Nathan Fielder’s new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is called You Can See Everything. For thirty-four days before Holmes reported to prison, Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim essentially moved in with Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans. They filmed as much as sixteen hours a day, using three cameras that captured virtually anything happening in the house.
Holmes and Evans wanted it that way; it was their idea, one they approached A24 Studios with. Their ‘pitch’ was that the public story about Elizabeth Holmes had become a caricature and that, with all the access, Fielder would see the real person underneath it. Radical transparency, they called it. Let the cameras run. Ask anything. See everything. Quite possibly realize she was innocent after all.
Radical Transparency, No Evidence
In its almost three hour running time there is almost no mention of evidence, it’s all Holmes, her kids, Billy (they got together after her indictment), and Fielder. Theranos is discussed in general as an idea, a failed concept, without any details.
Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s book (he loved the movie and is on record as suggesting that it skip Best Documentary and be considered for Best Picture) that methodically follows the collapse of Theranos, doesn’t exist in the movie. Neither, for that matter, does the trial where federal prosecutors spent months introducing emails, financial information, internal documents and witness testimony before a jury convicted Holmes of fraud. The movie is people talking about what happened at the end, after the conviction, after the sentencing. But never directly, aside from Holmes saying she was innocent. All the other talk is about memories, feelings, and trying to figure out what someone really meant by a specific statement, sometimes about why they used a certain word – because words can change everything.
Everyone Has a Story and Nobody Has Opened the Files
It looks remarkably like the beginning of a business dispute: everyone has a story, and nobody has opened the files yet.
Every new client arrives with a narrative. The issue(s) are, of course, always different but their story is usually clear and coherent – largely because the person telling it has lived with it for months, and has already explained it repeatedly to spouses, friends, accountants and anyone else willing to listen. They have a narrative.
That narrative has become dogma, set in stone. Which is fine because we haven’t seen any evidence yet, we’re getting an idea, the basic storyline.
Listen to the Narrative, Then Ask Questions
Fielder is dealing with this almost in reverse. In an interview with WIRED he said he read Bad Blood before meeting Holmes and, as filming continued, listened to the podcast about the trial and kept cramming on the underlying case. In other words, he already knew the evidence and then spent twelve, sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day listening to the narrative. He admits that without what he already knew, he would have thought Holmes was simply an “affable, soft-spoken, kind person.”
That distinction became important pretty quickly. Fielder says there were moments when Holmes or Evans would say something that set off what he described as the “something’s off about this” part of his brain. Then – and he does this really well – he pushes back in such a way as to keep the conversation going without it spinning out of control. His rule – apparently one of his few – was that he and the crew couldn’t let Holmes and Evans “run whatever show” they wanted.
That is, more or less, what a lawyer is supposed to be doing during those first meetings with a client. Listen to the narrative, absolutely. Let them tell the story in the order that makes sense to them. Figure out who everybody is and why they believe what they believe. Then you ask questions, then you ask for the documents. Then you ask more questions.
“I’m Not Sure What You’re Really Asking Here”
Holmes has what looks like a tell. More than once when Fielder gets too close to something, she responds with some variation of, “I’m not sure what you’re really asking here.” Every time she said it, viewers could only think: she knows exactly what he is asking and exactly why he is asking it.
Sincere Witnesses, Polished Memories
An utterly amazing thing about the movie: knowing all the history behind the Theranos case, having read Bad Blood (in which Holmes did some despicable things far beyond taking money from rich people) did not protect Fielder from the story Holmes was telling him. At the end of each day he and the crew would talk through what they had just seen. Fielder says he would start out believing he had a “very clear idea” of what had happened, only to discover that Oppenheim, the cinematographer, the camera operator and the sound engineer had all seen the conversations completely differently.
A witness can be completely sincere and still be wrong about what happened. Memories get polished. Motives get assigned. Conversations that lasted ninety seconds acquire paragraphs of explanation. A business partner who once made a bad decision becomes someone who was “always planning this.” An email that looks terrible becomes perfectly understandable after twenty minutes of context supplied by the person who wrote it – in hindsight.
The Documents Were There First
There comes a time when you have to stop listening to a story and start opening files. They may not tell the whole story either, but they have one enormous advantage over everybody sitting around the conference table: they were created before anybody knew there would someday be a story to tell.
For a business owner heading into a dispute, that means gathering the files before the first meeting rather than after it: the company agreement or shareholder agreement, the contracts at issue, the financials, and the emails and texts – all of them, including, and especially, the ones that look terrible. Don’t delete anything, don’t ‘clean up’ a folder, and don’t sit down to write your own summary of what happened for the file. Texas courts can sanction a party for destroying evidence once litigation is reasonably anticipated (the Texas Supreme Court set out the rules in Brookshire Bros. v. Aldridge), and a memo written after the fact is just one more narrative.
Welcome to the World of a Litigator
That may be what makes Fielder’s movie so fascinating. He went into Holmes’ house knowing the documented story, then spent more than a month immersed in another narrative. By the end, despite three cameras covering almost the entire house and hundreds of hours of footage, he still could not entirely explain what he had experienced. He told WIRED that he knows Holmes’ tendencies extraordinarily well but still cannot tell whether she is consciously lying, believes what she is saying, or has constructed something more complicated for herself – like an alternate reality.
Welcome to the world of a litigator, Nathan.
Talk to Hopkins Centrich
Every client who walks in has a story, and we listen to all of it. Then we ask for the documents, and then we ask more questions. If a business dispute is starting to take shape, call our litigation team before the narrative is set in stone. Time is not your ally.