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Lance Oppenheim had been looking for a project to collaborate with his cinematic idol Nathan Fielder. The two had become good friends after Oppenheim contacted Fielder about his first film “Some Kind of Heaven” – he knew Fielder had received a screening connection, but when Oppenheim signed into the screening service, he could see the “Nathan for You” creator had just watched a portion of the 85-minute documentary.
“I saw [Nathan’s] email on this screening service, and I decided to cold email him,” Oppenheim said while a guest on this week’s Filmmaker Tool Podcast in support of the duo’s “You Can See Everything.” “I said, ‘Hey, I’m a fan of yours. You know, there’s another 40 percent of this movie left. It’s not that long. Maybe 20 minutes – that’s all [left] to end it.”
Fielder wrote back saying that he had actually finished and liked his 24-year-old director’s Sundance debut, and from that point on, whenever Oppenheim was in Los Angeles, the two future collaborators would meet.
“We would have these long hangouts, and I was just like, ‘What? Are we going to be good friends, a bromance or something?,'” Oppenheim said. He credits “Nathan for You” and Canadian Fielder’s early sketch work on YouTube with making him want to make documentaries. “We’d be out for hours just talking about life and random things, and I started to realize, ‘Oh, maybe he wants to work with me on something.’ So I just started sending him ideas.”
Two of the projects Oppenheim brought to Fielder reached the early design stages, but nothing caught on. Then, in early 2023, when Oppenheim was in town to shoot a commercial, Fielder – who grew up wanting to be a magician – took him to the Magic Castle.
Assuming that the universe was speaking to him when Holmes’ name was included in their lot at Magic Castle, Oppenheim told Fielder about the rumor he had just heard, and said that, if true, the project could be interesting for two very different reasons: “First, why A24? Did she watch ‘Ex Machina,’ or something, and like it?,” he recalled.
And the second, more substantial reason: Holmes hadn’t done an on-camera interview since Theranos applied. The details of that explosion were discovered by the Wall Street Journal, just to be of great interest to the general public, who could not get enough of the story of the young CEO who wiped out billions of Silicon Valley, through a popular podcast, a best-selling book (“Bad Blood”), a documentary by Alex Gibney, and a scripted Hulu Limited series (“The Dropoutyf”) by Amanda Seedyf.
Oppenheim recalled the fateful evening, “The magician asked for a famous name, just a random name for the group, and someone raised their hand and said ‘Elizabeth Holmes,’ and a light bulb went off in my head.” Earlier that day, Oppenheim had heard a rumor that Holmes had contacted A24 about shooting a documentary with her by May 30, 2023, the day the show began. disgraced Theranos founder sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors of her medical testing device. “From what I heard, the A24 were interested and then they backed out because they were a bit nervous and they just didn’t have a leader.”
Fielder agreed, but, according to Oppenheim, was concerned that “the story has been told so many times already.” Regardless, Oppenheim prompted Fielder to call A24 this morning, and he confirmed the rumors – a deal with Holmes had fallen apart, with just weeks left before she had to report to the Federal Prison Camp (FCP) in Bryan, Texas. It was against this background that Fielder put an extremely unusual arrangement on the A24.
Oppenheim explained, “Nathan [said to A24]’Well, do you think if Lance and I were going to see if there was something, would you be comfortable with giving us money and basically just leaving us alone, and giving us a provision in our contract that whatever the money was, we could kill him at any time? If we didn’t find something, we could just throw it away, we could throw it in the trash. And they gratefully agreed.”
Oppenheim said Fielder negotiating a “kill switch” on the project “changed everything.” Fielder was still skeptical that there was a film to be made with Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, who were trapped with their two small children in a Del Mar, California beach cottage with just 34 days – before Fielder and Oppenheim arrived – left before reporting to the Bryan FCP, but the pressure to figure it out was gone.
“It was the first time I was ever like, ‘Oh, we have a place to explore something without any pressure on anyone watching. [over us],’” Oppenheim said, “I’d love to have that for every project, because it really feels like you’re just working out of curiosity alone. You can pretty much fish.”
Despite the killer twist, Fielder and Oppenheim’s only option was fishing – there was no time to prepare, let alone figure out the film in advance. “We just had to make time to call the people in our own lives that we trust in our lives,” Oppenheim said. “We basically brought our individual Avengers to this thing.”
The small “You Can See Everything” crew included Oppenheim’s longtime cinematographer David Bolen and production sound mixer Richard Carlos, while Fielder named his “Nathan for You” and “The Curse” camera operator Jonathan Mitchell, and editor Adam Locke-Norden, with whom he has worked closely since high school.
“That was seven people [just] we went into that house in Del Mar, where Elizabeth and her partner Billy lived, and we didn’t know what we were going to find,” said Oppenheim. I want this to be really good.”
Once on the ground, Oppenheim worried that he and Fielder weren’t on the same page. After filming days of 14 to 16 hours, they had very different interpretations of what each saw of the couple’s domestic life, in which they mixed parenthood with trying to launch their new venture, a medical testing machine similar to Theranos 2.0 powered by AI.
“There were things that we saw that we could not agree on. Things that we saw that should be very simple and very rude and very boring,” said Oppenheim. “We’d spend a day shooting, Nathan and I would talk about it, and he’d be like, ‘That’s not what happened,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s what happened. I was watching it on three different monitors. I was watching it remotely. I wasn’t in the conversation. [Fielder was the one engaging with Evans and Holmes].’”
The co-directors turned to their trusted team to settle their disputes, but Bolen, Mitchell, and Carlos had their own explanations. Everyone had a different idea of the remote rural life they aimed to capture with a laser.
“It felt like all of a sudden we were in this zone, almost like the inside zone [Russian director Andrei] ‘Stalker,’ by Tarkovsky felt a little similar [another Tarkovsky movie] ‘Solaris,’ it felt like we were in this place where the laws of reality and what we were seeing couldn’t agree on anything, and that was Nathan’s first time, I think. [started to see a film]” said Oppenheim.
Fielder and Oppenheim realized that these different interpretations were not a problem between the collaborators; instead, the questions they were asking, and disagreeing about, was the concept of the film itself, something they could sink their teeth into.
“We have these moments that happen that feel very flat and dense. Like, ‘Is this a show? Isn’t it a show? Is this a real thing that’s happening?'” I was definitely like, ‘This is inspired by this. I think the cognitive dissonance of this experience is cinematic. I think we can do something with this.’ And I think Nathan saw it and was like, ‘There’s something rich and mature in those moments that are very questionable, but as simple as someone whistling eggs.'”
According to Oppenheim, it was after this discovery that the debate about the kill switch spread: “That was the moment when we were like, ‘Okay, we have to commit to this. We have to make this work. Let’s keep going with this process.'”
To hear Lance Oppenheim’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview on YouTube.
