Elizabeth Holmes became the youngest female self-made billionaire at 30 years old because of her healthcare start-up, Theranos. Dropping out of Stanford University to cause shockwaves in the blood-testing industry, she convinced millions, including billionaire investors, that her company can run hundreds of blood tests on only a few drops of blood.
Her success eventually came to an end when a 2015 Wall Street Journal exposé revealed that Theranos was operating under deceptive practices, and soon she and her then boyfriend Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted by a federal grand jury for criminal wire fraud and conspiracy.
During this whirlwind of a legal storm, she began a new romantic relationship with entrepreneur Billy Evans in 2017. Within three years, they had two children together as she stood trial and was ultimately found guilty in 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors and acquitted of charges related to defrauding patients.
Watch the trailer:
In the weeks leading up to her incarceration, she welcomed a film crew into her home to document her final days of freedom, led by directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Oppenheim and Fielder found out about this opportunity during a night out with friends. “I’d heard that Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend were looking to have their lives documented and that they had approached A24 about it,” said Oppenheim. Nathan was intrigued: “I wonder if we could meet them?”
Photo from Columbia Pictures
They followed the lead and soon a meeting with Holmes and Evans were set in the couples’ oceanfront home. “My interest at first was just my own personal curiosity,” says Fielder. “It wasn’t even that I saw a project there. I had just read a lot about her, and I wanted to know what she was interested in saying after being silent for so many years. But the experience of meeting her was so odd. After that I was like, there’s something bigger here.”
The filmmaking duo were curious about the timing, as Holmes hasn’t spoken to the media since 2016. “Why would you be opening your doors after years of not speaking publicly? Why would you be opening your doors to us? It didn’t make a lot of sense,” says Oppenheim. “Is she looking for someone to craft her redemption story? Do they want promotion for some new endeavor? Does she have another agenda? So I said, ‘Okay, let me talk to her. I’ll go, I’ll listen.’ But what ended up emerging was so much stranger than I would have predicted,” adds Fielder.
With this, they were granted total creative freedom to pursue the film, and Fielder and Oppenheim gathered a small team of seven and began filming You Can See Everything in secret. What developed was a story that went places they could have never imagined.
You Can See Everything arrives in the Philippines on November 18, in Vietnam on November 27, and in Malaysia and Thailand on December 3.