How “You Can See Everything” Was Shot – No Lights, Three Cameras, and a Day of Getting It Wrong

MZed Education

by Nino LeitnerToday

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You Can See Everything is the film everyone is talking about right now: $64.7 million in US ticket sales after three weekends, the first non-concert documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11 to finish a weekend at No. 1, a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score, and five Critics Choice Documentary Awards nominations, among them Best Cinematography. Much of that conversation is about what Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim captured, but we are more interested in how. At the New York Film Festival the directors explained the camera plan, and it is simpler and stranger than the film looks.

Here is the short version. Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison, she and her partner Billy Evans let Fielder, Oppenheim and a seven-person crew move into their house in Del Mar, California. The shoot started with one camera and anamorphic lenses, which the directors abandoned after a single day. What replaced it was three cameras, two operators, two 25-250mm zooms, one wide camera watching the whole house, no lighting of any kind, a 4:3 frame, and 16-hour days. Cinematographer David Bolen shot it. The technical quotes below come from the NYFF post-screening conversation on September 30, 2026, moderated by festival artistic director Dennis Lim, and from the directors’ interviews with Variety and IndieWire.

A documentary that keeps winning weekends

The numbers explain the noise. A24 opened the film on October 16, 2026 on 855 screens, and it took about $15.6 million over the first weekend, roughly double what Variety had projected, with more than 2,000 sold-out showings. Then it did something almost no film does. A24 expanded it to 2,655 theaters, and the second weekend came in at $19.5 million, a rise of 23% over the opening, according to TheWrap. Variety puts the budget at around $7 million.

Over the Halloween weekend, the film took first place. Deadline reports $11.44 million for the third weekend, just ahead of Warner Bros’ Clayface, after a Sunday that was the biggest day of the weekend. The domestic total is now $64.7 million. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it is the first non-concert documentary to lead the US box office since Fahrenheit 9/11 in June 2004, and already the seventh-highest-grossing documentary of all time. A $100 million finish, which only ten documentaries have reached, is now a live question.

The audience is not the usual documentary crowd. About 70% of opening-weekend ticket buyers were under 35, Variety’s exit polls show 90% would “definitely recommend” the film and 80% found it “even better than expected,” and the Metacritic score sits at 99. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it “just about the furthest thing from a ‘pure’ documentary you’ve ever seen.” The awards season has started too. The film has five nominations at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards on November 8, including Best Cinematography for Bolen, who is also nominated in the same category with Matt Clegg for The Python Hunt. The Gotham Awards nominated it for Best Documentary Feature and for the Audience Award, and Deadline’s Pete Hammond named the cinematography, alongside directing, editing and score, as a possible Oscar category. Even the subject has weighed in: Fielder told Wired that Holmes called him from prison shortly before release and said only “I trust you,” twice, and that he does not know what she meant.

For a nearly three-hour vérité film shot by four people in a house, all of this is remarkable, and it is why the method deserves a closer look.

How it started

Oppenheim cold-emailed Fielder years ago, after he noticed on his distributor’s screener platform that Fielder had watched 60% of his first film, Some Kind of Heaven. He wrote to tell him there was another 40%. They became friends and looked for a project together for a couple of years. Then, at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, a magician asked the audience for a celebrity name, someone shouted “Elizabeth Holmes,” and Oppenheim told Fielder what he had heard: that Holmes wanted someone to document her life and had approached A24. Fielder called A24 the next day. The deal had fallen apart, but the door was open.

The arrangement with A24 was unusual and it shaped the shoot. “We cannot promise we’ll deliver anything on this,” Fielder told the studio. “We don’t know what the story is.” A24 agreed, with no deadline and the option to pull the plug at any time. Oppenheim later told IndieWire that this kill switch “changed everything.” The crew went in without a story, without a schedule, and without a plan to put Fielder on camera.

A day of getting it fully wrong

The first setup was one camera with anamorphic lenses. It is still visible in some of the film’s early scenes, and it failed fast. “It was extremely cumbersome and it was the wrong approach for this,” Oppenheim said in New York. “Every time we would miss a moment or try to change a lens, that would be when they would also be engaging Nathan off camera.”

That last point was the real problem. Fielder had said on day one that he would not be in the film. Holmes and Evans kept talking to him anyway, from across the room, in long conversations, and the operator would eventually pan to him. Fielder explained why a single panning camera could not work for this subject: “The moment you say something to someone, you want to see their face the moment they hear it. Especially in a movie like this where you’re trying to evaluate if someone’s being honest or not. And when you have to swing, you’re missing like a few seconds.” After about one day, the two directors threw out how both of them normally work.

It was not the first time Oppenheim and Bolen started a film on the wrong foot. When we spoke to Bolen at Sundance 2020 about Some Kind of Heaven, he said: “On our first few days of filming, we did things totally wrong. We started with a 16×9 aspect ratio, and shot mostly handheld.” He went back to the Airbnb “feeling sick to my stomach about the footage,” put 4:3 bars on it in DaVinci Resolve, and the pair moved the whole film to tripods. Six years later, the same team threw out its first plan again, and again within days.

Three cameras, two operators, and a director behind the wide shot

What they built instead is old-fashioned and clever at the same time. “So we had three cameras, two operators,” Oppenheim said. “One would be sometimes on Elizabeth or Billy, one would be on Nathan, and we basically pick zones of the house and have these extremely long zoom lenses, and then I would be hidden behind the wide camera.”

Fielder filled in the glass. “We had a wide lens that would cover the whole house. So, if something happened, we wouldn’t miss it. And then the other two 25 to 250 lenses could be wide, but then also zoom. So, we could basically capture everything.” The 10x range matters here. An operator could sit at the far end of a room, hold a wide frame, and push into a tight single on a face without a lens change, a move, or a visible reaction from the crew. Oppenheim watched all of it from three monitors, at a distance, while Fielder did the talking. He has called Fielder an “accidental investigator of everyday moments,” and the camera plan is what made that possible.

A zoom that goes from a room-wide frame to a face also has to behave during the move: hold focus, keep its aperture, and not breathe. If you want to know why some cine zooms do that and others do not, the “Zooms and Primes” chapter of our MZed course The Art and Science of Lenses explains parfocal and varifocal designs and aperture ramping in detail.

The crew was seven people, with only four inside the house at any given time. Oppenheim brought Bolen, who shot his documentaries Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld and his narrative feature Primetime, and sound mixer Richard Carlos. Fielder brought camera operator Jonathan Mitchell, from Nathan for You and The Curse, and his editor Adam Locke-Norton. Oppenheim described the crew list to IndieWire in one line: “All we really had time to do was call the people in our respective lives that we trust with our lives.”

The directors have not named the camera bodies or the brand of the zooms in any published interview, and we are not going to guess. For Some Kind of Heaven, Bolen told us he used an ARRI ALEXA Mini in 4:3 Open Gate with Angénieux Optimo Style 16-40mm and 30-76mm zooms, plus a long Fujinon servo zoom, but that does not mean the same package went into the Del Mar house.

No lighting, and a tripod reset in ten seconds

This is the part that surprised us most. “We had no lighting,” Fielder said in New York. “Our DP David Bolen found a way to make shots look beautiful by only having a single light source, like in the day or the night. As long as there was a light he could sort of make it work.”

The cameras stayed on tripods, and the tripods moved. “If we were wide and then something interesting started happening, he could pick up the camera on tripod, move to a new spot, relock the head in 10 seconds,” Fielder said. “If they were on the patio, he could move outside to the patio in 20 seconds.” Fielder called it “a whole dance,” and he gave the look of the film to that dance rather than to any gear: “It looks amazing, and I think it almost makes this thing feel like, oh, it feels like this film, like not a documentary.”

Working this way means choosing camera positions by the light that is already there, not adding light to the positions you want. We wrote about this approach in The Philosophy of Shooting with Available Light. For the opposite skill, how to shape a location when you can bring a small kit, Stephen Lighthill, ASC, and Paul Atkins, ASC, cover indoor and outdoor setups for documentary crews in the MZed course Lighting People on Location.

Bolen himself has said little, but what he has said fits. In an interview published on October 19, he described the film as “a new approach for me and Lance. We were trying to be purely observational and let people come to their own conclusions about what was going on. It’s such a polarizing subject that I was much more interested in capturing these people in a more objective way, where the audience is making the emotional decisions and not the camera.” He also credited the A24 arrangement for making that possible: “Having that freedom makes you free to fail, which is important.”

The length of the days was also a tool. “They would be shooting like 16 hours a day, so they wouldn’t really know what we were interested in necessarily,” Oppenheim said. If the cameras run all day on every zone of the house, no single moment feels like the moment, and the subjects stop performing for the lens. IndieWire reports 14-to-16-hour days, after which the crew would sit down and fail to agree on what they had just watched.

Why the frame is 4:3

Oppenheim warned the New York audience that he was about to get “technical and boring,” and then explained the one decision cinematographers will want to hear about. “The aspect ratio of the movie came about because of just, you know, we’re confined largely in one space,” he said. “Every time we’d put the camera somewhere, when we originally were in a larger aspect ratio, it felt like you were just seeing so many details that were distracting you from the human face. The face was the ultimate landscape.”

The boxy frame does two jobs at once. It cuts the walls, furniture and clutter of a wide domestic interior out of the sides of the image, and it turns a long-lens close-up from across the room into the whole picture. It is also a format the pair keeps returning to. On Some Kind of Heaven it helped evoke “an old movie” for the nostalgic retirement community, and on Primetime, Variety reports, it was chosen to mimic 2000s reality television. There is also a shift in lens choice: in 2020, Bolen told us he liked “wide angles to capture faces,” while here the faces come from 250mm across the room. This time the reason for 4:3 is not a period look, but a way to make a face the entire subject of the shot. The “standard” aspect ratio is one of the conventions that Mascha Deikova examines in the MZed webinar Storytelling Sessions: Breaking the Framing Rules, together with headroom, leading room and the 180-degree rule.

Why it does not play like a documentary

Lim put the point to the directors directly: multiple cameras and angles give the film a different feel in the edit, and the music is not what an observational documentary usually sounds like. Fielder’s answer went back to the shooting method. Two synchronized angles mean the edit can cut to the listener at the exact moment a line lands, which is the grammar of narrative drama, not of a single-camera vérité film. Ari Balouzian’s score, which Oppenheim’s regular composer wrote for the film, pushes it further from the observational template.

Oppenheim sees the method as a return rather than a break. He placed the film in a line from Frederick Wiseman to Errol Morris and The Thin Blue Line, “finding different ways of telling and reacting in real time and making aesthetic choices based on what’s in front of them.” Fielder was blunter about how it felt from inside: “It felt like we were in the zone from Stalker every day.” Oppenheim told The A.V. Club the team “had to come up with an entirely new aesthetic that was dictated by the limitations and the experiences of being in that room with those subjects.”

Bolen’s operating habits push in the same direction. “What we found in documentaries is that if you hold a shot on someone long after they think something is complete, really interesting stuff happens,” he said in the same interview. “Often the most vulnerable moments come 20 seconds after the thing that’s supposed to happen happens.” On this film, with three cameras rolling all day, there was never a reason to cut.

Both directors stressed that nothing in the second half was planned. “Each scene that happens is happening and we’re documenting it, and there’s no plan of what’s going to happen next at any point,” Fielder said. The house shoot became a three-year production, and Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout, appears both as herself and in character. The published interviews do not say how those later scenes were shot, and the directors have asked that nobody spoil them.

Release and availability

You Can See Everything is in wide release in the US, and the UK and Ireland release follows on November 20, 2026, with Sony Pictures handling international distribution for A24. A24 lists the runtime as 2 hours 55 minutes. For more information, please visit the A24 website.

Three tripods, two zooms, no lights and a director hiding behind the wide shot: would you dare to shoot a feature this way? And would you have kept the anamorphic lenses for one more day? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!