A few months ago, Nathan Fielder’s publicist sent me an unexpected email: Would WIRED be interested in Fielder for a fall cover of our magazine?
The answer, before we even got a reason, was yes. The reason, it turned out, was that Fielder would soon release a project that was so top-secret, I’d need to sign an NDA to even hear about what it was—let alone watch it. I signed, I heard, and then I saw, counting myself among the few dozen people who’d screened You Can See Everything before the film debuted in the first days of September as a secret addition to the Telluride Film Festival.
If you’re a human being with internet access, you know that the buzz following Telluride was nothing short of an online thermonuclear event: Reddit forums exploded; best-in-class memes were born overnight; every journalist on planet Earth, including the staff at WIRED (who had no idea their boss was NDA’d to hell, and seemed confused when I ordered them repeatedly not to contact Nathan Fielder’s publicist), pined, pleaded, and jockeyed for access to the film. Or, even better, for access to Fielder himself. The notoriously inscrutable performer, after all, has become a cult hero for his ability to turn human discomfort into high art. He built a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, creating an international news event in the process. He built an entire fake bar so that one man could practice having a difficult conversation with a friend. He trained to be a commercial airline pilot—lunacy!—and flew a 737 filled with passengers (the Miracle over the Mojave), in what can only be described as the most transcendent moment of television I’ve ever seen. For a certain genre of viewer, Nathan Fielder is a comedic god among us mere mortals.
He’s also, not surprisingly, rather particular. Fielder was going to do the cover of WIRED; then maybe he wasn’t. A week went by. Our features director and I didn’t sleep. Then we were a “go.” Great! For a few days, at least, until things got dicey again. This kind of back-and-forth is a normal part of booking celebrities. But given the secrecy, the buzz, the Nathan of it all—the stakes for WIRED were high. I told several people in my life that I hated Nathan Fielder. Then we were on again. I told several people in my life that I loved Nathan Fielder.
You might be wondering: If I found Fielder’s pre-interview agita so stressful, why didn’t we just scrap the cover entirely? Maybe see if Aaron Sorkin was still available, or some other guy involved in some other tech-adjacent fall movie. There are plenty.
The thing is, You Can See Everything is a singularly astonishing film. I’d go so far as to say that it’s among the best I’ve ever seen. Codirected by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it begins as a strange, captivating, occasionally hilarious 34-day psychological dance between Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her partner Billy Evans before Holmes’ incarceration, and subsequently morphs into something so beguiling and brilliant that it’s futile to try to describe. After screening You Can See Everything in early September, I thought about the movie every single day until I saw it again a few weeks later. I’m still rolling it around in my brain. When a small handful of WIRED staffers screened the film before Fielder’s cover shoot, we spent hours afterward debating facial expressions, relationships, and even the meaning of single sentences. We agreed on very little, other than that Fielder—notorious for his meticulous building of worlds—seemed to have finally stumbled into one much stranger than anything he could have conjured.