Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder have been doing a lot of press lately, a natural consequence of having cracked the zeitgeist wide open with their new documentary You Can See Everything. (You’ve presumably done a pretty good of worming your way into people’s brains when very loud conversations about whether your documentary even qualifies as a documentary start to break out of film nerd noodling and into gen pop.) You’d think that spending the last several years making a movie about Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, and then watching that movie god knows how many times, and then answering questions about that movie from the public, might have finally offered the duo some clarity on the matter.
“Fuck no,” according to Fielder. He’d just been asked, in a new THR interview, if he has clarity, even now, on why Holmes and Evans invited him and Oppenheim into their home in the last month before Holmes was being sent to prison in 2023—a process that was so omnipresent that the filmmakers started entering the family’s unlocked home to set up for the day while they were still sleeping, just to try to catch an unguarded glimpse. “Why us? Why are we there?” Fielder asks, even now. “I mean, I like myself enough, but I would not want me there for my last month of freedom, if that makes sense.”
Among other things, Fielder and Oppenheim double down on one of the things that they’ve said multiple times about this project, i.e., that they were extremely willing to bail on it if things became too uncomfortable for the family. “If tensions would ever run high and we sensed that our presence wasn’t wanted,” Fielder asserts, “I’d say, ‘Look, if you guys are regretting this decision, we’ll pull the plug. We’ll go.’ It wasn’t a thing where we were saying, ‘You have to do this,’ or trying to convince them to be a part of this.” But at every juncture, the pair states, Holmes and Evans pushed them to stay. Fielder: “We always were saying, ‘We will leave anytime.” And they were very much like, ‘No.'” Oppenheim: “‘Stay. Stay for this.'” “That was part of the mindfuck of it all,” Fielder adds, before clarifying a little further: “Sorry for swearing. I don’t normally swear in professional settings or even private ones a lot of times.”
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