The interview below contains spoilers for You Can See Everything. The last few years of Lance Oppenheim’s life have been defined, in part, by two men: Nathan Fielder, Hollywood’s resident agent of chaos, and Robert Pattinson, its box office powerhouse. When Oppenheim and I spoke earlier this month, he was flanked by a life-sized poster of the Batman and Odyssey actor, who starred in (and produced) the director’s just-released debut feature, Primetime.
That film was followed, three weeks later, by You Can See Everything, the momentous and at times unwieldy documentary Oppenheim co-directed with Fielder. That experience, which unfolds over three invasive and inviting hours, was a far cry from the work he’d done on Primetime, a quasi-biopic of another outsized 21st century figure: To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. It wasn’t just that the movie was Oppenheim’s first scripted feature.
The scale of the production also dwarfed the eight-person documentary crew he and Fielder brought into Holmes’s California rental. Until Primetime, he says, he hadn’t made a movie with a crew of more than a dozen people. But regardless of their size or scope, Oppenheim’s movies are exercises in profound intimacy.
In his 2020 documentary, Some Kind of Heaven, he explored the world’s largest retirement community and all its colorful characters; in 2024’s Ren Faire, 80-year-old George Coulam, the founder of the Texas Renaissance festival, tells Oppenheim of his struggles with erectile dysfunction medication and his affinity for sugar babies. It’s no wonder Elizabeth Holmes let Oppenheim get so close; people tend to open up to him, even against their better judgment. Though Oppenheim prefers to let his films do the talking ("I can't do anything, unfortunately, except make films to express my emotions and feelings," he insists), he got candid with us earlier this month about filming with Pattinson, Fielder, Holmes, and her husband Billy Evans.
From ingratiating himself with a convicted criminal to welcoming his first child just five days before shooting his debut feature, Oppenheim is having a moment, personally and professionally. But making films, he maintains, is his most reliable form of catharsis. GQ: I saw Primetime and You Can See Everything only a few days apart.
I'm sure that's not how you expected people to see these two movies. Lance Oppenheim: It's really crazy. It was not what I expected.
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