The first screening was a secret. In the first days of September, You Can See Everything turned up as a surprise addition to the Telluride Film Festival, and by the next morning Reddit threads had erupted and memes were circulating. Journalists everywhere began pleading for access to the film, or to its codirector, Nathan Fielder.
A Film Made in Secret
Fielder codirected the film with Lance Oppenheim. It begins as a 34-day psychological dance between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, in the final month before Holmes went to prison, and then turns into something Wired’s Katie Drummond, who interviewed Fielder, found nearly impossible to describe. Fielder told her he and Oppenheim came in with no plan. Only a few dozen people knew the project existed, and it stayed secret for three years. Even people at A24 did not know for a while. The distributor settled on the Telluride debut, which left about five weeks before release.
Fielder said the secrecy was partly for the subjects, since paparazzi had already gathered around the location, and partly because publicity could shape the project before it existed. The setting was a tiny beach house. The crew arrived each morning with two cameras, later three, and spent 12 to 18 hours a day around the couple. Fielder had not meant to appear on camera. He said that changed because Holmes and Evans kept talking to him, and because some of what they said struck him as propaganda that someone had to challenge.
What he found, he said, was not what he expected. Holmes did not seem controlling. “I thought she would be a little more outwardly anxious,” he said in effect, and the calm unsettled him. Near the end of editing, he said, Evans pushed to control the project and the filmmakers cut off communication.
The Call From Prison
Three weeks after their first interview, Fielder told Wired that he had missed two calls from the prison on a Friday morning. A third came in. It was Holmes, whom he had not heard from in more than six months. She asked how he was and said she had heard about the film but read little of it. At the end, he recalled, she said, “I trust you.” She said it again before hanging up. Fielder said he did not know what she meant.
The Record Behind the Film
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, claiming it could run blood tests on a few drops from a fingerprick. In 2015 Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States, on a $9 billion valuation. The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou published his investigation that October, and the company began to unravel. Forbes revised her net worth to zero the following year.
In 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Holmes and former chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani with raising $700 million through false or exaggerated claims about the technology. Holmes settled, paying a $500,000 fine, returning 18.9 million shares, giving up voting control and accepting a ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company.
A federal jury convicted her in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors and acquitted her on the four counts involving patients. She began an 11-and-a-quarter-year sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan on May 30, 2023. She and Balwani were ordered to pay $452 million in restitution. Holmes went into the final month of freedom with her partner and two children, born in 2021 and 2023, with cameras in the house.
Sources
- Elizabeth Holmes
- Nathan Fielder Tells Us Everything
- How the Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Is Deceiving You
Photo: Photo by Max Morse for TechCrunch TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0)
