Photograph: Chris Maggio for New York Journal
Spoilers forward for the plot of You Can See Every thing.
On Elizabeth Holmes’s final day of freedom, Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, who had spent the earlier month filming each side of her life, thought of giving her some house. Holmes was about to start an 11-year sentence at a federal jail in Bryan, Texas, for defrauding buyers in her blood-testing firm, Theranos, of a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars}. Her mother and father had come to see her off; she may need most well-liked to spend her remaining time along with her accomplice, Billy Evans, and their two younger kids unobserved. However Oppenheim wished the proper shot of Holmes coming into the jail — so he drove the entire household there, taking part in Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” at Evans’s behest whereas the cinematographer David Bolen crouched within the trunk together with his digicam skilled on Holmes’s face. “I bear in mind Lance and Nathan actually combating in regards to the strategy,” Bolen says. “However Lance simply pushed and pushed and pushed. Irrespective of how awkward the ask is, Lance will make the ask.”
The ensuing documentary, You Can See Every thing, is a surprisingly intimate probe of Holmes’s beliefs and her persona. Fielder, who actually moved in with the household, performs the function of tricksterish inquisitor; Oppenheim imbues their interactions with cinematic aptitude. Already, awards prognosticators are speculating that You Can See Every thing might make Oscars historical past as the primary documentary nominated for Finest Image. Its launch caps off a whirlwind 12 months for the 30-year-old director. His first narrative function, Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen, debuted in Venice lower than 24 hours earlier than You Can See Every thing’s shock premiere at Telluride — a head-spinning situation beneath the most effective of circumstances. It didn’t assist that he had microdosed LSD in Italy and was nonetheless feeling the consequences when he landed in Colorado: “I received to Telluride, and I used to be like, Oh no,” he tells me.
We’re at Tatiana, a Russian restaurant in Brighton Seaside, for lunch the day after the New York Movie Pageant screening of You Can See Every thing. Moments after sitting down at an out of doors desk, Oppenheim breathes within the ocean air and begins cheerfully free-associating. The neighborhood reminds him of his native Florida’s Hollywood Seaside Broadwalk, so he visits as typically as attainable; his second date together with his now-wife, the producer Abigail Rowe, whom he’s attempting to steer to maneuver to the realm, was at this very restaurant. He orders expansively however not earlier than checking in with me about every dish: Do I eat meat? How do I really feel about pickled greens? And have I ever tried purple caviar? “It’s the cheaper model — it’s like Temu caviar,” he explains. “When in Rome, man!”
Oppenheim, carrying spherical glasses and a green-and-white-striped shirt, has a guileless smile and a boyish vitality that belies his ambition. Charismatic and neurotic, he speaks in paragraphs and is consistently observing — as we anticipate our meals, he feedback on the Europop soundtrack and on a shirtless man who wanders by “flicking his bag of blow.” He hates texting and loves cellphone calls. Fielder says Oppenheim often picks up even when he’s within the bathe. “He doesn’t inform you he’s within the bathe when the decision begins,” he says. “However he’s all the time trustworthy while you ask.”
In a filmmaking context, Oppenheim’s candor serves him nicely: Being weak together with his topics typically conjures up them to return the favor. His first function, 2020’s Some Sort of Heaven, in regards to the Villages, an insular, well-off retirement neighborhood in his residence state, finds lots of its central characters grappling with failed relationships, unrealized ambitions, and their very own mortality. His second, Spermworld, follows individuals within the unregulated sperm-donation market: folks assembly, as Oppenheim places it, “on the perimeters of the Earth to try to conceive a toddler with an entire stranger.” He’s seen topics go to trial, face romantic rejection, and lose their jobs on-camera; he’s additionally been holed up in a dingy motel rest room whereas two of them had intercourse within the different room.
His innovation lies within the dreamy method he renders these experiences, with lush scores, vivid colours, and exactly composed pictures that assist a viewer get inside his protagonists’ psyches. “Most individuals, after they’re going by means of one thing dramatic, the stakes can really feel impossibly excessive. It’s virtually like they’re dwelling by means of a Hollywood drama,” he says. “However in the event you simply observe it usually, by means of vérité means, you don’t actually get that feeling.” Bolen, who has labored with Oppenheim on all of his options, explains their philosophy: “As quickly as you carry a digicam into an area, the environment adjustments, the folks change, we modify. There isn’t any goal actuality. We’ve all the time been fascinated about how we will greatest current somebody’s subjective fact in a visible method.” Ren Faire, a 2024 docuseries Oppenheim shot for HBO in regards to the succession disaster on the Texas Renaissance Pageant, marked the apotheosis of this technique. Most of the main gamers have been performers of their each day lives, used to inhabiting a fantasy world. The competition’s octogenarian founder was satisfied he might hear angels, so Oppenheim employed voice actors to play them; when the crew flagged down a man in a dragon costume and requested him to ship just a few traces externalizing the anxieties of the truthful’s common supervisor, he fortunately obliged.
Oppenheim’s eagerness to discover and his embrace of artifice with a purpose to “discover one thing actual on the opposite facet of it” have made him some of the unorthodox documentarians working right now. The incentives of the streaming period imply many documentaries at the moment are preordained affairs: true-crime narratives populated by speaking heads and pitched when the result is already recognized, or cozy, approved docs about celebrities. Oppenheim, like Fielder and John Wilson, is after one thing extra heightened and fewer predictable; not like them, he doesn’t have a writers’ room or make himself a personality within the proceedings. He borrows from the custom of nonfiction filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman, in search of out tales that may unfold in actual time. Usually, the method includes a prolonged “fishing expedition,” leaving him with a whole lot of hours of footage to sift by means of within the edit. Then there are the surreal thrives that carry the work into the realm of what Oppenheim calls “docufantasia.” None of Wiseman’s institutional portraits have the voices of angels speaking to the man in cost.
On every challenge, Oppenheim works with a tiny crew, and a few repeat collaborators have grow to be an important folks in his life. It was in the middle of making Ren Faire that he fell in love with Rowe, who’d first discovered the story. A month after it premiered, he proposed to her. (Understanding that she cherished monkeys, he employed one to current her with the ring.) She’s been a part of every little thing he’s executed since. Final spring, they’d a son. Rowe says of her husband, “It’s virtually like he was an alien beamed all the way down to Earth and the one piece of software program that was downloaded was like, ‘You’re going to make films.’”
Photograph: Chris Maggio for New York Journal
For so long as he can bear in mind, Oppenheim wished to be a director. On Halloween in fourth grade, the 12 months Struggle of the Worlds got here out, he dressed up not as Tom Cruise’s character however as Steven Spielberg. (His favourite movie is a special Cruise automobile, Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, a notoriously polarizing fantasy-versus-reality thriller that he estimates he’s seen upwards of 85 occasions.) His mother and father, each real-estate legal professionals, have been supportive of his ambitions — his dad, a Kubrick fan, blithely confirmed him A Clockwork Orange when he was 9.
A number of years later, the recession hit. The household decamped to a patch of as-yet-undeveloped swampland close to the Everglades, satisfied that others would be a part of them. As a substitute, Oppenheim discovered himself stranded practically an hour from his college in Fort Lauderdale, reduce off socially by the commute. With out pals close by, he would spend some weekends watching three movies a day. “I lived by means of films,” he says. At 13, he received his first DSLR and began making them. He pored over his native newspaper, the Solar Sentinel, and earmarked tales he might pursue; at one level, he talked a gaggle of activists into letting him trip together with its armed effort to rescue abused canines. Actual-life dramas appeared higher than something he may provide you with himself. “I attempted to put in writing stuff, however I used to be a horrible author,” he says. “I used to be doing, like, knockoff Nolan.” Quickly, he was importing shorts on Vimeo and pitching the New York Instances’“Op-Docs” division.
His mother and father’ tales about shoppers who had misplaced their houses sparked an everlasting curiosity within the energy of self-delusion. “Through the foreclosures disaster, my dad would characterize all these individuals who have been dwelling inside garages with all their stuff and nonetheless going about their day as if nothing was happening,” Oppenheim says. “Individuals who’d entrapped themselves in a mind-set — virtually in a dream. All the flicks I’ve made contact on that in a bizarre method. I like dwelling inside a special actuality with any individual, and I like the concept of what that may supply cinematically. Whenever you come again to your individual actuality, every little thing feels completely different or slightly extra uncanny.”
Oppenheim went to Harvard, the place he was taught by Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, and Dennis Lim, the inventive director of the New York Movie Pageant. “He was all the time very on this thought of the constructed nature of documentaries — fictional units, makes use of of staging and reenactment, hybrid kinds,” Lim says. (Oppenheim as soon as submitted an essay titled “A Protection of the Hyper-Actual.”) Some Sort of Heaven started as his thesis challenge. Authorities on the Villages denied him entry, and the shoot required him to dodge safety guards, attraction topics, and sometimes undertake disguises. He’d run out of cash to maintain filming when Darren Aronofsky, whom he’d despatched a gentle stream of chipper emails, agreed to satisfy — and in the end got here aboard as a producer. The completed model premiered at Sundance on Oppenheim’s twenty fourth birthday.
He arrived at his signature strategy whereas nonetheless in faculty. What it entails is much less reenactment — frequent follow in docs — than stage-managed enactment. Oppenheim orchestrates moments which are “spiritually true,” letting an encounter unfold with out interference however encouraging the individuals to satisfy, say, in a backyard at sundown fairly than a plain workplace constructing at noon. Usually, he actively collaborates together with his topics, displaying them cuts, taking part in them the music he has in thoughts, and enlisting them within the effort to inhabit their perspective. Their involvement doesn’t spare them unflattering moments; loads of characters are proven behaving unusually, badly, or each. But due to Oppenheim’s course of, they have an inclination to return away feeling seen fairly than uncovered.
With Nathan Fielder.
Photograph: Chris Maggio/Courtesy of A24
You Can See Every thing started, as lots of Oppenheim’s initiatives do, with a chilly e-mail. The tactic dates again to his teenage years, when, within the aftermath of the Sony hack, he’d searched the names of filmmakers he idolized, then determined to shoot his shot. (A number of administrators have launched themselves to Oppenheim now that he’s made it solely to be taught he’d emailed them as a minor.) He grew up loving Nathan for You, a docu-comedy collection during which Fielder “helped” struggling real-life enterprise house owners by proposing questionable fixes for his or her woes — so in 2020, when his screener system knowledgeable him that Fielder had watched 60 % of Some Sort of Heaven, Oppenheim wrote to let him know there was one other 40 % after that. Fielder replied the identical day. (He tells me he appreciated the movie’s “uncanniness” and the truth that “these mundane moments had all these layers to them,” including, “I neglect why I took a break 60 % by means of, however I’m certain it was necessary.”) Over lengthy calls — and, as soon as pandemic restrictions lifted, nights spent speaking at bars till 1 a.m. — they grew to become pals and began scheming about how they could collaborate.
One night, Fielder invited Oppenheim to the Magic Fort, a personal magic membership in L.A. with a suit-and-tie gown code. (He lent Oppenheim an oversize jacket and a tie with a “bizarre drum set” sample for the event — “possibly to mess with me, possibly as a result of that’s what he likes,” Oppenheim says.) In response to a magician’s immediate, somebody referred to as out Elizabeth Holmes’s title, and after the present, Oppenheim talked about a rumor he’d heard: that she had simply approached A24 a couple of documentary.
Fielder referred to as the studio the following day, then arrange a preliminary assembly with Holmes. He went again to A24 together with his phrases. He would do it provided that the studio might promise fast funding to begin capturing and a kill clause so he and Oppenheim might pull the plug at any time. “We received to determine that if we don’t like what we’ve executed, they’re not getting their a refund and that’s it,” Oppenheim recollects. A24 agreed. Every week and a half later, they’d assembled a workforce and have been establishing cameras at Holmes’s residence in Del Mar, California.
Oppenheim had already learn John Carreyrou’s Unhealthy Blood and seen Holmes’s rise and fall dramatized by Amanda Seyfried within the Hulu collection The Dropout. He was conversant in the contours of the story: the best way she’d defrauded buyers, misrepresented the capabilities of her expertise, and vigorously insisted on her personal innocence all through. However he wasn’t ready for the way deep the denial went. Even after they arrived, simply over a month earlier than she went to federal jail, she was nonetheless speaking as if her sentence wasn’t a certain factor.
For the following month, Fielder, Oppenheim, and a seven-person crew shot in her residence for as much as 16 hours a day. They agreed to not movie privileged authorized calls; nearly every little thing else was truthful sport. “You get to their home, and her laptop’s open. All of her emails are open. Her journal is open on the facet of the sofa,” Oppenheim recollects. The efficiency of whole transparency might attain comical heights. At some point, he accompanied Holmes’s accomplice, Evans, to the health club and requested what else he was planning to try this afternoon. Evans talked about that he’d should bathe, and earlier than Oppenheim might suggest a tasteful, minimally invasive strategy, he stripped and hopped in. What follows is the sequence that earned You Can See Every thing its R for graphic nudity. “It looks like he actually had one thing he wished to indicate to us and to the world,” Oppenheim says.
The look of the movie was born of necessity. To keep away from lacking a probably vital response, the workforce discovered to maintain a digicam on every of the principals all through. They quickly discovered their strategy to one thing unexpectedly immersive. Giant swaths of the movie are composed of close-ups of individuals’s faces or arms, giving seemingly mundane exchanges and gestures — say, a second when Evans, unimpressed with Holmes’s egg-whisking approach, confiscates the bowl — larger weight. Ordinarily, Oppenheim would reduce something that referred to as consideration to a presence behind the digicam. In You Can See Every thing, glimpses of crewmembers and tools serve to intensify the immediacy. “It’s all in regards to the problem of capturing these moments,” he says. “And in regards to the problem of attempting to make sense of them.”
With Robert Pattinson and David Bolen on the set of Primetime.
Photograph: Sinna Nasseri/Courtesy of A24
Primetime, which Oppenheim labored on concurrently, is in some ways You Can See Every thing’s reverse. The place one is a stripped-back effort to get to the reality of an individual, the opposite is scuzzy, hyperstylized, and intentionally excessive. Actual-life occasions tackle a mythic dimension: Throughout one sting, Hansen sees a demon lurking within the darkness. Oppenheim describes Primetime as a “fever dream” and an “elaborate type of fan fiction” fairly than a traditional biopic. And he’s in reality a fan of Hansen’s; as a child, lengthy earlier than he noticed movies like F for Faux and Shut-Up, he was riveted by the interaction of artifice and actuality on To Catch a Predator.
Initially, Pattinson had deliberate to supply Primetime however to not star in it. Ajon Singh, who wrote the screenplay, spent a frantic week retooling it to steer him to alter his thoughts. Oppenheim resorted to bribery. “Rob, on the time, was grappling with a Zyn dependancy,” he says. There was a scarcity within the U.S., so Oppenheim enlisted a pal who was working in Canada to ship 200 canisters to Pattinson’s place in L.A. Then he dropped off the newest draft with a letter that started, “Expensive Chris Han-Zyn.” When Pattinson referred to as to say he was in after studying the brand new script, “it was like LeBron making the announcement that he was becoming a member of the Warmth.”
Although the shape was new for Oppenheim, a lot of the thematic terrain of Primetime — together with the query of how a staged scenario, like the homes rented by Hansen’s workforce and the actors paid to play kids, could be used to reveal the reality — was acquainted. His obsession with spontaneity formed his strategy. He threw out the shot checklist, routinely saved the cameras rolling lengthy after a scene was supposed to finish, and inspired improv. “Should you are available with a plan and also you execute that plan completely, Lance will hate it,” Bolen says.
“He has very distinctive whims,” Pattinson says. In a single scene, Hansen spits out mouthwash; at first, Pattinson did it usually. “Lance is like, ‘Ugh! So boring! This isn’t working!’ And he says, ‘Rob, simply strive one the place you go loopy,’” Bolen recollects. “Everybody on set is him like, What? ” Lastly, Pattinson threw his entire physique into the motion — arms again, face hurtling towards the sink. It was the take that ended up within the movie and that launched a thousand memes upon launch.
As in his documentaries, Oppenheim received the visuals he wished, no matter they required. One shot of a pc’s innards concerned a colonoscopy digicam; a number of sequences have been filmed with a digicam that was actively degrading as a result of he cherished the impact on the picture. “We discovered it on eBay for, like, 50 bucks,” Pattinson recollects. “It was so humid the digicam was actually dying. Daily it could worsen and worse. And we’d shoot total scenes, and Lance can be like, ‘Okay, we received it.’ After which I’d take a look at the dailies, and he’d solely shot on the damaged digicam. He’s like, ‘Nevertheless it appears nice!’ I’m like, ‘You’re a loopy individual.’” However he appreciated Oppenheim’s collaborative impulse — and his willingness to argue. “We might go head-to-head about stuff, and it by no means broken the connection. We all the time ended up with the fascinating model,” he says. “And 99 % of the time it was Lance’s.”
The precise Hansen condemned the film earlier than he’d seen it and wasn’t significantly happy when he did, calling it a “hit piece” and a “full fiction.” He has taken to tagging Oppenheim in random Instagram posts however hasn’t in any other case reached out. “I’m bummed!” Oppenheim says. “I need to discuss to him.” However he suspects that Hansen, who just lately posed for a photograph within the Los Angeles Instances carrying what gave the impression to be a bulletproof vest, is now in “messianic territory”; he’s not partaking with Oppenheim as an actual individual, both.
Till Holmes, the characters in Oppenheim’s documentaries had been relative unknowns — folks with far much less incentive to deceive him. Although he opened as much as the themes of You Can See Every thing (“I did share quite a bit about myself,” he says slightly uneasily), they didn’t evaluate cuts. Oppenheim additionally knew that the type of stagecraft he sometimes deployed would solely compound the authenticity drawback inherent in a movie about, as he places it, “fairly probably the most important manipulator on the earth.” To seize one thing actual, he must dispense with “the entire bells and whistles that I often do” and embrace a mode he’d as soon as rejected: pure, rigorous vérité.
This being a Fielder-and-Oppenheim manufacturing, there’s slightly extra happening than that. Each are preoccupied with questions of fact and efficiency; inevitably, there’s a meta layer to the proceedings. But essentially the most vital twist arose virtually accidentally. The 2 filmmakers had been struggling to get anybody else in Holmes’s orbit on-camera when Emma Stone, a detailed pal of Fielder’s, linked him with Amanda Seyfried. On a preliminary Zoom name, Fielder mentioned solely that they’d been working in secret on a challenge that concerned intensive entry to Holmes. May they present her, and wouldn’t it be okay in the event that they recorded her response? Seyfried agreed — although Oppenheim recollects that, as a fan of Fielder’s previous work, she was cautious of getting “punked.” Instantly upon assembly Seyfried in individual, they handed her a laptop computer with materials from their month in Del Mar and began filming, hoping her response may give them “a deeper understanding of what we’d made.”
When Seyfried expressed a sudden impulse to play Holmes once more, the following part of the documentary started to take form. Her involvement dramatically expanded the challenge’s scope. She might assist Fielder and Oppenheim by taking part in Holmes in sequences a digicam couldn’t seize, however she additionally had her personal pursuits and her personal relationship to the topic. “As quickly as Elizabeth leaves, the film is type of haunted by her absence. Everybody in it’s making an attempt to recollect her in several methods and in addition create a model of her,” Oppenheim says.
The reenactments that ensued got here with new challenges even for Fielder, whose HBO collection The Rehearsal hinges on elaborate simulations of real-life occasions. The customer space of Federal Jail Camp Bryan, the place Fielder and Holmes would meet, needed to be reconstructed basically from reminiscence. “You may’t take footage of the jail. You may’t carry a recorder in. You may’t even carry a pen and paper in,” Oppenheim says. Fielder would name him instantly upon leaving for a “moment-by-moment play-by-play” with Oppenheim transcribing every little thing that had occurred. Small discrepancies in supply or uncertainties round phrase alternative grew to become an engine of drama: How had Holmes actually mentioned it, and what did she actually imply?
Oppenheim has spent plenty of time fascinated about what he calls the “inherently vampiristic relationship” between topic and documentarian. (His favourite e-book, naturally, is Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Assassin.) When the celebrities of a few of his early shorts reacted unfavorably, he was crushed. He developed his standard collaborative strategy partly to attenuate the sting of betrayal — and his lasting bonds with lots of his topics counsel he’s succeeded. He nonetheless talks with Reggie and Anne, the central couple of Some Sort of Heaven; Brian Brier, who seems in Spermworld, even had a bit half in Primetime.
For You Can See Every thing, he needed to suppress his queasiness about his topics’ disapproval. “I do not know how Billy and Elizabeth are going to react to the movie. However every little thing that’s in there may be the truest type of what Nathan and I skilled coping with them,” he says. “I made a film about it as a result of that’s the one method I can actually specific my emotions.” After I marvel aloud whether or not Fielder’s responses to Holmes — by turns subtly skeptical, outright incredulous, and surprisingly sympathetic — are honest, Oppenheim assures me that none of it’s for present. “I really feel like that is the closest we’ve ever come to really seeing Nathan not being a personality onscreen or doing a bit,” he says.
The onscreen friction with Evans, who emerges as one thing of a villain, was additionally actual. “I do consider she’s very a lot in love with Billy,” Oppenheim tells me. “I consider that they’re very a lot in love with one another — and that’s fascinating, too, as a result of for a very long time I used to be like, What’s occurring? ” However he says tensions escalated after Holmes went to jail and Evans tried to claim management over the movie. For the primary time in Oppenheim’s profession, his relationship with a topic broke down seemingly past restore. When he was engaged on Primetime, he would wrap a full day of capturing after which discuss with Evans and Fielder late into the night time; now, neither director has spoken to Evans in months. (Evans didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
Oppenheim is stressed by nature. “You set one thing out into the world,” Bolen says, “and the following day Lance is anxiously being like, ‘Okay, wait, what’s subsequent?’” He hopes to make a documentary with Pattinson and an adaptation of Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Performing Class. Then there’s a “found-footage revenge film” Oppenheim describes as “American Film meets John Wick,” constructed fully from iPhone and Android movies. This, too, can be docufantasia: “It’s all actual — for essentially the most half.”
For now, although, he’s nonetheless puzzling over You Can See Every thing. Even having watched the movie “300 occasions, possibly extra,” Oppenheim nonetheless doesn’t fairly know what to make of what he noticed. “Often, after I’m executed with one thing or I’ve labored on it for a few years, I’m like, I do know each a part of this,” he says. “It is a mysterious object that retains rising in that means.”
Thanks for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
Should you desire to learn in print, you too can discover this text within the October 19, 2026, situation of
New York Journal.
Need extra tales like this one? Subscribe now
to assist our journalism and get limitless entry to our protection.
Should you desire to learn in print, you too can discover this text within the October 19, 2026, situation of
New York Journal.
Join the Vulture Day by day
An leisure e-newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.
Vox Media, LLC Phrases and Privateness Discover