Nathan Fielder Addresses Unconventional Doc Techniques in ‘You Can See Everything’ as Academy Doc Branch Members Weigh In (Exclusive)

On Wednesday at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, Nathan Fielder, the co-director of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, found himself, for the first time, in conversation with a bunch of other directors of top 2026 documentaries. And the unconventional nature and tremendous box-office reception of his and Oppenheim’s film was a hot topic of discussion.

Fielder, who directed his film with Lance Oppenheim, was part of the fest’s The Hollywood Reporter-moderated Docs to Watch panel — the full video of which will soon post, but the relevant clip of which appears below — and was seated alongside nine other doc filmmakers: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Everest: Other Side), Rory Kennedy (The Trial of Alec Baldwin), Amir Bar-Lev (The Last First: Winter K2), Julia Loktev (My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile), David Greaves (Once Upon a Time in Harlem), Poh Si Teng (American Doctor), Jack MacInnes (One in a Million), Alysa Nahmias (Cookie Queens) and Ron Howard (Avedon).

It was noted by the moderator — yours truly — that the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which solely determines the best documentary feature Oscar nominees, has, in recent years, become controversial. The branch has consistently passed over docs that feature celebrities and/or get wide releases and/or make money, almost punishing popularity — examples include Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Jane, Life Itself, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, American Symphony, Will & Harper and Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. And the branch has also been very resistant to docs that feature filmmaking techniques that are a bit adventurous, including reenactments — Stories We Tell being a recent example.

At a time when those are the very sorts of docs that the public is gravitating towards — You Can See Everything has grossed nearly $50 million so far, after having the highest-grossing opening weekend from fewer than 1,000 locations since 2006’s Borat and for a doc since 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — the question was: does the branch need to broaden its idea of what a doc is?

Bar-Lev, a longtime member of the doc branch, enthusiastically weighed in in support of You Can See Everything: “If you haven’t ever read a Werner Herzog thing called The Minnesota Manifesto, he says that verite films, which have this reputation as being the most truthful — he says, ‘Yeah, it’s the truth, but it’s the truth of the Yellow Pages, it’s the truth of facts, it’s like an actuarial truth, it’s not ecstatic truth.’ You can get at ecstatic truth with reenactments, playing to the camera, all these different techniques… And to just say, ‘Because I didn’t edit something, and I just aimed the camera,’ that’s not necessarily any more truthful. And it’s a pity that the doc branch is narrow-minded at times. I’m glad you brought that up. And a lot of times, they forget — we forget — that it’s an Oscar for a film, not for an issue. We all care about issues, but that’s not what this Academy Award is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about technique and craft. And I’m really happy that your film [addressing Fielder] is doing as well as it’s doing because I think it pushes the boundaries and we all learn from it.”

Vasarhelyi, another member of the branch (who won the best documentary feature Oscar for 2018’s Free Solo), interjected, “Just a moment of appreciation: In Manhattan last weekend, you couldn’t get a seat to see your film!” Fielder replied, “It’s wild! I don’t know.” She continued, “I was like, ‘What is going on?!’ It was kind of like the most beautiful moment ever in nonfiction.” She added, “How I looked at your film: the constraints became the opportunity, right? And that’s formal innovation, and that’s what was awesome — like The Act of Killing, one of the greatest formal innovations in nonfiction.”

Fielder, for his part, emphasized that he loves documentaries, and that he and Oppenheim did not set out to make a doc with unconventional techniques. “Honestly, I am such a fan of documentaries, and I think so much about this stuff,” he volunteered. “This project’s different than the other ones, but I feel like the process of making it was just a process of including everything that needed to be included to make it as honest as possible. It was not a choice of trying to do anything different — like, we were very stringent about trying to be accurate, trying to portray things authentically. The only reason we started including these other things [such as reenactments] was because it felt dishonest not to. We’d actually be hiding things from the viewer if we didn’t let them in on what we knew or what we observed.”

Fielder continued, “I think everyone who makes docs can understand, and they’ve experienced — when you’re in the room with cameras, it’s not the same as if you weren’t in the room with cameras — you’re part of the story, and the person is acting a certain way because of you and the camera, regardless of if you acknowledge it or not. And I think about those things when I watch docs. And Lance and I, putting this together, we were just like, ‘What is the information that’s missing that the viewer needs to know to try to make sense of this in the way we are?’ And so it was just that process that sort of evolved.”

He closed, “I don’t know, really, what makes something not a doc; I know what it would be if we didn’t do those things: it would just be a less honest version of what the story was. But if anything comes of the movie doing well and all that, [I hope] it’s that people are excited about docs and want to see docs in theaters and are just paying more attention to all the great docs that are being made now. That’s, like, awesome; that’s, like, a big win for me, because I love documentaries, and I’ve thought about them my whole life.”