Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s newly released documentary You Can See Everything gets up close and awkwardly, even creepily personal with disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans. It’s mindbending, strange, and breaking more than brains: It’s breaking box office records. It’s also generating Oscar buzz.

But the genre-shattering documentary would’ve never happened without one cold email that was sent circa six years ago and connected the two filmmakers behind the engrossing hit. In a recent Vulture interview, Oppenheim revealed that he’s apparently a master of the cold email. 

While he’d reach out to filmmakers in the past as a teenager—long before he’d become a seasoned director—he used the same strategy to connect with comedian Nathan Fielder back in 2020. At the time, Fielder was best known for his offbeat and often cringe-inducing approach to “helping” grow small businesses in his comedy series Nathan for You before his HBO hit The Rehearsal. As for Oppenheim, his biggest project had been the documentary Some Kind of Heaven, which examined life at The Villages, the Florida retirement community. 

When Oppenheim told Vulture that when he heard that Fielder only made it through 60% of the doc, he reached out to playfully let him know there was another 40% of the film he missed. Fielder replied warmly that day, letting him know that he actually enjoyed several aspects of the film and couldn’t remember why he stopped a little more than halfway along. 

From there, the two became friends and started plotting their eventual collaboration.

Source link