To be fair, this is how a lot of Fielder’s projects seem to wind up happening; he’s talked in the past about how he and Oppenheim developed a mutual appreciation for each other’s work, which led to them saying yes when A24 asked if they wanted to embark on the strange project of filming Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans in the days before her 2023 incarceration. And it’s not like he’s a stranger to the narrative horror works that Barker has made a name for himself with, either; just a few years ago, he starred in and wrote The Curse, which, while pretty defiant of traditional genre labeling, absolutely has some strong horror elements to it.
For his part, Barker is pretty unashamedly in a phase where he’s making the most of an unlikely success; Obsession was only his second feature film, and ended up making enough of an impression on audiences, and enough at the box office, that he’s currently in something of a blank check period. It’s totally possible that nothing will come of this passing interest in Fielder’s work, but the two do have a shared fascination with some of the extremes—often romantic—of human nature, so it’s not like we’re automatically disposed toward thinking it wouldn’t work.
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