Nathan Fielder’s Surprise Call From Elizabeth Holmes: ‘I Trust You’

The answer, before we even got a reason, was yes. The reason, it turned out, was that Fielder would soon release a project that was so top-secret, I’d need to sign an NDA to even hear about what it was—let alone watch it. I signed, I heard, and then I saw, counting myself among the few dozen people who’d screened You Can See Everything before the film debuted in the first days of September as a secret addition to the Telluride Film Festival. If you’re a human being with internet access, you know that the buzz following Telluride was nothing short of an online thermonuclear event: Reddit forums exploded; best-in-class memes were born overnight; every journalist on planet Earth, including the staff at WIRED (who had no idea their boss was NDA’d to hell, and seemed confused when I ordered them repeatedly not to contact Nathan Fielder’s publicist), pined, pleaded, and jockeyed for access to the film. Or, even better, for access to Fielder himself. The notoriously inscrutable performer, after all, has become a cult hero for his ability to turn human discomfort into high art. He built a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, creating an international news event in the process. He built an entire fake bar so that one man could practice having a difficult conversation with a friend. He trained to be a commercial airline pilot—lunacy!—and flew a 737 filled with passengers (the Miracle over the Mojave), in what can only be described as the most transcendent moment of television I’ve ever seen. For a certain genre of viewer, Nathan Fielder is a comedic god among us mere mortals. He’s also, not surprisingly, rather particular. Fielder was going to do the cover of WIRED; then maybe he wasn’t. A week went by. Our features director and I didn’t sleep. Then we were a “go.” Great! For a few days, at least, until things got dicey again. This kind of back-and-forth is a normal part of booking celebrities. But given the secrecy, the buzz, the Nathan of it all—the stakes for WIRED were high. I told several people in my life that I hated Nathan Fielder. Then we were on again. I told several people in my life that I loved Nathan Fielder. You might be wondering: If I found Fielder’s pre-interview agita so stressful, why didn’t we just scrap the cover entirely? Maybe see if Aaron Sorkin was still available, or some other guy involved in some other tech-adjacent fall movie. There are plenty. The thing is, You Can See Everything is a singularly astonishing film. I’d go so far as to say that it’s among the best I’ve ever seen. Codirected by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it begins as a strange, captivating, occasionally hilarious 34-day psychological dance between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner Billy Evans before Holmes’ incarceration, and subsequently morphs into something so beguiling and brilliant that it’s futile to try to describe. After screening You Can See Everything in early September, I thought about the movie every single day until I saw it again a few weeks later. I’m still rolling it around in my brain. When a small handful of WIRED staffers screened the film before Fielder’s cover shoot, we spent hours afterward debating facial expressions, relationships, and even the meaning of single sentences. We agreed on very little, other than that Fielder—notorious for his meticulous building of worlds—seemed to have finally stumbled into one much stranger than anything he could have conjured. When I ultimately sat down with Fielder for a conversation in late September, any lingering irritation at his pre-interview jitters instantly fell away: For all of his overthinking, lines in the sand, and apparent ambivalence to press, Fielder presented as considerate and genuine. Over nearly an hour and a half, Fielder—in trademark New Balance sneakers and nondescript men’s apparel, a Summit Ice windbreaker in tow—slumped casually on a sofa, seemed to mull my questions earnestly and in good faith, and did the best he possibly could to answer them. Verbal communication, Fielder repeated several times in our conversation, isn’t always easy for him. It’s a quality that’s often put to good use in his work, and his blunt demeanor makes Fielder particularly effective in the role of truth-seeker vis-à-vis Holmes and Evans. The same can’t be said for a sit-down interview, which made my conversation with Fielder all the more endearing in the moment; at least, I told myself, the man was really trying. Our time together concluded at 2:17 pm; I’d been warned beforehand that Fielder had a Zoom meeting at 2:15 pm sharp. “I’m trusting you,” his publicist told me before leaving us alone to talk. I took the entreaty seriously, practically shoving Fielder out of the room as soon as I realized he was running late. This lovely, thoughtful man has a meeting! Days later, a thought gnawed at me: 2:15 pm is an odd time to start a meeting. On a Sunday, no less. I couldn’t shake it. Had the publicist looked me in the eyes and lied? Had Nathan? I considered asking them outright. I’ve never been one for ambiguity, and a journalist craves nothing more than to know what’s real. Then again, people make things up all the time. They present different versions of themselves to different people, obfuscate and perform, and they do it in little ways and sometimes bigger ones. Did it really matter if he’d left for a real meeting or the excuse of one? And hadn’t I spent enough time letting Nathan Fielder make me feel crazy? In the end, I decided that this time it was better not to know. It was better just to trust. And after a second talk with Fielder a few weeks after our first conversation, I learned that Elizabeth Holmes might feel the same way. The interview has been edited for clarity. KATIE DRUMMOND: I have a lot of anxiety about recording interviews. NATHAN FIELDER: Why? About losing the recording? Yeah. OK. You have a backup too. I have two. I would do the same thing. Do you? What? Double-record things? No, but if I had your job, I would. OK. Before we get into it, I just want you to know that I know how important it is for you to preserve the experience of the film. Yes. But you know, some people enjoy knowing what happens. I read this thing where they told people the end of a story, and then they had another group that didn’t know, and then the group that knew the ending said they enjoyed it more. So it could just be a me thing. Maybe it is. But I love being surprised. I love the experience of just sort of not knowing. When this interview comes out, the film will be just out in theaters. But it was a secret for three years, right? Yeah. My understanding is that only a few dozen people knew it was happening. We kept it really small. Secrecy has been a feature of your work before. What made you decide to keep it so under wraps? Why was that important to you? I think, firstly, it was a concern on the subjects’ part. No one knew where they were at first. But while we were shooting there, paparazzi started surrounding the location and all that. So one of the understandings was, we needed to keep it secret because it could affect things with them, and we didn’t want to do anything where our involvement would be a news story or change things with them. In addition to that, I think when stuff comes out about a thing, then the narrative is out there, and it may affect our ability to make the project. We didn’t know who we wanted to talk to or get on camera. We didn’t have a plan when we went in, so we were just like, “It’s best to operate in a place where no one knows it exists.” We thought it would be a net benefit. How many people did you have to lie to about this? I didn’t lie as much as say, “Oh, I can’t talk about this thing I’m working on, but I really want you to see it when it’s out.” People knew I was working on something. My family knew, people I’m close with that are trusted friends and collaborators. And now there’s a teaser out. There’s a trailer. That’s about it. How did you think about the lead-up to the film? Was that strategic in terms of deciding what to put out there and what not to? Is this strategic? I don’t know. I think everyone didn’t really know how to handle this. Even people at A24 didn’t know we were making this for a bit, because we just went and started doing it, and so it wasn’t really on their radar in terms of what it’s gonna look like. Then, they’re the pros on how to release a movie. I think they saw an opportunity in doing it all at once at Telluride. I was like, "Will that be enough time?" Because they normally have a long lead time when they first do these movie things. It was gonna give us five weeks until it was released. Oh, wow. They felt confident in their plan. And then it was a question of what we put out there. We got the sense pretty early on that she’s a very toxic figure to people everywhere, so I understood that we were dealing with material that people were gonna project a lot onto. I think everyone thought that maybe the audience will meet us halfway with some of the stuff we put out. Have you been reading the speculation? Are you reading— Speculation about what? About the film, from everyone who hasn’t seen it. What are people speculating? I haven’t seen. Theories that she’s naked, that you’re naked, that— Oh that. —that you dress up as Elizabeth Holmes, that you become her. I saw an image someone made of you with a blonde wig on. I haven’t seen a lot of that stuff. When this all came out and we did the Telluride Film Festival, my phone was off for that whole night, and then I started looking at some stuff the next day, but there was a lot, and it was a little overwhelming. I couldn’t really engage with everything. I definitely understand that people would project stuff onto a new project that feels like stuff I’ve done in the past. But this is a totally unique thing. It feels, to me, so different than what I’ve done before in the way it came together, in the way it functions, and what we’re able to explore in it. I’ve never done something like this before, but the process was fascinating, and I really enjoyed shooting this way. It was a real freeing and fascinating experience. What was freeing about it? Well, for example, I think a lot of projects usually have to be generated by you. You have a concept, and you go and pitch that concept, and then you have to present a plan to get the money to make it, and then you go and execute it. Things can change while you’re doing it, but usually if they green-light a project, you have to deliver something. Ideally. Yes. You can’t— You seem like someone who plans quite a bit. I mean, I try to. I try to plan, and then I’m always met with the absurdity of me trying to plan too much. I experienced that when I did Nathan for You. I was trying to be like, “OK, we can know where things would go.” But then the best moments were when we’re just totally surprised by something we didn’t expect, and then we end up going in that direction. And the aftermath of that was like, “Why did I think I could predict or control that?” That was part of the inspiration for The Rehearsal—that tendency that I have to want to, like, plan. There is a pressure sometimes of, “you have to deliver something,” so you want to think things through. You can’t just go into something. But with this, because I came into this feeling like the story’s been told about her, I was very interested in meeting her, but I did not see what a film about her or a project about her could be. You and Lance reached out to her initially, right? It was a bit of a both thing, because she and Billy [Evans] had approached A24 with the desire to have their life documented in some way. But no one was attached. It’s just them approaching A24. And I guess the negotiations fell apart because there was nothing to it, really. Months later, I heard that that had happened. So I called A24 and said, “Well, could I meet her?” That was the start of it all. Why her for you? Why did she seem interesting? It’s a goo