Watch: Elizabeth Holmes Says She Was “Silenced for a Long Time” in Rare Message Ahead of Documentary
Nathan Fielder isn’t exactly known for taking a straightforward approach.
To be sure, the Canadian comedian gets where he needs to go. But when he sets out to unmask, shed light, probe or otherwise get to the crux of a matter, he does so in the most tortuous way possible, wielding awkwardness like a blade as he craftily peels the onion.
So, perhaps Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes were just meant to be.
But as you can see in You Can See Everything, Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim‘s top-secret documentary about the Theranos founder—which they shot in 2023 before she started serving an 11-year prison sentence after being convicted of fraud charges—even the Dumb Starbucks visionary wasn’t sure that he was for her.
And yet Holmes, sounding confident that she had nothing to hide—”Why would I deceive you?” she asks Fielder in one especially memeable exchange—invited him to move right in.
So, The Rehearsal creator did, staying in the guest house for a month at the San Diego, Calif., rental home Holmes shared with her partner Billy Evans and their two children.
A24
After 34 days of filming, Holmes—who pleaded not guilty at trial and maintains she’s innocent of defrauding investors—reported for prison on May 30, 2023.
More than three years later, Fielder and Oppenheim’s documentary caused quite the splash with a surprise Sept. 6 screening at the Telluride Film Festival.
And it wasn’t a surprise just because the doc hadn’t been trumpeted as one of the festival’s must-see offerings. Rather, it shocked and awed because hardly anyone knew such a thing had been in the works at all.
Which, suffice it to say, isn’t an easy trick to pull off in this day and age. But the small circle of frequent collaborators Fielder and Oppenheim entrusted to join them on what A24 has called “a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss” helped them keep a tight lid on the project.
“Keeping it under wraps was very important because we never wanted to get in front of what we were capturing,” Oppenheim told Variety ahead of the documentary’s Oct. 16 release. “It was always about letting life unfold. Part of how we pulled it off was working with a very small crew, about seven or eight people.”
And then they needed time and space to figure out what the heck had just happened.
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“I really am struggling to this day to understand exactly what I experienced,” Fielder said during a Q&A following the Telluride screening, according to Vanity Fair. “And one of the things I’m genuinely excited about is for this movie to come out and for people to help me understand what I experienced.”
As Oppenheim noted at a Sept. 30 Q&A during the New York Film Festival, “I feel like our brains were scrambled. We were also unsure for so long if we even had anything that was worthwhile to make and put together.”
Fielder had read about Holmes’ downfall in journalist John Carreyrou‘s 2018 book Bad Blood when the Primetime director told him that the disgraced entrepreneur had reached out to A24 about collaborating on a documentary.
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When Fielder met Holmes, he recalled, “I remember having this weird experience where she seems so genuine at times. But then I’m like, ‘No,’ and clocking and tracking my thoughts and being like, ‘Okay, I know she’s a liar.’ It was a weird mental thing.”
A24 gave them the option to “pull the plug,” Fielder added, in case there ended up being no story for them to tell.
A24
But when he and Oppenheim kept having different takes on what they were witnessing, they knew they had something.
“Every person that worked on this movie was going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance,” Oppenheim added. And if he and Fielder could somehow bring people “as close to that experience of being there as possible,” then there was “an interesting project to be made out of this.”
And they really did want to be able to see everything, with cinematographer David Bolensetting up a wide lens to capture entire rooms at a time, while two other cameras were at the ready to zoom in.
“It was down to this whole dance we had,” Fielder shared, “and it was just amazing and one of the best experiences I think we’ve had making something because of that exploratory freedom and being able to let our curiosity drive us.”
A24
Once they were done filming, they had a lot to chew on, but Fielder was also busy hiding in plain sight.
The Curse with Emma Stone, which he’d already shot before his stay in San Diego, premiered in November 2023. Then production began on the second season of The Rehearsal, which landed in April 2025 and won a Peabody Award for its inimitable contribution to the discourse on aviation safety.
Fielder accepted the honor on May 31, almost two years to the day since Holmes went to prison.
Reflecting on the experience once the cat was out of the bag, Fielder said, “I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there.”
And he still doesn’t know “why you would want to spend your last month of freedom in a decade with this guy,” he noted after an Oct. 6 screening in Los Angeles. “Even with no cameras—I like to see myself as like a nice person overall, but still, I wouldn’t choose me.”
Read on to find out where Holmes and the rest of the main characters caught up in the Theranos scandal are now:
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