Holmes Gave Three Years of Cameras. The Makers Got an Exit.

Before Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim pointed a camera at Elizabeth Holmes, Fielder negotiated a contract clause with A24 that let them walk away and deliver nothing, according to Oppenheim. ^[1][4]

I think that clause, which the filmmakers call a "kill switch," is the most candid thing to come out of documentary in years. I also think it is uncomfortable, and that the discomfort is the point.

The film is You Can See Everything. Fielder and Oppenheim directed it, and it opened in theaters on October 16, 2026. ^[2] A24 describes it as beginning 34 days before Holmes, the Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors, was due to go to prison, and following a three-year journey from there. ^[2][4]

The arithmetic nobody shows

I spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent, and the calculation behind every trip was the same. You go somewhere, you spend someone else's money, and you hope that the place gives you a story.

Sometimes it does not. Then you quietly file something smaller and nobody outside the office ever knows how close you came to filing nothing.

Documentary has the same arithmetic, with a longer fuse and bigger bills. A filmmaker approaches real people, asks for access, and spends months or years deciding whether those people can be turned into a film. The audience sees only the survivors of that process. Every finished documentary arrives wearing the look of inevitability, as though the story had been waiting for the camera.

The kill switch drags the calculation into daylight. Oppenheim has said that Fielder negotiated with A24 for a provision allowing the two to abandon the project if they could not find a story. ^[1][4] Fielder has said he told the studio he did not know the angle but felt there might be something worth exploring, and that he wanted the ability to deliver nothing if it did not work. ^[1]

That is a remarkable sentence to say to a distributor. Most people who pitch a film say the opposite.

The best case for the switch

Let me give the clause its due, because it deserves it.

The Holmes story had been told many times. Oppenheim named a popular podcast, the book Bad Blood, an Alex Gibney documentary and the Hulu series The Dropout, and said this helped explain Fielder's concern. ^[1][4] A fifth treatment of a famous fraud is not obviously a gift to the world. A filmmaker who suspects that, and says so before taking the money, is behaving better than one who shoots first and discovers a thesis in the edit.

Oppenheim also said the provision changed the project by giving them room to explore without pressure. ^[1][4] This is the real argument for it.

A contractual duty to deliver a film is a standing temptation to find one, to bend whatever you have shot into a shape that satisfies the delivery date. Take away the duty and curiosity gets to be curious. If the story is not there, you leave it alone.

And the story, by their account, nearly was not there. Early in filming, Oppenheim said, he and Fielder disagreed about what they were seeing in the home Holmes shared with her partner, Billy Evans. They could not agree whether the behavior was performance or authentic. In time they decided that the disagreement was the material. ^[4]

After they found the ambiguity compelling, Oppenheim said, they committed to making the film. ^[1][4]

Oppenheim has described his earlier documentary work as using cinematic technique to put the audience inside a subject's point of view. This time, he said, the aim was to bring the audience into the filmmakers' own experience of uncertainty. ^[3]

That is a coherent idea, and it is hard to see how it could be had without a bailout clause. A film about not knowing what you are looking at cannot be promised in advance.

Who holds the switch

Now the other side of the ledger.

The switch belonged to the makers and the studio. It did not belong to the people being filmed. By the time Fielder and Oppenheim were deciding whether there was a film, Holmes and Evans had already let the cameras in, and the crew had gone from one camera to three and were shooting 14 to 16 hours a day. ^[3][5]

Oppenheim has said those long stretches helped the subjects feel less pressure to perform for a traditional interview. ^[3][5] That is a fair description of how patient observation works. It is also a description of how people stop guarding themselves. The longer the camera runs, the more of a life it holds, and the more of it ends up in the pile from which a film may or may not be made.

Why did Holmes and Evans agree? Fielder told a New York Film Festival audience he did not know, and said it was hard to speculate. ^[5] I find that answer more honest than a confident one. It also means the filmmakers were spending three years inside two people's lives without a settled account of why those people were letting them.

What Holmes and Evans knew about the kill switch is not on the record. Nothing published says they were told that the film might be abandoned, or on what terms they took part. I am not suggesting they were kept in the dark, only that the people with the most at stake in the bargain are the ones whose understanding of it nobody has reported.

There is nothing improper in what the filmmakers have described. Nor is Holmes an ordinary subject. She is a convicted fraudster whose story has been picked over in print, podcast, television and cinema, and she hardly needs my protection from a documentary.

But Evans is not the Theranos founder. And the principle matters more than the particular case, because the next film with a kill switch may be about someone with no lawyers, no book deals and no earlier coverage to prepare them.

A clause is not a conscience

So, to the question the clause forces: does a film that needs permission to disappear have the right to take its subjects' lives as material?

My answer is yes, but not because of the clause. The switch tells us the makers were honest with themselves and with their studio. It says nothing about whether they were honest with the people on the other side of the lens. Those are different debts, and paying one does not settle the other.

What the clause does prove is that the decision to make a documentary is a decision, taken by people with money and options, before any truth has been found. For years the genre has hidden that choice behind the language of discovery. We found the story, the story found us, the film chose to be made.

Fielder and Oppenheim's contract says something plainer. We will make this if it turns out to be worth making, and we reserve the right to decide.

I would like that to become ordinary. If a studio can write an exit for the makers, a subject should be able to ask for the matching document. What happens to the footage if the film dies? Who owns those 14-hour days? Who gets told, and when?

These are boring questions, and they are exactly the ones a kill switch makes it impossible to avoid.

Watch the film for its treatment of its own doubt. If the uncertainty is real, and the audience is trusted to sit in it, then the switch did its job and then got out of the way. If it is a stylish device, a way of making the makers' calculation look like candor, then the clause was the most honest thing about the project, and that would be its own kind of verdict.

Next time you buy a ticket for a documentary, ask what the makers would have done if the story had not come. For this one, at least, we know the answer. It was written into the contract: deliver nothing.