Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris is considering releasing a previously unseen, two-hour interview with Elizabeth Holmes, filmed when the disgraced Theranos founder was at the height of her success.
Morris, best known for The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, had been hired by Holmes in 2015 at the “height of her success” to direct a series of advertisements for Theranos, the Silicon Valley start-up she founded in 2003.
During that period, he also asked Holmes to sit for a separate, in-depth interview, excerpts of which later appeared in Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
“I did film a two-hour interview with her, which is not very well-known if it is known at all. And I just watched that. I am sincerely interested in putting that out as an unedited film,” Morris told Variety.
“If anything, it gives you a comparison of Elizabeth before and Elizabeth after, which I think is interesting in and of itself,” he said.
Morris said he had directed “probably 1,000” commercials during his career and had no reason at the time to suspect that Theranos was fraudulent.
“What’s really not known about any of this is, yes, I did all the advertising for Theranos,” Morris said. “But I did it at a time when Elizabeth Holmes was on the front cover of Forbes and many other magazines. She was riding high, and this was before everything collapsed. Did I have any reason to believe that she was a fraud? I did not. Did that change as time went on? It did.”
He confirmed that the footage has been seen only by himself and “the people in my office”.
“For all intents and purposes, it has not been seen by anyone,” he confirmed.
Asked why the interview had never been released, Morris said: “Because the company fell apart and she was prosecuted…but I can’t really answer it. The clearest answer is that I’d moved on.”
When Holmes founded Theranos, she promised to revolutionise blood testing with technology that could run a range of tests using just a few drops of blood. The company's claims unravelled under scrutiny, and in 2022 she was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison after being convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.
A jury acquitted her of charges relating to defrauding patients.
Holmes has recently spent weeks back in the public eye thanks to You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s nearly three-hour documentary, which was filmed in secret over three years.
Fielder and his crew spent more than a month with Holmes and her partner Billy Evans in the run-up to her reporting to prison in 2023, documenting their life at home as she prepared to begin her sentence. The film opened in North America on 16 October, taking $15.6m from 855 cinemas in its first weekend — the biggest documentary debut in more than two decades.
The film holds a 98 per cent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, and left The Independent’s culture desk wondering how a “three-hour documentary could be so simultaneously thought-provoking yet yield so few answers”.
Morris has not seen You Can See Everything yet, but said he was less interested in whether “she’s lying or she’s telling the truth”.
“What interests me is: To what extent was she self-deceived? To what extent did she believe in her own bullshit?” he said. “I keep wondering about the psychology of self-deception because part of me believes that she believes in Theranos and that she could achieve the results as promised.”
His own conclusion after watching the interview again was succinct: Holmes was “a true believer”, he said.
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