Nathan Fielder has opened up about spending a lot of time with Elizabeth Holmes.
“When I met her, I remember having this weird experience where she seems so genuine at times,” Fielder, 43, said during a Q&A after a screening of his forthcoming documentary about Holmes, You Can See Everything. “But then I’m like, ‘no,’ and clocking and tracking my thoughts and being like, ‘OK, I know she’s a liar.’ It was a weird mental thing.”
After an initial meeting with Holmes, 42, Fielder knew he wanted to film her. The only problem was he wasn’t sure exactly what story to tell.
“We were like, ‘Can we roll the dice on something if they were open to having cameras in?’” Fielder said.
You Can See Everything follows Fielder as he lives with Holmes and her partner, millionaire Billy Evans, in the weeks leading up to her prison sentence. Despite courts convicting Holmes on several fraud counts, the disgraced Theranos founder maintains her innocence.
Holmes had reached out to A24 earlier about the possibility of someone documenting her life, director Lance Oppenheim, 30, said. After Holmes and Evans agreed to let Fielder and Oppenheim film them, A24 gave the crew a budget and a chance to “pull the plug” if nothing story-worthy surfaced.
“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. “We’d completely disagree 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, who also directed this fall’s Primetime, added that the feeling of confusion extended to the rest of the crew as well. Nobody interpreted “seemingly mundane moments” in the same way; everyone was “going through a similar feeling of cognitive dissonance,” and had a “different point of view,” Oppenheim said.
He and Fielder decided the documentary’s narrative would center around that dissonance. Holmes’ indecipherability was clear to them. They wanted others to experience the same discord as they tried to parse her.
“Nathan and I started thinking, ‘If we can just try and get out of the way of this and 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,” Oppenheim said.
Fielder is still stunned that Holmes allowed the filmmakers in her home, especially during her final days with her family.
“I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder said. “I wouldn’t think I’d be the person you would want for your final period. I’m a nice person, I do believe, but I’m not the most comforting.”
When they started working with Holmes and Evans, Holmes told them she viewed the endeavor as a “human story,” “first and foremost,” Fielder said. He doesn’t know why she trusted strangers with the project, but he has some theories.
“It’s so hard to understand where they may have been coming from, but maybe there was a sense that inviting someone who was like a friend of theirs—no one would take that seriously,” he said. “It’s so hard to speculate.”
Holmes formally asked President Donald Trump, 80, for early release from her 11-year prison sentence in Dec. 2025. The Federal Bureau of Prisons approved her request on Sept. 24. Holmes will move from prison to a residential halfway house in Texas next year.
Days after the news of her reduced sentence broke, Holmes embraced President Donald Trump, 80, on social media. She retweeted one of Trump’s posts bragging about his administration’s accomplishments and added the caption, “We are winning.”
