How Elizabeth Holmes Was Secretly Filmed for ‘You Can See Everything’ Doc: 7-Person Crew, 16-Hour Shoots and Cameras Covering the ‘Whole House’

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim shocked Hollywood and the world when they revealed they’d secretly been filming Elizabeth Holmes ahead of her 11-year prison sentence for their documentary, “You Can See Everything.” The film had a surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month and had another early screening at the New York Film Festival on Wednesday, where the co-directors peeled the curtain back on how they pulled off the shoot.

Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invited Fielder, Oppenheim and a small camera crew into their San Diego home 34 days before Holmes began her Theranos fraud prison sentence. Fielder, who makes his feature directorial debut with the film, is known for blending bizarre, real subjects with absurd, scripted comedy on his shows “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.” But he had planned to stay behind the camera when he and Oppenheim embarked on “You Can See Everything.”

“I was like, ‘I’m definitely not going to be in this when we started,’” Fielder said. “I was behind the camera with Lance, and it was strange. [Holmes and Evans] would keep talking to me or asking me questions, and I would answer from off-camera. But then eventually, the operators would start panning over to me because the conversations would be long.”

“You became this accidental investigator of everyday moments,” Oppenheim added. “I feel like that also came about too because the way we were shooting it initially was with one camera and anamorphic lenses, and it was extremely cumbersome. It was the wrong approach for this. Every time we would miss a moment or try to change a lens, that would be when they would also be engaging Nathan off-camera. So eventually, probably about a day of getting it fully wrong, we decided essentially to completely change the way both of us work.”

Fielder and Oppenheim both brought crew members from their past projects, including cinematographer David Bolen, who worked on Oppenheim’s recent film “Primetime” and his docs “Spermworld” and “Some Kind of Heaven.”

“It basically made us work in this completely new way, which oddly and ironically, is as close to the tenets of documentary filming, which is just fly-on-the-wall, vérité filmmaking,” Oppenheim said. “So we had three cameras, two operators, one would be sometimes on Elizabeth or Billy, one would be on Nathan, and we basically pick zones of the house and have these extremely long zoom lenses. Then I would be hidden behind the wide camera. We were trying to do that in an effort to try and take all the pressure away from any moment. We would be shooting like 16 hours a day, so they wouldn’t really know what we were interested in necessarily.”

“We didn’t always know either,” Fielder joked. “We started setting up the cameras where we had a wide lens that would cover the whole house, so if something happened, we wouldn’t miss it. The other two 25mm to 250mm lenses could be wide, but then also zoom, so we could basically capture everything.”

Fielder revealed that the crew was comprised of just seven people, and only four of them would be inside Holmes’ house at any time. He also shouted out Bolen, who “found a way to make shots look beautiful in the day or the night.”

“As long as there was a light, we could make it work,” Fielder said. “If we were live and then something interesting started happening, [Bolen] could pick up the camera and tripod, move to a new spot, re-lock the head in 10 seconds. It looks amazing, and it’s a testament to the team who put this together. It was down to this whole dance we had, and it was just amazing and one of the best experiences I think we’ve had making something because of that exploratory freedom and being able to let our curiosity drive us.”

Oppenheim and Bolen collaborated on “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen. The film was shot in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio to mimic the retro, reality TV look of “To Catch a Predator” from the 2000s. Oppenheim used the same format on “You Can See Everything” to get close-up, reaction shots from Holmes, Evans and Fielder.

“One thing we realized with the one camera that’s panning is that the moment you say something to someone, you want to see their face the moment they hear it,” Fielder said. “Especially in a movie like this, where you’re trying to evaluate if someone’s being honest or not, when you have to swing, you’re missing a few seconds.”

Oppenheim added, “The aspect ratio of the movie came about because we’re confined largely in one space, and there was so much. Every time we put the camera somewhere, when we originally were in a larger aspect ratio, it felt like you were seeing so many details that were distracting you from the human face. The face is the ultimate landscape. You wanted to be on their faces when something would happen and really study it and linger there, because that could get the closest you could possibly be to being there.”