Errol Morris Is Sitting on a Secret Elizabeth Holmes Interview (EXCLUSIVE)

“I have this problem,” shares Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker behind “The Thin Blue Line,” “The Fog of War” and countless other renowned docs. You see, the 78-year-old can’t seem to screen Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s docu-phenomenon on Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything.” He claims to have contacted the appropriate parties but has thus far been rebuffed. “Can you get me a screener?” he pleads. (I cannot.)

What Morris did do, however, was finally watch Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary on Holmes and her sham blood-testing company Theranos — “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” — for the very first time.

Morris, who’s directed “probably 1,000” commercials for various companies, was hired by Holmes in 2015 to shoot a series of ads for Theranos that depicted the “founder” staring wide-eyed into the camera that have attracted criticism for contributing to her mythmaking. Morris says he doesn’t know how Gibney got ahold of extra footage from the ads to use in “The Inventor,” but that’s not all: Morris exclusively revealed to Variety that he actually conducted a two-hour Interrotron interview with Holmes that he’s contemplating releasing in light of the renewed interest around the infamous grifter.

So, I understand you have not seen “You Can See Everything,” but recently watched Alex Gibney’s documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, “The Inventor,” for the very first time.

I never really wanted to see it until recently for a variety of different reasons, and I was quite surprised to find out that I was in it.

He used outtakes from your Theranos ads, right?

Well, what’s really not known about any of this is, yes, I did all the advertising for Theranos, but I did it at a time when Elizabeth Holmes was on the front cover of Forbes and many other magazines. She was riding high, and this was before everything collapsed. Did I have any reason to believe that she was a fraud? I did not. Did that change as time went on? It did. I had tried very hard, over a number of years, to do a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes and it would have happened except that she was under indictment. There was massive litigation going on.

You wanted to interview Holmes for a documentary?

I asked her, at a certain point, if I could film an interview with her — and this is at the height of her success — and I did film a two-hour interview with her, which is not very well-known if it is known at all. And I just watched that. I am sincerely interested in putting that out as an unedited film.

You should.

If anything, it gives you a comparison of Elizabeth before and Elizabeth after, which I think is interesting in and of itself. I noticed that the Gibney film begins and ends with my interview with Elizabeth Holmes.

This two-hour interview you conducted with Holmes has not been seen by anyone other than yourself?

Well, myself and the people in my office, but yes, for all intents and purposes, it has not been seen by anyone. Let me ask you a fast question: Why do you think [“You Can See Everything”] has proven so popular?

I think it touches on a lot of different things that fascinate the culture — grifters, self-delusion to the point where the person created a persona that incorporated a fake Yoda voice, true crime and Silicon Valley megalomania channeled through the prism of Nathan Fielder’s brand of awkward comedy that pits, to borrow from John Ganz, a neurotic against a psychotic.

Well, it’s hard for me to tell you about the film having not yet seen it, but I can tell you what I think about Elizabeth Holmes having spent a considerable amount of time with her. I was interviewed by John Carreyrou recently for an article that subsequently appeared in The New York Times, and he was questioning me about something I’d said to him many, many years ago when I was considering making a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and had asked him if he would participate in that documentary. Some people see these stories as an on/off switch of she’s innocent or she’s guilty, she’s lying or she’s telling the truth. And when you’re investigating a crime, part of that investigation has to be if the person is guilty or innocent, since the criminal justice system works in such a way that you are looking for some kind of result. But what interests me is: To what extent was she self-deceived? To what extent did she believe in her own bullshit? Carreyrou understandably wants to tell you that she knowingly committed fraud, is guilty, should have been convicted and is in prison, as she should be. I keep wondering about the psychology of self-deception because part of me believes that she believes in Theranos and that she could achieve the results as promised.

Aren’t there, say, serial killers who are convinced that what they’re doing is right and just? And isn’t it more about the people you hurt along the way?

Yes, it is. You could say that lots of people in Silicon Valley misrepresent or out-and-out lie about what their technology can achieve, but in this case it involved medical results and people whose lives are directly affected by those medical results, and that in itself makes it different.

One example of a lie would be that she’d claimed Theranos had a Department of Defense contract and its blood-testing technology was being deployed on the battlefield, none of which was true.

Now, we can get into a philosophical discussion of the nature of lying and what is a lie, and did she lie in a very clear sense? Yes. Many, many times. Did she see them as lies? That is of interest to me.

I want to ask you about something you’d said during a Reddit Q&A after Holmes’ house of cards collapsed: “When everything fell apart, I was shocked because I believed in Elizabeth Holmes. I feel, rightly or wrongly, that most of the television programs and movies about her have missed the mark. Did she do bad things? Most assuredly. The question remains, why?” You then drew a comparison between her and Joan of Arc.

Probably the Robert Bresson “Joan of Arc,” which is one of my very favorite films.

But Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t burned at the stake. She’s serving some time in prison for defrauding people.

The nature of her punishment is not similar to being burned at the stake, and if you thought that’s what I meant by it, I did not.

You were drawing that comparison in regard to their self-deception.

One thing I can say about Joan of Arc: Do I think that God was speaking to her? I have a confession to make: I don’t believe in God. Do I think that God exists? No, I don’t! Do I think that God was directly communicating with Joan of Arc? I don’t! Do I think she thought that God was directly communicating with her? She did! She went to the stake on the basis of it. That’s your comparison.

Going back to those Theranos promos you shot with her—

—Don’t call them promos! I was hired as a commercial director, and I’ve shot probably 1,000 commercials. In the Gibney documentary, it is mentioned that Elizabeth Holmes and Patrick O’Neill, who was her CCO, had hired me because of the many Apple commercials I’d directed for Steve Jobs. If I had known how much of my interview was being used [by Gibney], or even if it was being used at all, I’m not sure what I would have said. I knew it was being used, but I never really wanted to watch [“The Inventor”]. Maybe I’d just had enough of it.

How did Gibney get ahold of the footage?

This I do not know. I really don’t know. And I’m not being coy or cagey. I do not know.

I know the commercials you shot for Holmes and Theranos have garnered quite a bit of criticism for contributing to her mystique, but I found Holmes quite creepy in those commercials. How do you feel about people’s perception of those commercials?

People have never seen my long interview that I did with Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve heard that I have been accused of representing a fraud — knowingly — and this is just not true. I’ll join a lot of other people who were on the Theranos board at the time that I was doing this series of commercials.

Are you sure you want to join Henry Kissinger? I’m joking.

I actually interviewed Henry Kissinger just before he died.

Is that going to go anywhere?

It might. I have so much stuff that I do nothing with.

I’d heard a very funny story about how BP approached you to direct an ad for them following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that you proposed a wild idea that they turned down.

I believe that’s true!

And what was that idea?

You tell me and I’ll tell you if it’s real!

That Mel Gibson would be standing on a BP oil platform and say something to the effect of, “If anyone knows about a public relations disaster, it’s me.”

That’s it! And of course, they said no. Fortunately, enough people have said yes over the years, but I can’t tell you how many people have said no. I once said to my producer for commercials, “You know, I get all these commercials, but I’ve never gotten diarrhea or erectile dysfunction commercials. What’s wrong with me?” I once got a Depend commercial, and my ideas for incontinence/Depend commercials were by and large rejected.

What was one of those ideas that you really liked?

Thank you for asking. I had just done a long interview with Janis Karpinski, who’d just been demoted in connection with Abu Ghraib — and this interview has never seen the light of day — so there’s this lady general inside a tank in a war zone. Shells are exploding all around. The tank is on maneuvers. We see the face of the lady general inside the tank. She has an enormously pinched expression. She is fidgety, edgy. And then, you hear the sound of running water, and the expression on her face changes to one of total relaxation and pleasure. And then we cut outside and we see the artillery exploding. Depend.

That is hilarious.

The guy who was producing the commercials to Depend put his face two inches away from mine and said, “THERE IS NOTHING, NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT INCONTINENCE!” And I said, “I guess I beg to differ.”

I’m with you on that one. By the way, why did your two-hour Elizabeth Holmes interview never come out?

Because the company fell apart and she was prosecuted… but I can’t really answer it. The clearest answer is that I’d moved on. But now I feel pretty strongly that this is an interesting document — not because I’m trying to prove something about Elizabeth Holmes, but it does provide some kind of evidence of what she was like when everything was going her way.