The atmosphere inside the room feels strange. Perhaps it’s the three hours of You Can See Everything that are intense and captivating, perhaps they needed a brief moment of calm to settle; perhaps it’s because attendees were asked not to use laptops but to take notes by hand, as in the old days; perhaps it’s because the gathering with Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the directors of this film that has been a phenomenon in recent months, isn’t a traditional press conference, since questions for the directors are permissible only for Mattia Carzaniga, the moderator who accompanies them on stage.
For anyone who has recently awakened from a very long sleep, You Can See Everything is the A24-produced documentary that has smashed box offices and driven critics wild, and not only for its more obvious subject. On paper, the film is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, a young entrepreneur who nearly a decade ago found herself in the crosshairs over a fraud linked to the startup Theranos, which took its name from the device she invented and that claimed to revolutionize medicine by conducting every kind of blood analysis from a single drop. After attracting investors, politicians, and journalists, and gathering hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, it emerged that Theranos didn’t work at all, and Holmes—who has always maintained her innocence, claiming to be misunderstood and convinced of her technology—ended up on trial and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
“During her rise, Elizabeth Holmes had a vision, and people believed her. She was regarded as a prodigy, the Steve Jobs of medicine, and she was famous as the first self-made female billionaire,” recounts Fielder, while Oppenheim adds that “on the board of Theranos sat figures you would never say could be easily deceived, powerful people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and among the project’s supporters were figures such as Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch. People were intrigued by the way she presented herself, but when we met her she was no longer that persona.” After the conviction, for many Elizabeth Holmes became the epitome of deceit: “No one believed a word she said anymore,” adds Fielder.
It happened that shortly before entering prison, where she is currently detained, Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans (an heir to a wealthy American family) contacted A24 claiming an interest in collaborating on a documentary about them, ostensibly to tell their version of the story, and explicitly to show the world who Elizabeth really was (so they say).
“Tutto è avvenuto in modo un po’ rocambolesco,” racconta Oppenheim. “Quando si è aperta la possibilità di questo film, subito dopo che loro aveva contattato la A24, abbiamo allestito al volo una troupe con persone con cui avevamo lavorato e siamo subito partiti, senza però sapere che cosa avremmo davvero visto raccontato.” Subito i due registi si sono resi conto, con una certa sorpresa, che Holmes non aveva nulla in mano per dimostrare la sua innocenza, nessuna prova, né alcun piano per mostrarsi tale. Ma ancora di più, dice Oppenheim, “dal primo momento in cui l’abbiamo incontrata ci siamo chiesti se stessimo assistendo a una performance o avessimo di fronte una persona sincera, e abbiamo pensato che se fossimo riusciti a riportare e trasmettere la dissonanza che sentivamo, questo sarebbe potuto diventare un grande film. Elizabeth è un’illusione ottica umana, con un modello di comportamenti che sta tra il conscio e l’inconscio”. “Sentivamo che ogni comportamento apparentemente normale potesse nascondere una recita, una messa in scena. Ed è stato interessante iniziare a lavorare con questo bias,” conferma Fielder.
You Can See Everything: il trailer del film
If Oppenheim, who recently directed his first fictional film, Primetime with Robert Pattinson, has a pure documentary background, Nathan Fielder has a more complex résumé, spanning parody reality such as Nathan for You, mockumentaries like The Rehearsal, and bold narrative series like The Curse with Emma Stone. And even in You Can See Everything, which was initially supposed to place him behind the camera, Fielder ends up being more visible than he had imagined, being in front of the camera as well and becoming, in his own way, a protagonist of the film he directs.
This decision, explains Oppenheim, “was the consequence of the way Holmes and Evans constantly interacted with him, peppering him with a thousand questions and requests, and somehow the film was nudged toward making Nathan a character. We asked ourselves at length what the pros and cons of this decision could be before making it, but we also realized that this approach allowed Nathan to confront Elizabeth and her delusions more directly.”
“The initial goal of the film was to provide information, but later the film became also the story of a crew filming someone. We kept asking why Elizabeth and Billy asked us to film certain things and moments, and with my presence we wanted to give the audience the impression of being there with them, and of being part of the debate.”
What Fielder wanted was for “people to feel what we felt while filming. You Can See Everything is the story of how hard it is to reach the truth, of how the human mind works, of how impossible it is to fully understand its mechanisms.” What has stayed with him after this experience, after trying to enter Elizabeth Holmes’s mind, is that it now tends to raise many more questions for him about the people he meets, and about the difference between reality and fiction.
You Can See Everything will have its national premiere at the Turin Film Festival and will be shown in Italian cinemas as a special event on November 27, 28 and 29.
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