You Can See Everything: are Fielder's reenactments deceiving you?

"Why would I deceive you?" Elizabeth Holmes asks Nathan Fielder that in his documentary, You Can See Everything. It's a remarkable question from someone convicted of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Holmes spends much of the documentary trying to convince us she's not the lying, manipulative con artist everyone thinks she is, and we spend much of the movie questioning whether she's telling the truth. But Holmes isn't the only person in this documentary you should be questioning. Some of its most important scenes were never filmed. They are reenactments starring Amanda Seyfried, built from Fielder's own memory. While we're busy trying to figure out whether Holmes is manipulating Fielder, we might not realize that Fielder could be doing the exact same thing to us.

With a fictional movie, we know the dialogue was written, the scenes were staged and the actors are pretending. With a documentary, we generally assume we're seeing something that happened. Yet some of the most acclaimed documentaries ever made rearranged events, left out important information and recreated entire conversations and situations nobody ever filmed. What we see can be every bit as fictional as a regular movie.

Why Elizabeth Holmes invited a documentary crew in before prison

Holmes started a company called Theranos that claimed it had created a single device that could run hundreds of medical tests from one drop of blood taken with a finger poke. There was one enormous problem: it never worked. After years of misleading everyone, including her investors, Holmes was convicted of fraud and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Despite everything, she maintained that she had done nothing wrong.

With 34 days remaining before she was supposed to report to prison, Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, invited a documentary crew into their home. She likely hoped that by giving filmmakers unprecedented access to her private life, audiences would begin to see her as someone who had been misunderstood rather than the manipulative con artist she'd been portrayed as in the media.

There's another reason to question her motives: money. In addition to her prison sentence, Holmes and her former business partner were ordered to pay more than $452 million in restitution to the investors they defrauded. That brings us to what might be the most important scene in the entire documentary.

The A24 meeting where Billy Evans asked for a share of the profits

During a meeting with executives from A24, the studio financing the documentary, Holmes excuses herself to take care of her crying children. The moment she leaves the room, Billy Evans starts demanding a percentage of the documentary's profits. That's an unusual request, because documentary filmmakers generally avoid paying their subjects. It creates a conflict of interest: once Holmes starts profiting from the documentary, audiences have to wonder whether they're seeing an independent investigation or a carefully constructed piece of publicity designed to rehabilitate her image.

Fielder and the A24 executives object, but Billy refuses to back down, and A24 reluctantly agrees to a profit sharing arrangement. Later, Holmes mentions, out of the blue, that she's not making any money from the documentary and has no financial interest in it.

So what is going on? Did Billy negotiate the deal without her knowledge? Or did Holmes deliberately leave the room so her partner could do the dirty work while she kept her hands clean? If she was secretly in on it, that would suggest she's doing exactly what everyone suspects her of doing: manipulating people while convincing them she's being completely honest.

The A24 scene is a reenactment starring Amanda Seyfried

One detail about that meeting changes how you should interpret it. It wasn't filmed. The entire scene is a reenactment featuring Amanda Seyfried, who previously played Holmes in The Dropout, and Christopher Abbott, who plays Billy. It is based on Fielder's recollection of a conversation that apparently happened years earlier, before they started shooting.

Fielder includes a shot of Holmes, played by Seyfried, eavesdropping on the conversation from upstairs while she's supposed to be taking care of her children. How does he know she was listening? Was she eavesdropping, or is that simply how Fielder imagined the situation unfolding? Once we see something dramatized on screen, it's remarkably easy to start treating it as something that happened.

The prison conversation that comes down to one word

Later in the documentary, Fielder visits Holmes in prison to ask her again whether she knew about the deal. Cameras weren't allowed inside, so once again he has Seyfried recreate their conversation. In this reenactment, Holmes appears to acknowledge that she knew Billy had been discussing money with the filmmakers, which would suggest she wasn't as innocent as she'd been claiming.

Then Fielder starts questioning whether he remembers what Holmes said. There's a significant difference between her saying she knew Billy was talking to the filmmakers about it and saying she knew he was talking to them about something. Fielder can't remember which one she said. The first suggests she knew about the financial arrangement. The second could mean she only knew Billy was talking to the filmmakers, without necessarily knowing what they were discussing. One of the most important questions in the documentary comes down to a single word that Fielder isn't even sure he remembers correctly.

That raises a much bigger question. How do we know any of these conversations happened the way Fielder says they did? We weren't there, and we don't have any recordings of them. We're seeing actors recreate conversations based on somebody else's memory. The performances matter as much as the dialogue. Seyfried isn't simply repeating what Holmes supposedly said. She's also interpreting how Holmes said it. Was Holmes nervous, confused, deliberately evasive? Depending on Seyfried's delivery, the exact same line could sound completely innocent or incredibly suspicious.

There's even a moment where Fielder coaches Seyfried on how to deliver a line, trying to get her performance as close as possible to how he remembers Holmes saying it. When she doesn't quite get it right, he eventually tells her, "Good enough." That's a remarkable thing to hear when you're recreating a conversation where the difference between someone appearing innocent or guilty could come down to a single word.

Why a documentary can't show the whole truth even when it's filmed

Even if Fielder had filmed every one of these conversations, we wouldn't necessarily be getting the whole truth. People who know they're being filmed might choose their words more carefully, exaggerate certain parts of their personality or avoid saying things that could make them look bad. That doesn't necessarily mean they're lying. Holmes's entire reputation depends on convincing people she's been misunderstood, so you have to wonder how much of what we see is genuine and how much is a performance.

The filmmakers aren't impartial observers either, because they're trying to make an entertaining movie. They decide which questions to ask, which conversations to include and what gets left on the cutting room floor. Even if everyone involved is telling the truth, the final documentary can still present a carefully constructed version of reality, and perhaps much of our opinion of Holmes is being shaped by Fielder's decisions about what to show us and how to show it.

The kill switch and Nathan Fielder's role as witness and investigator

Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, who directed alongside him, weren't even sure there was a documentary worth making. The Elizabeth Holmes story had already been told countless times. So Fielder negotiated something called a kill switch with A24. The studio agreed to finance the entire production, but if the filmmakers couldn't find a compelling story while filming, they could abandon the whole thing without ever delivering a finished movie.

When Holmes told Fielder during filming that she had no financial interest in the documentary, the earlier A24 meeting took on an entirely new meaning. Did Holmes know about the deal, or was she genuinely unaware of what her partner was doing? You have to wonder how much that discovery influenced the direction of the documentary, because Fielder isn't simply observing Holmes anymore. He's actively trying to figure out whether she's lying to him.

That puts him in an unusual position. He was personally in the meeting that started the entire mystery, and now he's investigating what happened, recreating conversations nobody filmed and deciding which details the audience gets to see. He's a witness, an investigator and the person telling us what happened. Fielder has also admitted that he and Oppenheim would frequently disagree about what they were witnessing. Sometimes they'd see the exact same interaction and come away with completely different interpretations, which ultimately helped convince them there was a documentary worth making. But if the filmmakers themselves can't agree on what they're witnessing, whose interpretation of events are we ultimately seeing?

The You Can See Everything Oscar campaign blurs fact and fiction

Perhaps nothing shows how much this documentary blurs the line between fact and fiction better than its Oscar campaign. A24 is campaigning for You Can See Everything for best picture, while Amanda Seyfried could receive a nomination for best supporting actress. Again, this is a documentary.

So what qualifies as a documentary anymore? Much of this movie consists of genuine material filmed with Elizabeth Holmes, but some of its most important scenes were never filmed at all. They were staged with professional actors using dialogue reconstructed from someone else's memory. Seyfried could be nominated for an Oscar for appearing as herself, an actor being directed to play Elizabeth Holmes, in a documentary about the real Elizabeth Holmes.

What we see in the finished film isn't necessarily an objective account of what happened. It's the filmmaker's interpretation of what happened, shaped by their editing choices, personal bias, agenda and desire to tell a compelling story. Holmes asked Fielder, "Why would I deceive you?" The same question belongs to Fielder, and his answer might be that sometimes deception makes for a better story.