“I Know She’s a Liar”: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim and the Problem With Believing Your Own Eyes
Inside a documentary where even the filmmakers couldn't agree on what was happening in front of them.
A documentary about Elizabeth Holmes became an experiment in trust, manipulation and the uncomfortable possibility that two people can witness exactly the same thing and come away believing entirely different stories.
Nathan Fielder has built a career making ordinary human behaviour look suspicious. Lance Oppenheim has a knack for finding strange realities hiding inside apparently normal lives. Together, they've made a film about a woman whose extraordinary talent for appearing convincing helped turn Silicon Valley ambition into one of its most notorious fraud scandals.
Their subject is Elizabeth Holmes, the former Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors. Their documentary, You Can See Everything, begins 34 days before she enters prison and develops into a three-year examination of truth, performance and the people who control a story.
But the most revealing part of the filmmakers' New York Film Festival Q&A isn't what they discovered about Holmes. It's what happened to their own judgement.
Fielder and Oppenheim spent hours reviewing footage they had witnessed firsthand. They couldn't agree on what they'd seen. Neither could their crew. A facial expression, an everyday exchange, even something involving eggs could send everyone down a different interpretative rabbit hole.
There is a fairly uncomfortable question buried in all this: if a camera captures reality, why can't the people operating it agree on what is real?
And what happens when the person holding the camera becomes part of the story?
The Lowdown
The whole project began with an unsolicited email. Oppenheim discovered that Fielder had watched only 60% of his film Some Kind of Heaven and contacted him about the missing 40%.
Holmes could seem convincing even to someone who knew her conviction. Fielder found himself actively reminding himself of her history while talking to her.
The disagreement became the film. Nobody on the crew could reliably agree about the meaning of seemingly ordinary moments.
The filmmakers abandoned their original shooting approach. Three cameras, long lenses and minimal lighting helped them capture reactions without constantly interrupting the room.
The relationship with Holmes and Billy Evans deteriorated. The directors describe tensions over control and editorial independence.
There is no definitive verdict from the filmmakers. Fielder still struggles to interpret some of what he witnessed and hopes audiences might help.
Editor's note: The following feature preserves the filmmakers' request not to reveal the documentary's major later developments. Direct quotes are drawn from the supplied Q&A transcript. External sources are used only for independently verified film context.
“I Saw That Nathan Watched Like 60% of the Documentary”
A promising creative partnership doesn't always begin with two great minds recognising something in one another. Sometimes it begins with someone checking the analytics.
Oppenheim knew Fielder had watched his debut documentary, Some Kind of Heaven, through a screening platform that tracked viewing progress. The only problem: Fielder hadn't finished it.
So Oppenheim found his email address and informed him that another 40% was waiting.
Fielder watched the rest. They started spending time together. Eventually, a trip to Hollywood's Magic Castle gave them the subject they hadn't been looking for.
During a performance, someone shouted out Elizabeth Holmes's name. Oppenheim mentioned that he'd heard Holmes was looking for someone to document her life and had approached A24.
Fielder was curious, but not initially convinced there was another film to make. After all, the Theranos scandal had already produced books, documentaries and dramatisations.
The attraction wasn't necessarily another revelation about the fraud. It was the strange proposition of meeting someone whose public story seemed settled but who still wanted to explain herself.
Fielder contacted A24. The earlier conversation with Holmes had fallen apart, but an introduction became possible.
A casual friendship, a half-watched documentary and a magician asking for a celebrity's name: not exactly a conventional development process. Probably a better origin story than most Hollywood pitch decks.
“She Seems So Like Genuine at Times”
There is knowing someone is capable of deception. And then there is sitting across from them while they seem completely sincere.
That distinction became one of Fielder's earliest problems.
He had read John Carreyrou's Bad Blood. He knew Holmes's reputation and legal history. None of that prevented the unsettling experience of finding her convincing in person.
“No, I'm clocking like tracking my thoughts and being like, okay, I know she's a liar.” — Nathan Fielder
The fascinating part isn't that Holmes could appear genuine. It's that Fielder had to consciously monitor his own response.
Most of us like to imagine fraud is something we'd recognise from a distance. A suspicious glance. An inconsistent story. A certain artificial confidence.
But human beings don't walk around with subtitles indicating their reliability. We make assessments using charm, eye contact, tone, familiarity and whatever we already believe.
Holmes's conviction is an established legal fact. Whether an individual interaction feels genuine is another matter.
The film sits in that gap, where evidence and instinct become surprisingly difficult to reconcile.
“If We Can't Agree on What's Happening, There's Something Here”
Most documentaries begin with an argument they're trying to prove. This one increasingly took shape around the filmmakers' inability to agree on an argument.
Fielder and Oppenheim would finish shooting, discuss what had happened and discover they had interpreted the same encounter differently.
It wasn't just the directors.
Oppenheim describes a crew experiencing similar cognitive dissonance, struggling to agree about moments that initially appeared mundane.
That changed their ambition. Rather than resolve each ambiguity for the viewer, they wanted to recreate the experience of being there.
“Everyone had a different point of view.” — Lance Oppenheim
There's a tension here for an audience trained by true-crime television to expect a revelation, a culprit and a neatly packaged conclusion.
We tend to treat footage as proof, even though footage still needs interpretation.
A camera can establish that someone smiled. It cannot automatically establish whether that smile was affectionate, defensive, calculating or nervous.
And when the directors can't agree, whose interpretation deserves to become the official one?
“We Cannot Promise We'll Deliver Anything on This”
A24 accepted an unusually uncertain proposition.
The filmmakers wanted to enter Holmes's world with cameras without guaranteeing that they'd emerge with a finished film.
They didn't yet know the story. They weren't even certain there was one.
A24 gave them permission to explore, with the option of abandoning the project.
That's a very different arrangement from arriving with pre-written interview questions, planned confrontations and a trailer-ready narrative.
The approach came with a risk: sustained access can make people more comfortable, but it can also make the observer less certain of their own distance.
Being inside someone's daily life changes the relationship. The subject learns about the filmmaker. The filmmaker gets used to the subject. Something that initially appears bizarre can become routine.
That familiarity can produce deeper observation. It can also complicate judgement.
This was never simply a question of whether Holmes would open her home to a camera. It was whether the filmmakers could remain independent once they were inside it.
“The Moment You Say Something to Someone, You Want to See Their Face the Moment They Hear It”
The technical decisions reveal what the film is really interested in.
Initially, the production used a single camera and anamorphic lenses. It looked cinematic, but it was cumbersome. The team missed moments while repositioning equipment or changing lenses.
Worse, whenever the camera swung from one person to another, the crucial immediate reaction had already happened.
So they changed nearly everything.
3 Cameras covering the house
16 Hours of filming on some days
7 Core crew members on location
One camera held a wide view; two others could capture close reactions using long zoom lenses. There was no conventional lighting setup. The crew developed a system for moving equipment quickly and remaining as unobtrusive as possible.
And the filmmakers adjusted the frame itself, favouring faces over the distracting details of a wider image.
Oppenheim put it neatly:
“The face. It was the ultimate landscape.”
That tells you more about the film's priorities than any technical specification.
Fielder and Oppenheim weren't simply recording what people said. They wanted to see the split second after something landed.
The awkward smile. The glance towards a partner. The expression that disappears before anyone has time to construct an answer.
Of course, the same problem remains: seeing a reaction doesn't necessarily mean understanding it.
“I'm Definitely Not Going to Be in This”
Nathan Fielder making a documentary without appearing in it sounds, on paper, like a fairly straightforward creative decision.
It didn't survive contact with reality.
Fielder intended to stay behind the camera alongside Oppenheim. But Holmes and Evans kept addressing him directly and drawing him into extended exchanges.
Eventually, camera operators began turning towards him.
The supposed observer had become part of the environment he was documenting.
It's particularly fitting for Fielder, whose work on Nathan for You and The Rehearsal continually complicates the distinction between participation and observation.
Except here the transition wasn't originally designed as the central gimmick.
There is an unavoidable power struggle whenever somebody agrees to be filmed. The director controls the eventual edit. The subject controls what they choose to reveal.
But when the subject starts questioning the director, and the director becomes another visible character, the balance shifts.
Who is examining whom?
And who gets to decide what the encounter means afterwards?
“Billy Was Trying to Exert, I Think, a Level of Control Over the Project”
Access is valuable until somebody wants to renegotiate what it buys them.
Near the end of filming, the directors encountered tension with Holmes's partner, Billy Evans.
Fielder describes Evans attempting to exercise control over the project in ways that made them uncomfortable.
The filmmakers considered their editorial independence non-negotiable, and communication eventually broke down.
Fielder describes Evans as a conduit to Holmes, making the relationship particularly difficult to navigate.
At the time of the conversation, neither Holmes nor Evans had seen the completed documentary, according to the directors, and they had not been in contact for some time.
There are two separate issues here that shouldn't be confused.
Subjects have understandable personal reasons to care about how their lives are presented. Filmmakers also need freedom to publish work that their subjects may dislike.
The transcript doesn't establish every detail of that dispute or Evans's interpretation of it.
What it does establish is that the problem of control moved beyond the film's intellectual themes and into the real relationship between its makers and subjects.
The question of who owns someone's story stops being theoretical very quickly when everyone involved wants a different version on screen.
“I Am Still Like Struggling to This Day to Understand What I Went Through Here”
There is something refreshing, and slightly maddening, about a filmmaker reaching the end of a long project without being able to supply the meaning.
Fielder describes continuing conversations with editor Adam Locke-Norton about scenes they still interpret differently.
Rather than treating the public release as the moment their interpretation becomes definitive, he sees it as an opportunity to hear what others make of the footage.
Oppenheim, meanwhile, points to the advantage of filming over an extended period: the chance to notice recurring behaviours and patterns that a conventional interview might never expose.
That's the uncomfortable double edge of documentary intimacy.
Spend too little time with someone and you may only capture their public performance. Spend enough time with them and you may begin to understand their habits, while becoming increasingly entangled in their version of events.
Fielder and Oppenheim haven't emerged with a tidy handbook on spotting manipulation.
They've emerged with a film that makes certainty itself feel suspect.
The temptation is to conclude that we can never really know anyone. But that goes too far. The established facts of the Theranos fraud don't become negotiable because Holmes can appear sincere on camera.
What becomes harder to settle is how people experience, interpret and participate in the reality around those facts.
A documentary can show us a great deal. That doesn't mean everyone watching has seen the same thing.
