Transcript of Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder Keep Us Guessing

It's selling out everywhere.

Is it? 'Cause I was debating with my wife yesterday. I was like, is this really a thing, or is this like a New York Times thing?

No, this is a thing.

No, this is a thing. I have heard strangers on public transit talking about it.

Friends with very little interest in movies mad at me for not taking them to the screening.

Yes.

Yes.

All right, save it for the episode. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. Every once in a while, through a combination of subject matter and clever marketing tactics, a movie becomes a phenomenon long before anyone can even see it. Usually it's a star-studded blockbuster. Think of Oppenheimer or Marty Supreme. What doesn't normally come to mind is a 3-hour documentary. But a few weeks ago, it was the anticipation of a documentary kicked off with a coy trailer. Why would I deceive you?

There's no—

there's no reason for me to do that. That touched off a cultural wildfire.

All right. Okay, good shot.

And sent my colleagues film critic Alyssa Wilkinson, and critic-at-large Jason Zinoman racing to a secure screening room in Midtown Manhattan in order to watch it. What they experienced—

My head is still sort of spinning.

Floored them.

I just feel like in these people, he sort of met his match.

It is emotional. It's romantic. It's wildly intimate for a documentary.

You get to the end and you're like, hang on. What have I been watching this whole time?

But maybe the most intriguing thing about the documentary, and really the source of all this hullabaloo, is who made it. The comedian Nathan Fielder, whose shows are known for blurring the line between reality and fiction, and the documentary's subject, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose career blurred the lines between reality and fiction. So today, I speak to Alyssa and Jason about why this documentary called You Can See Everything is, in their estimation, a bona fide breakthrough. It's Sunday, October 18th. Alyssa, Jason, welcome to The Sunday Daily.

Great to be here.

Great to be here again.

So, I'm just going to start off by conceding that I have not seen the movie You Can See Everything. That's going to be very much the center of this conversation. And so, I just want to get out of the way the ironclad pledge that we are all going to be making to each other, and most importantly, to the listener, that we are not going to spoil this film, we're not going to tell you everything that you can see in this. Do we agree?

You can't hear everything.

That's right.

Yeah.

I want an oral form. Alyssa?

Oh, absolutely. I promise.

Jason?

It will be hard, but I pledge.

I pledge.

Okay.

We can also edit it if you falter. But thank you for signing the oath. My first question, Is this worthy of all of the hype and excitement that it has engendered in this world?

It's a very tall bar, is the first thing.

Yeah.

Because it's hard to remember something that has generated this much hype. That said, I'm gonna say unequivocally, yes, it does live up to the hype. It's unlike anything I've seen before.

I write a documentary column for the paper every week, so I think it's safe to say that I see more documentaries than most people. And this is unusual and excellent. I'm sort of expecting this film to— and this sounds like hype, but I believe it— to lodge itself in one of those greatest documentary categories.

Whoa!

I think that this film is not just about what it's about, but it's about documentary too. And that, I think, is an extra level that really makes it stand out in the field of many, many, many documentaries that come out every year.

I think also, there's all sorts of judges of what makes a movie worthwhile or good. One of which is, does it stick with you? And do you keep thinking about it? Do your opinion of it change? I had that feeling. And I—

You have not been able to get it out of your head.

Yes. I've thought about it a lot. And I also think it will be a discourse object. for much longer than the sort of the original, you know, when the reviews come out, et cetera. And part of that has to do with Nathan Fielder, part of that has to do with the genre, but a lot of it has to do with Elizabeth Holmes. And I think that on the Elizabeth Holmes of it all, it's gonna be, I think, polarizing.

It's got the juice.

It's got legs.

Yes.

So, I think a lot of people hearing this right now are gonna be asking themselves why this story is being retold at all, because it's been told so many times already. But, From what I gather, you're both saying it's the combination of both Elizabeth Holmes, her story, and who Nathan Fielder is as a performer that makes this project unique and special and worth retelling.

Yes!

Right.

Correct.

So, Alyssa, at heart, with your no-spoiler pledge still 100% intact, what is this movie about?

So it is, I guess, ostensibly and to some degree about Elizabeth Holmes. And Elizabeth Holmes, if people don't remember, she dropped out of Stanford and started this blood testing company called Theranos, the idea of which was that you would be able to run a huge battery of tests from a pinprick of blood.

Right.

And she built—

That was her breakthrough. It was just, like, the tiniest little blood. It was gonna be a revolution in kind of all medical testing.

Right.

You could just go down to the drugstore and get tested for everything all at once. And, you know, this made her an incredibly popular figure for a while. She was on the COVID of magazines. She became the world's youngest female self-made billionaire. And Theranos at some point was valued at $10 billion. But this all came crashing down because our colleague, the investigative journalist John Carreyrou, uncovered that these machines didn't work.

Right. Famously.

So this all came crashing down. And in 2022, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors.

So she kind of disappears.

Well, she sort of disappears, but she also becomes the subject of many a pop culture object. So there's been the Bad Blood podcast about her with Kerry Ruehl. There also was a documentary called The Inventor. And—

Oh, there was The Dropout.

And there was The Dropout, which is a Hulu miniseries for which Amanda Seyfried, who plays Elizabeth Holmes in it, won an Emmy for her performance. So she has sort of stayed in memory as a character. who exists. But she herself kind of dropped out of sight. And that is where Nathan and his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, come in.

Okay. Well, before we get to this movie, I think we have to describe the work of Nathan Fielder, because he's not always been mainstream. And we can even debate, I hope, in this conversation, whether he is even mainstream now. Perhaps this movie's gonna mark that but how would you describe what he's been up to, up until now?

Well, I mean, one thing that defines him is he's sort of boundary-blurring and genre-crossing. So, he's tricky to describe, but he's Canadian, grew up in Vancouver. He loved comedy and magic as a kid, both of which show up in his work.

Like literal, physical magic show magic?

He was a child magician. And one of his first— I think, you know, his first 2 jobs are, I think, important context.

He—

He was a segment producer on the Canadian version of American Idol, Canadian Idol. And was that a snotty American laugh that we all did? Silly name.

It's a slightly amusing place to begin one's career in television when you end up in documentary.

Yes.

Yes. And I think that that is a through line through his whole work, is an interest in reality television and the the authenticity or contrivances of it. And I also— my— I suspect he developed a lot of skills about editing from that show, which show up in all his work, including in the Elizabeth Holmes movie. Um, and then he went to work for a show called This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which is sort of the Canadian Daily Show.

I sat down with relationship psychology expert Dr. Marianne Fisher.

The reason that younger women tend to prefer older men And you're starting to see him use the tools of interviewing real people.

What about younger men and older women?

And the tools of documentary to make comedy. I don't—

I don't know if there'd be as many evolutionary benefits to that. I really like your shirt. It's really pretty. Thanks.

And that leads him to the show that first brought him to some fame, which was a Comedy Central show called Nathan for You that premiered in 2000. Right.

And we should be clear on the emphasis. Nathan for You.

Right. Nathan for You. Yes.

My name is Nathan Fielder, and I graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades.

The premise is that he is going to help struggling businesses increase their profits, get more attention. And typically they would have some small problem that he would have some outlandish, absurd solution for.

You're gonna guarantee 8-minute delivery or you get a free pizza. Yeah?

No, I don't think so.

'Cause why? You can't deliver in 8 minutes, right?

Of course not. Even I can't cook the pizza for 8 minutes.

That's the point.

Yes.

You'll always be late, but the free pizza they get will be an inch big.

Based on the biography that you have supplied us with so far, he is wholly unqualified to be providing this counsel to the small businesses he encounters.

Well, he does have a degree in business, so he actually wasn't lying about that. But no, he's probably not qualified to do this work, but he certainly carries himself with this authority. And I will say, he's often on a very crude level effective in things like getting attention, creating a media circus, getting customers in, even though he's being absurd.

Well, just talk about that, Alyssa, for a minute. The absurdity and what makes this show a breakthrough for Nathan Fielder.

I think it's a breakthrough in part 'cause he's on Comedy Central now and not just Canadian TV. But I think it also establishes for us a couple things that mark him, one of which is he commits really hard to the bit. And his solutions are so elaborate to problems that, you know, that these business owners are having.

Like, if you look at the gas rebate episode, which is the episode that Elizabeth Holmes saw that made her invite Nathan Fielder into her home, right?

That was—

she—

Good segue, as we say.

Yeah. That means a lot coming from you, Michael.

So I'm gonna pause, and when we come back from the break, I wanna hear about this gas rebate episode And how it sets this film into motion. We'll be right back. Jason, tell us about this episode of Nathan for You about a gas station rebate.

So, I went back and looked at this episode from the first season of Nathan for You, the gas station episode, because it seemed to be The only piece of Nathan's work Elizabeth Holmes was familiar with. And in that episode, he's trying to help an owner of a gas station called Savon Gas get more customers.

So I want you to charge $1.75 per gallon.

You know what is utopia?

Yeah. It's in your mind. You're not gonna see $1.75 gasoline anymore.

Only in the pictures.

Well, listen, listen to me. No, no, no, no. You give reasonable— No, I am being— I am reasonable. You didn't let me finish.

Okay.

After rebate.

So he says, yeah, but here's the trick. We'll say to get this rebate, you have to climb a mountain.

On the top of the mountain.

Yeah, that's a good tricky way to make money. Most people don't want to do it, and you'll be fine, right? So then he has several people who do want to do it.

To be honest, I didn't expect so many people to want to do the hike.

And then he goes up the mountain with these people. And I'm gonna give the short version of this, 'cause this is the part that I think is remarkable. It's a complete fraud.

I began to doubt that any of these 8 determined cheapskates would drop out before reaching the peak of the mountain. You might think I'd be nervous that Savon Gas was going to lose money, but what I had told no one is that this was about more than just helping a gas station. I set out to create the world's first perfect rebate. A completely legal rebate that absolutely no one claims.

They climb the whole mountain.

When I began this thing, I never thought that I would meet 3 people.

They waste their whole day. They have lives. They have— presumably they have, you know, jobs, right?

With so much free time that they'd be willing to camp out on the top of a mountain with a complete stranger just to save $13 on gas.

They were completely conned, like you might say some people involved with Theranos were completely conned, right? And then at the end of it—

And those 3 people turned out to be 3 of the most fantastic people I've ever met.

He says, yeah, but you know...

We've all gained something even more valuable than a rebate. Friendship. Amen.

It's really all about friendship.

Right?

Now, these people really did make a connection. They all seemed kind of lonely like Nathan. They really did— they went camping like you do when you're a kid. They really seemed to enjoy themselves. And is— when he says friendship, it seems ironic and he's making fun of it, but it also I've come to believe that his real point is to say that even if you get no rebate, you can make this human connection, and emotionally, that really is real and matters. And, you know, take it where you can get it.

Right. And another way of saying this is that manipulation isn't inherently awful.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, there's another famous scene in another episode. It's a very long story, but essentially, Nathan casts a play, and he asks an actress to run lines with him. And it really quickly devolves into this very weird moment. Basically, in a kind of quintessential Nathan Fielder moment, he stares and pauses and tells the actress to run her line.

Look into my eyes.

Which is, I love you.

And say, I love you. I love you. Okay. Now, I'm not believing that at this point. So say it again.

Then he says, let's try it again.

I love you.

And he says, try it again.

Again. I love you.

And he has it over and over and over.

I love you.

Again.

I love you.

Again. I love you.

It creates this incredibly awkward moment to watch, but also awkward for them.

Again.

But then it segues into an actual genuine emotion.

I love you.

He actually sheds a tear. You have tears in your eyes.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh my God. Sorry.

It's one of these moments that moves from awkward to funny to then something else.

Right. And suddenly you're left with the question, which I've had in all the times I've watched Nathan Fielder content, of what is really going on inside this person? Is it possible that what he just experienced was the love he has craved his whole life, this potentially broken man who somehow is reinventing documentary? Or is everything he does a performance?

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Is there any verisimilitude available at all in anything he's doing?

And is there a difference between those 2 things? I've been thinking of him more and more as kind of a performance artist asking questions about the nature of reality as it's depicted on screens, because his work gets more bizarre from there.

So, we're moving a little bit through time now.

Yeah. So, my personal favorite of his shows is The Rehearsal, which premiered in 2022, was just kind of the best thing I've ever seen on TV, and then had a second season last year. And the concept of this sort of springs from Nathan for You, which is he's going to help ordinary people who have some kind of difficult thing coming up, a difficult conversation with an estranged parent, family member or wanting to ask somebody out, he's going to rehearse it with them. And he's going to, as much as possible, create the circumstances in which they would have that conversation. And so, in the first episode, he's going to help a man who needs to tell a friend this secret that he's been keeping from her.

This is the trivia night episode?

The trivia night, the first one. He asks this guy, where are you going to have this conversation? He said, oh, we're going to have it at the Alligator Lounge. And in order to rehearse this conversation, he doesn't just say, well, why don't we meet up somewhere and we'll talk about it? He actually builds a full-scale, exact replica of the bar in a warehouse.

Clock now ticking, I invited Cor into my secret warehouse to begin his rehearsal.

And what we're seeing here is him, like, playing with an HBO-sized budget, which explains a lot of this show. But he's taking that commitment to the bit and really extending it.

Right. Literally supersizing it.

quite supersizing it. I mean, this is a perfect replica.

Every detail was meticulously replicated this time.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.

This spice rack, it's the exact spices they have. The garlic.

Yeah.

The basil. This chair is an exact— these rugs. Wow.

And even that's exactly the way it is.

Down to, like, balloons that are half-deflated, sort of. floating around in the background.

When you show up on the actual night, it'll feel just like this.

Yeah.

I think there's, there's also something else that starts to emerge, which is an interest in the ethics of what he's doing. Um, you learn in this episode, before he creates the replica for the bar, he creates a replica for the apartment of the guy he's supposedly trying to help.

Like, this conversation's going pretty well, right?

Okay.

I mean, do you think so? I don't know.

So far, so good.

So that's no accident. Everything that's happened so far today, I've rehearsed it dozens of times. These exact words in a replica of your home.

And how does he get that replica?

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the gas company came by because of a leak in your building? Yes.

He basically snuck into this guy's house, invaded his privacy, took photos.

And with the help of a fake you, I could practice every single permutation of this interaction and have a plan for it. I mean, do you think I should say something about the doors?

And then recreated his apartment. And while he's doing rehearsals for him, he's doing rehearsals for Nathan Fielder preparing to talk to this guy.

Hi, Nathan.

Hi. Hey.

Nathan.

Hi.

Nathan.

Hi.

Oh, Door City over here, huh?

And then you kind of think every episode's gonna be that, but then this show veers off in a wild direction that has to do with seemingly Nathan's own kind of fears about the future, about perhaps having a partner, becoming a father.

Hmm.

So he's kind of working out his own life issues while he's on this show working to help others figure out their life issues. And it sounds like his work clearly touches on what is ethical, what is moral in storytelling. And I think to a certain degree, his answer is sort of like, whatever it takes.

Yeah.

Or—

well, this is why I keep thinking of him, you know, as a performance artist. It's like he keeps kind of poking in different directions with this. I think we tend to see whatever we see on screen it just kind of got there, and we believe what we're looking at. And as someone who started in reality TV, and talks about that in the second season of The Rehearsal, he—

Is showing you all the ugly bits and the seams and what really is required.

And he's activating the audience too. He's pulling us out of our passivity and making us— maybe we're going to be angry at him, maybe we're going to be laughing, but we're going to have a reaction to what we're watching in a way that if we just plop down and watch a random documentary on Netflix, we might just kind of not think about all the filmmaking choices, the ethical questions that went into making that.

He's asking us to be deeply, deeply alert to all the dynamics of this because he's literally showing them, exploring them, testing them, exposing them.

I think it's also— I mean, I'll say for myself, and I'm a huge Nathan Fielder fan, but there are times when I think, especially early in his career, when I do find his humor cruel and unethical. There are certainly some in Nathan for You that feel less a part of the tradition of documentary and more a part of the tradition of the prank show.

Yes.

Right. But what I think is— what's interesting and admirable about Nathan Fielder is he confronts that critique the more deep into his career he gets. I think in The Rehearsal, certainly season 1, he has a character, this woman who wants to have a— see if she can have a kid, and she wants to rehearse it. That eventually, as it often does with Nathan Fielder, becomes more about him and him wanting to have a kid and rehearsing it than it is it is about her. And in that process, he gets a fake version of her. This is where her name is Angela. You hear this critique in the voice of her fake Angela.

Why are you even here, huh? What's the real reason, honestly?

Okay, well, why are you here, huh? Why are you doing this?

Are you—

are you really trying to help me, or am I the silly part that you talk about, huh? Is my life the joke? Do you sit here with your friends at the end of the day laughing at me?

And then he defends himself kind of pathetically.

No, you're not the joke. Not at all. No one's the joke. The situations are funny, but interesting too. But this can be, like, the opportunity to raise your kids in a— Just shut up!

And it's a moment where it's— I wouldn't call it funny, but you start to think, oh, he's after something bigger here.

And what's that bigger thing he's after?

I think he's— earnestly examining the morality of what— of not only what he's doing, but of a certain kind of art. And I don't think he lets himself off the hook. I don't think he always succeeds.

Do you want to feel something real?

Yeah.

That's sad. You never will.

But I think he also believes there's a deep pleasure in being manipulated, in being lied to. That's, I think, in some ways, one of the hardest, most transgressive ideas, because no one likes to be lied to. But I think all of art, to some degree, involves deception. And surprise is a key part of any effective kind of art, certainly comedy. And part of that surprise depends on sending you one way, going another.

Misdirection.

Misdirection, which, to go to magic, which I'm sure we'll talk more about, because that's a theme that we talked about that he begins his life with and is very much a big theme of this new movie. And I think it's a very challenging idea that we enjoy to be lied to. We enjoy to be manipulated. But I also think there's some— a deep truth in it.

We'll be right back.

Okay, so now that we are quite well-versed in the ethically murky performance art/comedy that Nathan Fielder has been purveying, that is still somehow deeply vulnerable and human. How does Fielder take that style and turn it on to Elizabeth Holmes?

Well, it's bizarre, but with a little over 30 days before she goes to prison—

So, I know you guys invited me to stay here.

Elizabeth Holmes and partner, Billy Evans, invite Nathan Fielder into her home.

Does any part of you worry about me being here 24/7?

I don't think so.

To live with them?

Yes, to live with them.

But what if I see something that makes you look bad?

And the setup reminds me of a reality show. It reminds me of, you know, we picked a few strangers to live in a house, stop be polite, start getting real.

The real world.

Seattle. Except, as opposed to 7, you know, Real World cast members, you have Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, and a ton of camera people.

And there's a 3rd character who's really important, which is Billy Evans, her partner, the father of her children. And he is always present in the film as well. And that becomes more and more important as we watch the movie.

Would you say it's accurate to say he is a much less gifted performer than these other 2?

Yeah. Or I don't know if he would think that, but I definitely think that you have a— you feel like you understand him better by the end.

Well, let's just linger on that for a moment. What a curious decision this entire project is for both parties. I mean, This is a big, big leap for him. And it's a somewhat curious decision for her.

Yes.

She's had 2 children, which has delayed her going to prison in the first place. Right.

Perhaps not an unrelated—

That's what a lot of people thought when she started having children was, oh, how convenient is this? But then that depends on your idea of who she is. Is she a master manipulator? Is she, as some people say, a pathological liar? Is something else going on there? And that is sort of the question of the film.

You really feel you did nothing wrong? I did not. So where did things get lost? Like, how are you where you are right now? I wish I knew, you know?

I don't know.

I don't—

I don't feel like I understand that.

It is a little obvious that this is in Nathan Fielder's wheelhouse very much, because he's just willing to ask questions about human behavior that other filmmakers tend not to ask, and certainly not of their subject.

Give me just an example of that.

So, for instance, there's a scene quite early on where Nathan's just kind of hanging out in their kitchen, and they're cooking, and something occurs. And it— when you watch it, it's sort of a normal interaction that people might have with one another, but he zeroes He really hones in on it. The camera comes right in, and we're seeing it. So, we know this is significant. And he asks them, why did you do that? And then he keeps saying, why did you do that? And they have a very revealing interaction at that moment. Whereas most people might not have picked up on that. It's just color in the background in most documentaries.

Right. And in most documentaries, the whole point is to kind of let life occur. And that's not at all what's happening here.

No, I mean, he's sort of a— he's inserted himself into an interaction that would be normal life. And he continually does that throughout the film without any apparent discomfort.

Mm-hmm.

Totally willing to sit in discomfort. And we've seen that in all of his work. Discomfort is not an issue for him. So that, you know, that's kind of fascinating. And then also, you know, in many ways, he's examining the question of, as Jason was saying, of being deceived, of the power Perhaps pleasure of being deceived.

It is in Nathan Fielder's wheelhouse. That's completely true. At the same time, he's not a legal expert. He's not a scientific expert. He's not— he doesn't demonstrate in this film a mastery of the facts of the case. And quite early on, he says to her, you picked me, who's a comedian, basically saying, did you pick me because I'm not gonna give you the hard-hitting journalistic questions? She didn't pick a journalist.

What does she say in response, if I can ask?

I mean, she's a genius at saying nothing. And you're left with this question, is she the most naive human being in the world or the most cynical? And my take coming out was there's nothing in between.

Well, so it seems pretty clear, and here I know we'll walk up to the edges of spoilerdom, that these are 2 masters of— maybe manipulation isn't the right word, but They are very much in control of information and how it's going to be presented, when it's going to be presented. And so, I think it seems safe to say that this movie is 2 kings, queens of that particular realm going toe-to-toe.

Completely. I think, look, one thing Alyssa said about her having kids is really remarkable, is how she uses the kids in this movie.

How does she use the kids in the movie?

They're almost like the armor for her. I mean, if I would say, what's her magic trick? What's she doing? Right? We all know these horrible things about her. She's a pariah. Right? How is she going to resuscitate her reputation? It's not easy. Right? Well, taking the cynical view, she's going to show us her as a mother. The kids are in so many frames of this movie. Right? They're all over the place. Show her as a daughter, as a partner. Right? And so, I think what she's trying to do, or I think one might conclude she's trying to do is humanize herself. And Nathan allows her to make that case. And my first reaction to this movie was that it put her in a much more sympathetic light than I would've expected. How could it not? But then the more I thought about it, the less I was committed to that idea.

And I think that that is, again, like a little bit of the point. I watched the film and went back and forth continually on what I was looking at.

Mm-hmm.

Just constantly. And like Jason, I kind of walked out the door, had an idea of what I think I saw, and then I have been waffling on it for the last week. Is it— is it real? Is it not real? What does real mean in this case?

One of Nathan's tools is how he asks questions. He's a great interviewer. And one of his tools is sitting in this discomfort. And when you— when it's silent, people fill this void. And if you ask the same question over and over again, people sort of heighten, and they say things that maybe either are more funny or more true. And in the trailer, what you see is he's trying, he's looking at her, and he's saying, are you for real?

You're being real right now?

And she says—

Always being real.

Always for real.

Yeah, she doesn't just say— this happens, I think, several times in the movie where he uncovers her saying something that seems on some level absurd. And they're juxtaposed with this giant absurdity at the core of her story, which is this fact that this machine didn't work. In fact— well, I guess I won't—

I want to—

No, we won't go there.

I won't go there. I won't go there.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Well, let me ask you guys, by the end of the movie, who seems to have gotten the best of the other?

So, you don't know exactly, although there is an answer the movie kind of gives you.

Which we're not gonna—

Which we're not gonna say. But whether or not you believe what it says is part of the whole experience of watching it, and very intentional. I think what makes this a great documentary is that it is living somewhere between a comedic documentary, a dramatic documentary, an investigative documentary. There's all these kinds of levels to it, and they're all happening at once. And they call into question the project of documentary entirely.

Mm-hmm.

The idea of taking the real stuff of the world and turning it into into entertainment and what the creators of documentaries are really doing when they make a documentary in the first place.

Hmm.

So I want to end our exploration of Nathan Fielder by situating him and the kind of documentary work he's doing in a larger context. I mean, as we're talking about in this conversation, it's not really a very clear genre he's occupying. The kind of manipulative, self-aware, documentarian-inserting-himself version of documentary doesn't necessarily have a name. But talk about the world he inhabits. Who else is in it? Who matters? So, Alyssa, where does he fit in?

So, Nathan Fielder's work fits into a really long tradition in documentary of people who start going in one direction and end in a completely completely different place. So, first, I think we have to talk about Lance Oppenheim, who's Nathan's co-director on this. He is a documentarian who's made work like Sperm World. He made a series about Renaissance Faire. He also directed the fiction film Prime Time that's out right now. And what is interesting when you watch a Lance Oppenheim documentary is that he often frames protagonists, real people, as if they're characters in a movie. Occasionally, he will show you a character, and then he'll show something else as if they're thinking about it, which really walks up to the line of what is nonfiction. He really brings that style to this film. There's a ton of zooms. There's a ton of very close cropping. So, we're really looking close at these people's faces. But he also is very willing to train his camera on people who seem a bit strange. And to some extent, Nathan Fielder is doing exactly that thing. It's just that he's inserting into the situation and provoking the strange reactions. So it makes perfect sense to me that the two of them working together would turn out this film.

Okay, that's Lance Oppenheim. Who else?

Well, I definitely think we have to discuss John Wilson. He made this HBO show, How To with John Wilson, which is little documentaries with a lot of B-roll about how to do tasks. But secretly, it's really about humanity. He just made this documentary, The History of Concrete.

Do you ever think about concrete?

No.

No.

Exploring basically, like, bureaucracy and infrastructure. And it's great.

Now, will you sell this presentation to somebody? We're gonna try to. Yeah.

But he's sort of exploring the world through his filmmaking.

It's kind of hard to get people excited about concrete, I'm finding. Is it?

Yeah.

All of these guys are, you might say, heirs to or students of Ross McElwee's work, whose film Sherman's March is 40 years old, and it was just restored, and it did really well when it got released in theaters.

2 years ago, I was about to begin shooting a documentary film on the lingering effects of Sherman's March on the South.

It starts out with him saying that he's gotten a grant to follow Sherman's March.

And I stopped off in New York from Boston, where I live, to stay for a few days with the woman I'd been seeing. But when I arrived, she told me she'd just decided to go back to her former boyfriend.

But it turns out to be about all of his anxieties about his singleness. And we basically just meet all his ex-girlfriends on this journey.

So instead of being an exploration of one of the most kind of heinous acts of military conquest in American history, it becomes an exploration of the director's personal life.

Yeah, you learn almost nothing about Sherman's March, and it was never the point in the first place.

I'm gonna add just one other idea to that, which is that In a movie like Sherman's March, you have— it's a documentary that presents itself to be about the world, about this important historical event, and it ends up being about somebody's navel. Right? And there's an aspect of memoir to a lot of these filmmakers that they're— it's about something, but it's really about a portrait of themselves. What Nathan Fielder, I think, has done, and he's not the only one, but maybe no one has done this better, is he's taken this idea of making something about the world, which then refracts back into your navel, and then keeps pushing back out through your navel, back out to the world. So if you look at his—

That's really beautifully said.

His career, he started doing these prank shows, and then with The Rehearsal, he started to go look at being a father. And now he is looking at Elizabeth Holmes, one of the most notorious figures of our time. And It's an incredibly difficult thing to tell this story through himself, but also not being purely self-indulgent. And I think this is where the movie might be divisive, is how much does he get out of his own navel? How much do we learn about Elizabeth Holmes at the end of the day?

If it's also as much about him.

Correct. Correct. And I think that once people see the movie, that will be a really interesting argument. Hmm.

What's interesting to me about what Nathan Fielder's up to, and I found this in John Wilson's work too, is that there's just a lot of authenticity to the documentarian putting themself so forcefully in the center of things. When you log onto the streaming services these days and you watch a documentary that you know Taylor Swift has authorized and told which cuts can be in and which can't be, you sort of know you're being manipulated, and the authenticity is pretty limited. But there's a lot of kind of incidental revelations that seem to come your way in the work of someone like Nathan Fielder. And maybe I'm overstating that, but it feels like there's a kind of a deeper, more unintended truth that arrives.

Yeah.

I also think that you're onto something, which is that the audience is very cynical about and they should be, about documentaries right now, that so many of them are paid commercials. And what I see Nathan Fielder doing in this movie, I was thinking about this, it reminds me of what Penn and Teller did to magic. Penn and Teller came along and they said, all magic is bunk. All magic is fake. That's how they start their show. And then they take you behind the scenes of how this trick is actually done.

Mm-hmm.

Right? And then they trick— fool you. And it turns out that the authenticity is the misdirection. Exposing the fraud, exposing the fake, that's the trick. And I think what he— the reason he does that is precisely because people are so understandably cynical about these documentary formats, and they already begin— you know, these are people right now, they've grown up on reality television, they've grown up on these contrivances, they've grown up on not believing the editing, And so, I think you have to— I think what Nathan Fielder believes is you've got to do something extra to earn that authenticity back.

So that you can then manipulate.

Exactly. Yes, yes.

Exactly. I agree.

Is it fair to say that this film, and what Fielder has become, is advancing the form? This form that I know you have spent so much of your career thinking about and caring about?

I think that judging from the response to this film, people's excitement for it, the sort of internet meltdown when the trailer came out, I think it's fair to say that it's putting the form in front of people who might not otherwise flock to a more esoteric documentary. It's— and it's entertaining, and people are going to be talking about it. I think we're going to be talking about it for a long time. So in that way, I think that it's a huge step forward. for the form, and I'm really excited about that myself.

Yes. Yes. No, I think you see a huge expansion of the ambition of this form that it— not just documentary, this particular kind of documentary, but also this specific kind of comedy, which uses the real world and documentary, that he— as he's shown over and over again, this kind of comedy can reveal oneself. It can reveal the world. It can be not just funny, but it can be emotional. It can be tender. It can be— it can portray people in a complexity that you can't in a piece of journalism. This slightly borderline unethical prank humor can actually mature into something that is really challenging and a complex work of art.

Well, Alyssa and Jason, thank you very much. Thank you for honoring the pledge.

Of course.

We kept our word. And thank you for your time.

Thank you. Thank you.

If you are not yet a Times subscriber, we have some news for you. You can enjoy full access to The Times without a paywall for 30 days. All you have to do is download the New York Times app to get your first month completely free. And if you're already a Times subscriber, thank you. This episode was produced by Laina Richards, with help from Alex Barron. It was edited by Wendy Doerr. It contains music from Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Has production assistance from Dahlia Haddad and was engineered by Rowan Nemisto. That's it for The Daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.