Sacha Baron Cohen has heaped praise on Canadian filmmaker and absurdist comic Nathan Fielder for his hit Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything.
Baron Cohen, known for his satirical mockumentary films like Borat and Ali G: Who Iz I?, said in a new interview that Fielder – whose previous credits include the social experiments Nathan For You and The Rehearsal – has left his mark on the documentary genre that Cohen pioneered.
“He’s really reinvented the genre, and he had a rule which was not to do anything that I had done,” Baron Cohen told Vanity Fair of Fielder. “He’d say ‘we’re going to do the stuff that Sacha would never do.’”
The Canadian comic worked with Baron Cohen on Who Is America? in 2018 and contributed to Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which took the project in a more abstract direction.
Cohen pioneered a genre that he dubbed the “undercover character documentaries,” in which he adopts a fictional persona and interacts with unsuspecting people to advance the narrative.
Fielder’s work is more centered on social experiments. In Nathan For You, he plays a fictionalized version of himself giving advice to struggling small businesses by pitching them outlandish marketing schemes.
Cohen made similar remarks in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying that Fielder had reinvented the genre he developed and coined.
“Oh, I think he’s a comic genius and he reinvented the genre that I, I suppose, created or developed,” Cohen said of Fielder. “And he had a rule, really, which was to not do anything that I had done. But he’s a brilliant, brilliant mind, and absolutely hilarious. I think his documentary is going to be huge, so I’m very excited for him.”
In You Can See Everything, Fielder lives with the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, California hotel heir Billy Evans, in the 34 days before she goes to prison to serve an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors and lying about the capabilities of her company’s blood testing technology.
The movie has had rave reviews across the board, achieving a rare 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with some calling it the “film of the year.” Others speculate that the film could nab the first-ever Best Picture nomination for a documentary at this year’s Academy Awards.
The movie has been a huge box office hit. It collected an impressive $19.5 million while expanding to 2,655 venues on its second weekend in theaters, according to Rentrak, which compiles box office data. So far, the movie has made $45 million in total domestically.
This makes the movie the highest-grossing nonmusical documentary since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.
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