For a film ultimately about the chaos of people (we presume), its origin story, relayed by Fielder and Oppenheim, is almost perfect: Oppenheim noticed that Fielder had watched part of Some Kind Of Heaven on the Indee screener app and reached out, which is adorable in an exclusively film-nerd sort of way. As their new friendship blossomed, they took in a fateful Magic Castle performance that reminded Oppenheim that Holmes had expressed interest in making a documentary with A24; eventually, Fielder was convinced they should meet with her despite initially feeling her story had been “very told.” Fielder’s curiosity about Holmes—spurred in part by having read John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup—pushed Fielder to hit the gas on a meeting. It helped that A24 agreed that Oppenheim and Fielder could “pull the plug” before committing to a project if they felt things were going sideways.
The surreality of meeting Holmes—”When I met her, I remember having this weird experience where she seems so genuine at times [then] being like, ‘Okay, I know she’s a liar,”” Fielder said—soon became too enticing for the filmmakers to ignore. “It wasn’t until we started shooting that moments would happen—some of them are in the film—and then after Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there,” Fielder said. “And we’d be completely disagreed on what something meant to us and what we thought was happening. Then we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting—if we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.” Oppenheim compared the experience to living out the cursed wish fulfillment depicted in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. “It felt we were in, like, the zone from Stalker every day when we were there,” Oppenheim said. “It was just, like, literally, the laws of reality, everything we thought was going on outside, just evaporated.”
“Every person that worked on this movie was going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance,” he continued. “We would unpack the day’s events, and no one could agree on the seemingly mundane moments that would transpire. Everyone had a different point of view. So Nathan and I started thinking if we can just try and get out of the way of this, capture this, and attempt to bring people as close to that experience of being there as possible, then maybe there’s an interesting project to be made out of this.” Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, invited Fielder and Oppenheim to film in their home more than a month before Holmes reported to her 11-year federal prison sentence for fraud in April 2023. (Holmes was convicted of defrauding Theranos investors on January 3, 2022.) You Can See Everything was filmed over three increasingly bizarre years, the results of which we’ll just have to see to believe—or not—when the film is released in theaters on October 16.
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