Whether or not you’ve gotten the chance to see You Can See Everything yet, you may wonder why former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes would agree to spend her last month of freedom being followed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Fielder himself doesn’t understand this, either, as he makes clear in a new cover story for Wired. “This is a question that we are still debating to this day. Me and my editor, Adam Locke-Norton, who has worked with me on The Rehearsal and for years—we were debating exactly this,” he says in the interview, which was conducted late last month. “I still don’t fully understand it. That really messed with my head,” he says later about her decision to work with him specifically. “Also, I got the sense very early that she hadn’t seen a lot, but she had seen some of what I did, and she had talked to people who had seen what I did. Billy had seen more. I think she found the clip that she said she saw funny.”
The whole interview is worth reading, especially if you caught the documentary already. But of particular interest—beyond the fact that Holmes called Fielder from prison again within the last few weeks—is Fielder’s reasoning for appearing on screen in the film. “I started this thing being like, ‘I’m definitely not gonna be on camera in this.’ The situation was very intense. She was going to prison,” he tells Wired. “But then a couple things started happening. Firstly, because I was there, they would keep engaging with me. So they would be talking to each other, but then they would be like, ‘Nathan, what do you think?’ And I would chime in from off camera. Or if nothing was really happening, I would ask a question to see what they would say about something. But I was off camera, and it was more to prompt a discussion or something like that. Or they would start talking to me, and conversations would go on for long enough that the operators started panning over to me.”
However, documenting a person convicted of fraud and her slimy maybe-husband Billy Evans necessitated having someone to push against some of their talking points. “[T]hey would say stuff that tickled a part of my brain that was like, ‘Something’s off about this.’ Or I feel like this is them trying to do some sort of propaganda. So I would wanna interject to be like, ‘Well, actually, I read this,’ or ‘I thought this was the case.’ We realized, ‘Oh, someone has to push back, and we can’t just let them run whatever show they kinda wanna do.'” Of course not. What does Billy think a documentary is—his partner’s X account?
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