Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim Go Deep on the Twisty Ride of ‘You Can See Everything’ — and How Audiences Are Reacting

[This story contains spoilers for You Can See Everything.]

Less than two months ago, the world did not know the existence of You Can See Everything. In the time since, the A24 production has opened as one of the most successful documentaries of all time at the North American box office and made a strong case to become the first documentary to ever be nominated for the best picture Oscar. The three-hour film, helmed by Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime), has captured the Zeitgeist in its combination of extensive, intimate access to its subjects; its news-making revelations; and its audacious formal choices, from the dynamic cinematography to the structural twist that defines the movie’s back half.

It’s also been a product of true discovery for audiences: Ever since its secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend, You Can See Everything has generated deafening buzz while keeping its biggest surprises hidden.

Viewers went into cinemas likely knowing that the film would depict the final month of Elizabeth Holmes’ life with her husband, Billy Evans, and their children, before the start of her 11-plus-year prison sentence for fraud. But the surreal nature of Holmes and Evans’s dynamic, both with each other and with Fielder (who appears on camera), could hardly have been anticipated. Ditto the final act’s flash-forward that finds Fielder and Oppenheim’s access to Holmes, now incarcerated, slipping away — leading to the introduction of Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, to help them complete the film and reenact key scenes and conversations from the time spent together.

In one of their first public Q&As since You Can See Everything’s theatrical release, Fielder and Oppenheim joined yours truly at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival for a wide-ranging conversation reflecting on those big surprises — while still clearly processing the years-long saga of making a film deep in the bubble of a “real-life human optical illusion.”

You guys had a seven-person crew moving into their household. How did you think about the way you were going to shoot this and capture this? I know whether Nathan would even be on camera was a conversation too.

OPPENHEIM When we first started this, we didn’t think Nathan was going to be on camera. It was Elizabeth and Billy: When we were filming in the early days, they kept asking questions of Nathan. It almost felt like they wanted him to gravitate from behind the camera, in front of it. So it happened sort of organically. One of our operators, Jonathan Mitchell, who’s worked with Nathan for a long time, just panned the camera to Nathan and I was watching on the monitor. I actually thought maybe this could be useful, in a way — if Nathan was becoming this accidental investigator of these everyday moments, he could try and pull Elizabeth from whatever version of reality she was living in and try and pull her back into the one that we were in.

The first stint of it was seven people. I usually shoot with one camera, with David [Bolen], and on this, it didn’t work at all because we kept missing these moments, especially when Nathan would ask a question — if we were panning from Nathan to Billy or Elizabeth, we would lose the first nonverbal reaction of what happens on somebody’s face when a question is posed. Nathan was like, “That’s unacceptable.” No, he wasn’t saying that. (Laughs.) But he was like, “We’ve got to get that stuff.”

FIELDER For something like this where you’re evaluating honesty and sincerity on someone’s face, their response even before they answer me is so important, in terms of trying to gauge if someone’s honest or not, or just what’s going on with them…. Because they would move around the house, it was a process of trying to continuously incorporate the things we were missing. We needed to pull the cameras back more, and we only had two operators for three cameras in that house; it was only two to three people maximum besides me and Lance in that house at any given time. We had the wide [shot] that would cover the whole house and then we had these zoom lenses that could also go wide, so that we could cover anything that was happening and [we] could zoom into a tight [shot] from really far away.

Then what started happening is, before we were even rolling, they’d start talking to us. They’d try to catch us off camera and be like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing today” or “Do you want to film this?” We thought, “Well, this is relevant because if they want something filmed, then that’s their idea of what’s going on.” We were like, “We need those process conversations.” We started coming in before they even woke up because they didn’t lock the door of their house, and we’d set up the cameras wide to cover the whole thing. You see it in the film when Billy’s like, “We’re going to the gym,” or whatever. It’s a totally different scene if you know he thinks that’s something that would be important for this documentary — to film him at the gym — as opposed to it coming from us.

OPPENHEIM Ironically for us, what felt new to us in some ways was embracing the oldest tenets of documentary filmmaking — like verité film. As we were responding to the situation where we had less and less access to Elizabeth, that led us to embracing other modes of filmmaking, like a director on camera or even where we go later on with the reenactments. It’s amazing seeing the way people are talking about the movie, saying it’s this new formal thing, but I’m like, “Oh no, this is actually the oldest. We’re channeling all of the different ways that documentaries have been made.” Ultimately we’re doing that because we’re dealing with a real-life human optical illusion. That’s who she is.

You’ve mentioned some healthy disagreements between the two of you, just about what was happening and how you were interpreting it. Let’s take the “who’s on first” scene as an example: Nathan, what it was like to be there for a bizarre moment like that, and how would you two then talk about it in terms of how it would inform the movie? And how do you reflect on them now?

FIELDER There were so many things that we were tracking all at once. Sometimes these little moments would sit in your mind for a bit, but we were there constantly for a month, so some we would sort of forget about — and then be reminded when we reviewed the footage in the edit. That “who’s on first” moment, everyone was like, “What was that?” We knew these moments that we couldn’t make sense of were interesting because we would talk about them a lot. It’s hard because you’re just there and you’re observing and you can’t cultivate anything. You can’t make anything happen. You’re just documenting.

OPPENHEIM There are also so many moments in this where Nathan would be like, “I think you’re guilty. Why are we here? Do you want us to leave?” And they’d be like, “No, no, stay.”

FIELDER I didn’t say that in the same sentence, hold on. (Laughs.) I did not say, “I think you’re guilty. Do you want us to leave?” I said it very early on to her; I laid out so she knew how I felt. But yeah, we were conscious that this was a mother’s last month with her children. If tensions would ever run high and we sensed that our presence wasn’t wanted, 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.

OPPENHEIM It was the opposite.

FIELDER We always were saying, “We will leave anytime.” And they were very much like, “No.”

OPPENHEIM “Stay. Stay for this.”

FIELDER That was part of the mindfuck of it all. Sorry for swearing. I don’t normally swear in professional settings or even private ones a lot of times.

OPPENHEIM Before we started shooting, Billy showed us a video — because he would sometimes video things on his phone, like just of him and Elizabeth on a couch. He’d be like, “Look at this moment.” It’d be a video of Elizabeth crying and he’s like, “We just watched Pride and Prejudice. This is so good.” I’m just like, “Are these the type of moments that you are interested in having us show? What do you want us to see? What is the object of your guys’ inquiry with this?”

FIELDER Why us? Why are we there? I mean, I like myself enough, but I would not want me there for my last month of freedom, if that makes sense. What was also weird about it is we felt like there was some game going on that even we couldn’t make sense of, but we were like, “Well, let’s just go along with this and see what comes out, I guess.”

Do you feel like you have any more clarity on that now?

FIELDER Fuck no.

OPPENHEIM Seeing it with audiences is always really different for me. I feel like I end up having a completely different reaction to the movie. It’s like it’s this evolving Rorschach test. But I do feel like we witnessed something. We saw a pattern of behavior emerge over the time we had. Other documentaries I’ve made, I’ve spent a lot of time with people — years — but sometimes you don’t really notice as much of a change. It felt like there were things that were going on, and there are times where I watch this movie and I feel like the behavior is totally unconscious and she’s not aware of it. And there are times where I’m like, “No, she’s totally aware of it.” It’s hard to operate fully in the world of binaries. It’s somewhere in between, somewhere deep, lost in the void or something.

FIELDER This is an interesting time because there are a lot of reactions to this and I have time to look at some stuff. There is this phenomenon that happens that is related to proximity. When you’re in their bubble, you’re in a different mindset than when you step out of it and you’re in the world of everyone else. We weren’t talking to anyone about this project; no one had seen it, we were just talking amongst ourselves for so long. And now the conversation is so all over the world, I’m gleaning new things from just hearing what other people are saying. Also, it does feel like people bring to this a lot that’s inside them. It’s not just what’s on the screen, or else everyone would have a consensus. There’s something coming from people, individuals, and it’s hard sometimes for me to separate that from what we’re objectively looking at.

We should talk a little bit about the back half of the movie, as you were losing access to Elizabeth but decided to continue telling the story. How did you decide on the shape of it and how did you know when to end it?

OPPENHEIM We both were interested in seeing what was going to happen with the business. Nathan said to Billy, “Let us know when you have something you can show us,” and he’s like, “I’ll have it in 365 days.” It turned out to be two years instead of when he had initially suggested it would happen. But then it felt like once we were out of the bubble of San Diego and we were seeing Billy work on the thing, there were these questions that kept coming up for us. We wanted to go to even more people. We reached out, but so many people we tried to talk to that were out of the bubble didn’t want to talk to us because they thought that Elizabeth was this toxic personality. So that led us to [Amanda Seyfried].

FIELDER When we watched everything and put together that first half, even though something felt complete with her going to prison, the picture didn’t feel complete because we were still having conversations where we were trying to make sense of it that were being informed by other stuff that happened off camera. We didn’t know where we were going to go. And like Lance said, we reached out to a bunch of people and then when we reached out to Amanda, she was like, “Come over, bring cameras.”

OPPENHEIM We didn’t know Amanda before this.

FIELDER And when we eventually realized we had something complete, that was just a decision that was made in the edit. We felt like there was enough, or the conversations that were being informed by things that the audience wouldn’t have been privy to were now part of the film. Once we felt like you guys had all the information basically that we had, it felt like, “Okay, this is sort of as far as we can go with it.” We didn’t even know if it felt complete. It just felt like the end of the road for this, a little bit.

OPPENHEIM The Amanda piece — she maybe knew who Nathan was, but they’d never met each other before. That first moment when we’re in her apartment, that’s the very first time any of us had really spoken with her in person, when she’s watching the footage. She even says in the scene, “I have no interest in doing this again.” Then she started imitating her and that suddenly led to us being like, “Okay, well this is interesting.” It almost felt like she had this unfinished business, this desire to do it again. That led us down a whole different path. She brought her own baggage into the process too. It was amazing. It’s a testament to the way we made the film.