The buzz around the documentary on Elizabeth Holmes You can see everything continues to grow, as evidenced by the film’s star-studded screening in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening.
The project, from co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, first screened in a surprise screening at Telluride before playing at the New York Film Festival last week and now at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, where Boygenius’ Zach Cregger, Steven Yeun, Elizabeth Olsen, Hannah Einbinder, Meg Stalter, Patrick Ball, Aziz Ansari, Hasan Piker and Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker were among those seen in the crowd.
The film follows corrupt tech CEO Holmes in the month before she is sent to prison, as she invites the camera crew to follow her every move, that of her husband Billy Evans and their children, in what becomes a wild three-year story. The Los Angeles screening was followed by a Q&A with Fielder and Oppenheim, moderated by Bill Hader, who began by asking incredulously, “So they asked you to do this?”
Holmes had in fact contacted A24 to make a documentary about her, and after a series of meetings Fielder and Oppenheim – friends since 2021 – found themselves on board. Holmes and Evans seemed to have little knowledge of either of their past works, however, as Oppenheim remembered how Evans looked in the first few minutes of his 2020 film. A kind of paradise and told him, “That’s not a very convincing opening.” » Holmes had seen a YouTube clip of Nathan from you and this seemed to be the limit of his familiarity with Fielder’s comedy.
Fielder pointed out: “There’s never been a good explanation as to why -”
“Why is this the guy telling our story?” Hader interrupted, as Fielder continued, “Or why would you want to spend your last month of freedom in a decade with this guy. Like, why? Even without cameras, I like to think of myself as a nice person overall, but still, I wouldn’t choose me.”
When asked about their current standing with the couple, Oppenheim revealed that “neither of them have seen the movie. Elizabeth is still incarcerated; Billy hasn’t seen it”, due to a now strained relationship with the crew.
Fielder explained that while they were trying to finish the film, Evans “started trying to exert a level of control over the process that made it very difficult to engage with him, and it was uncomfortable for us, and for A24 and everyone. And I think we kind of had to stop — I think the communication basically broke down, and we’ve been in that state for a little while. So it’s been a challenge in that way.”
The Q&A also revealed that Fielder didn’t initially intend to be on camera for the film, but Oppenheim said Holmes and Evans “kept pulling him in until he suddenly felt like oh, the only way to do that is to have someone sort of confront his delusions in certain aspects.” And as the crew moved into the couple’s guest house at their San Diego rental property, the filmmakers feared the house was being bugged and ordered a device to try to debug it, without success.
“We were in our own conspiracy thriller, we were all paranoid,” Oppenheim said of life in Holmes’ world. On that note, Fielder told the crowd, “I’m still not sure to this day what I went through, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m excited for it to come out and for more people to see it. It was just a small group for so long, and I actually think that maybe being out there, everyone can help me understand a little bit of what I went through – or what we all went through.”
You can see everything hits theaters on October 16.
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