Spoilers ahead for You Can See Everything.
You Can See Everything is a documentary like no other. It starts by following Elizabeth Holmes’ last days of freedom, but halfway through, Holmes goes to prison, and the production loses direct contact with her. Then Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim throw a total curveball at the audience by flashing forward a few years, bringing in Amanda Seyfried, and turning the whole thing on its head.
Who is responsible for bringing Seyfried into the project? None other than Emma Stone. In an interview with Vulture, director Oppenheim explained how the connection to Seyfried came about.
Oppenheim had expressed concern about how the documentary would continue or end once Holmes was out of the picture. No one in her life wanted to cooperate with the production either, and then Stone connected them to Seyfried.
Seyfried played Holmes in the Hulu original series Dropout. Her portrayal helped shape many people’s opinions of the Theranos founder.
Fielder and Oppenheim, who are both remarkably skilled at going too far, explained that they planned to record Seyfried’s reaction, and she agreed. Initially, Seyfried was hesitant to be part of the project; she knew Fielder’s work, was a fan, and worried she would be punked too.
At their first meeting, they showed the Mean Girls actress all the footage from the film’s first half. After that, she jumped right in.
The recreations of conversations with Seyfried as Holmes came organically after the actress said she wanted to play her again. The film then takes a major turn. With Holmes in jail, the story relies entirely on Fielder’s recollection of events and Seyfried’s portrayal.
She doesn’t just play Holmes in the reenactments; she becomes an active part of Fielder’s investigation, often offering her own perspective as one of the only people to step into Holmes’ life. By the end, she is asking Fielder the same kinds of questions he asked Holmes, becoming an interviewer in her own right. Without her, the film would not have been nearly as interesting, nuanced, or intricate.
This twist drives the film and some of the documentary’s central questions: Can we ever truly know the truth?
Thanks to Stone, You Can See Everything is the masterpiece that it is, and she earned a “special thanks” in the credits for her efforts.
Stone and Fielder are also good friends and collaborators. They play a married couple on The Curse, a satirical comedy thriller. The series follows the couple as they film their HGTV show while seemingly cursed. After their success with The Curse, Fielder and Stone began planning Checkmate, an adaptation of a book by Ben Mezrich. The story follows the chess scandal involving Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann. Stone also moderated the Q&A panel for the surprise premiere of You Can See Everything at the Telluride Film Festival in September.
You Can See Everything is now playing in theaters.
