Nathan Fielder says he “definitely” didn’t want to be on camera in his groundbreaking Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything.
The co-director and very much on-camera participant in the buzzy A24 film says when he showed up at the beach house rented by Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, the original plan was to stay in the background — similar to how he’s shown in the film’s early lurking shots.
“I started this thing being like, ‘I’m definitely not gonna be on camera in this,'” Fielder told Wired. “The situation was very intense. She was going to prison … I was very aware this is the final month that she’s gonna have for a decade with her kids and her family.”
So what changed?
Holmes and Evans started asking him questions, drawing him into conversation, and he also realized that he couldn’t just give the duo free rein on camera without any pushback on their narratives.
“Firstly, because I was there, they would keep engaging with me,” Fielder recalled. “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.”
Fielder continued: “But also, they 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.'”
You Can See Everything opened on Friday to $15 million from just 855 North American theaters, blowing away expectations and marking the biggest nonconcert documentary debut since Michael Moore’s 2004 hit Fahrenheit 9/11.
If you’ve seen the film, here are six things that went down behind the scenes of making the movie that haven’t been previously reported.