In the month since its release, the documentary “You Can See Everything” has become a full-blown cultural phenomenon.
The film, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Elizabeth Holmes, the former head of the failed biotech company Theranos, and her partner, Billy Evans, in the 34 days before Holmes begins serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors.
Having grossed about $65 million at the box office, the film has garnered critical acclaim, inspired countless takes and parodies in the media, and sent many a viewer down an internet rabbit hole.
Fielder, a filmmaker, actor, and comedian, inserts himself into the film, using his trademark awkward persona and surreal humor. He moves into the couple’s rented beach house in Del Mar, California, observing the couple in their daily interactions and questioning Holmes about her actions at Theranos.
For Marc Francis, the film programming manager for Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the film is representative of what he considers documentary rehearsal, a nonfiction technique that showcases the preparation process behind the re-enactment or performance of a real-life event. He is currently writing a book, tentatively titled “Documentary Rehearsal: Dramaturgy of the Everyday,” which will cover Fielder’s TV shows and this film, as well as many other works.
“I’m interested in why contemporary documentary has increasingly taken this self-reflexive turn to invite the audience backstage, so to speak,” Francis said, whose previous book, “Curating Deviance: Programming the Queer Film Canon” (Duke University Press, 2026), examined the curation of queer and deviant art house films from 1968 to 1989. “Rehearsal here breaks down into small, analyzable units, what the sociologist Erving Goffman considered the theater of everyday life. Acting, directing, props, and sets, for instance, all mediate the thorny social relations or formidable psychological experiences these documentaries’ participants attempt to work through.”
It’s an emergent nonfiction practice, previously honed by Fielder in his HBO documentary comedy series “The Rehearsal,” Francis said. (He particularly recommends season two.) Francis is currently planning a spring semester film series on the topic of documentary rehearsal, which will kick off with “You Can See Everything” and include other paradigmatic examples discussed in his book, including Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Four Daughters,” Kirsten Johnson’s “Dick Johnson is Dead,” and Ignor Bezinović’s “Fiume o Morte,” along with historical examples dating to the 1970s.
At Yale, Francis oversees and coordinates film exhibition and programming as it furthers the intellectual and curricular mission of FAS. He previously served as head programmer for Wayward Cinema in Los Angeles, and worked in film archiving, preservation, and servicing at Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers Discovery, and HBO.
He sat down with Yale News to talk about the buzz surrounding “You Can See Everything,” Fielder’s use of reenactment, and where public discourse about the film has gone wrong. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
What is your overall assessment of the film, in a nutshell?
Marc Francis: I was counting down the days to its release and, I have to say, it really did meet my expectations. I knew some of where it was going to go because I’m so familiar with Fielder’s corpus. And yet Fielder’s obsessive attention to detail and the minutiae of our interactive lives, his close reading of Holmes and her setting, was so impressive, bizarre, enthralling even. Few documentaries get so expertly and compellingly into the sociological weeds like this. There’s an interesting way in which it’s investigative, but to what end? Sometimes Fielder doesn’t even quite know what the endgame is. And then he’s also bringing his comedy into it, which can be very awkward, strange — off-putting for some viewers — and also sometimes surreal.
The film’s through line is Fielder trying to discern if Holmes is being “real” with him, if she and Billy Evans are putting on an act or hiding things. A lot of his questioning around that gets quite intense. Was that for comedic effect?
Francis: I can’t give you a straightforward answer to that. In a way, he’s trying to get to the bottom of the question of Holmes’ culpability. Meanwhile, there is a sense that he knows this is a fool’s errand. So how much does he know what he is doing and when? That’s part of the filmmaker-subject interplay and fluid process that Fielder relishes. At the end of the day, he has all the instincts of a scrupulous journalist or researcher and a comedian. There are scenes where Fielder is lurking in the corners of a room. The awkwardness of him standing and lurking is a bit of a parody of the observational filmmaker or of the reporter. He and Oppenheim are sort of playing with that while also not necessarily letting it collapse into full-on parody or satire, because they do take this project seriously, I believe.
I found myself questioning whether the film really qualifies as a documentary.
Francis: Which is going to be a dilemma for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at awards time. How will the film be categorized? The Academy has a documentary branch that votes separately — are they too conservative to award it? Beyond that is Amanda Seyfried’s participation in the film. Is she an actor or documentary participant in it? Are they one and the same? These are the classificatory and evaluative problems that it poses. That is often the case when a juggernaut film or creative work propels an experimental or marginalized technique into the mainstream, sending established institutions into a bit of a tailspin.
Why has it become such a phenomenon?
Francis: I think audiences are drawn to the collision of these two cultural behemoths, Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder. On the one hand, the union makes so much sense. You have Fielder, who played a faux entrepreneur in his series “Nathan for You.” And you have Holmes, who played a kind of “faux” entrepreneur in the biotech world. But then you also have the strange combination of fact and fiction in a way that’s distorted or played with on both sides to distorted ends. The meeting of these two people creates a fascinating alchemy for audiences to observe and speculate on.
What people didn’t realize, and what was a shocker in the film if you didn’t know it already, was that Holmes and Evans went to A24 to ask them to document the days leading up to her imprisonment. Fielder and Oppenheim signed on, and I think Holmes and Evans had the idea that they would clear her name and cleanse her image. But that is not the case. Of course Fielder scrutinized them. I don’t think the filmmakers land on either side. It ends in a really uncomfortable place, privileging a kind of unknowability, undecidability that lingers in the details of Fielder’s interactions with Holmes and her partner. I think people are fascinated by the oddity of this environment, as well as the takeaway irony that immersion into a subjects’ lives does not translate to steadfast knowledge of their psychologies or interiority.
It definitely left me with more questions than it answered.
Francis: I think Fielder ended up discovering an even thornier situation than he had predicted or imagined. In Billy, you see this controlling man. Before that you had [Ramesh] “Sunny” Balwani, her former boyfriend, who was also seen as controlling in the documentary about Holmes by Alex Gibney [“The Inventor,” which was released in 2019]. Both of which raise questions about how much of what she did was intentional. How much was she a puppet? How much is she in her own kind of fantasy world?
Often what Fielder does, and he did this with both seasons of “The Rehearsal,” is he goes in with an open question, and uses these rehearsals, these “deconstructed” reenactments, as a tool to try and answer the question, or get as close as he can to answering the question. Then what ends up happening is a self-reflexive turn: “What kind of access do I have? What kind of self-knowledge do I have that I’m bringing and that this might be tampering with?”
He ends up arriving at this place where you have the documentary kind of doubting itself, doubting the conclusions it can reach about the truth of a person. He puts forth a bunch of different questions, but it becomes about the limits of his knowledge and of language and its interpretation. Fielder obsessively dwells on intonation and the gestures that accompany speech. Together, these constitute a scene of everyday performance that demands reading and extrapolation on the part of interlocutors.
There’s been so much conversation about Holmes’ pathology, if you will. Is she the master manipulator? Is she a victim to the men that manipulate and control her? Does she have some untreated neurodivergence? Does she keep herself at a remove from business operations, intentionally or not, to maintain a certain fantasy of self and circumstances? The film entertains these readings. But I think Fielder’s point, in the end, is not to land on any diagnosis or read of Holmes. Rather, he encourages us to sit with the discomfort of the documentary encounter. Ultimately, he hangs on the micro-scale elements of performance and sociality alike to pursue a reading that finally yields many readings — to an extent, a product of his own entangled and vexed projections.
It’s a long film at three hours. It could have been shorter, but it wouldn’t have been as compelling.
Francis: I think you’re right and I think that was intentional. There’s a very clear structure to the film, which is two acts. You have the first act where he’s immersed in their living environment where “you can see everything” (which, of course, becomes an irony). And then the second act after she goes to prison. At first, many audiences might be left thinking, “Where can this go now?” Then it takes them on a metatextual and intertextual rollercoaster ride. The film needs that three-hour duration to do justice to those turns. I don’t think there are many minutes of the film that are wasted. Yet I’m glad it didn’t go on longer because my lower back hurt from absorbing all the tension in the film—there is something so excruciatingly suspenseful in how exacting Fielder’s method can be.
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