Some Kind of Heaven

Hello and welcome back to the Movie Marathon podcast, a place where we watch movies and then talk about them.

I am your host, Dixon.

I'm joined as always by my partner in crime, the Lance Oppenheim to my Nathan Fielder,

You're in a very weird...

Who's never in a weird Nathan mood? But I hope that everybody got their stretches in because we are doing another sprint episode today.

Hopefully a little bit faster than our last one, but same movie conversations, a little bit of a shorter distance.

We are going to go dive into the background of our movie, set it up a little bit, but then just get right into some discussion questions.

And this week we are talking about You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

This week, we are back talking about something everyone is either talking about or about to be talking about.

And that is You Can See Everything, the new documentary slash fictional film about Elizabeth Holmes.

Now, this is going to be a bit looser of an episode than we usually do.

But both Natalie and I saw You Can See Everything in the first few days that it was in theaters.

Since the time that she was convicted, she has been taking some steps to rehab her image.

I'm thinking about a New York Times profile that was entitled, Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth, and was her first entreaty in 2023 to present herself as a normal woman, not just a felon.

Whether this documentary, which is directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is one of those steps as well, is a subject of debate.

We've been waiting to talk about this movie.

I don't trust anything I'm seeing at this point.

Did I send you that documentary about the...

That's

a big boy.

I'm assuming he's wearing fucking tie or what's it called? Kevlar all the time.

That might just be his weight with Kevlar.

Did I send you the documentary of the dudes who went to Africa for the migrants? No.

I was listening to Jones for the past two weeks freak out about these fucking migrants in France and shit like that.

And...

He had seen my first film, Some Kind of Heaven, and Magnolia Pictures put that movie out, and there was a screening service called Indie TV, and I could track who was watching the movie.

And I saw that Nathan watched like 60% of the documentary.

So I saw his email, and I emailed him, and I was like, there's another 40%.

And I also just was like, you know, I knew that she hadn't been in public really for years and stuff.

um when we start talking about it spoken i

think to anyone in i think seven years seven years total silence so it was curious to us but yeah like lance said i i did finish some kind of heaven eventually um it's a fantastic film i love lance's work we were trying to figure out something to work on together for like a couple years and hanging out and yeah he brought this up and i you know i had I had read the John Carreyrou book, Bad Blood.

So I knew of her and I was really fascinated by her when it happened, but I was sort of like, I was really curious about the thing that, you know, she wanted to speak about something, but I was also like, I didn't really see like a documentary project in it.

Right.

And then Lance Oppenheim, you know, we first found out his work at Some Kind of Heaven.

Yeah.

And he's iconic in the documentary space.

Now everyone to keep up.

Everyone's going to keep up with the Joneses.

There's gonna be knockoffs of this, people are gonna try to do their own versions, like it happened with some kind of heaven, everyone and their mother knocked it off, right? And now there will be other versions of this, but I think it's like you gotta take away from what they are doing on the marketing end.

Because that's now where Netflix will wanna compete with how A24 did this and be like, oh, well, how can we have a documentary that is also making the same kind of waves? And then that means you have to do a big- This is just

Lance Oppenheim directed it.

He made the documentary Some Kind of Heaven, and this is his first fiction feature.

Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen in a film about how Dateline NBC built To Catch a Predator in the mid-2000s.

Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen is somehow both completely wrong and completely right.

That's a real band name.

Lightning & Thunder is real.

Their story was first told in a 2008 documentary of the same name by Greg Kohs, and the film is based on that.

Two people who have nothing much going for them commit completely to Neil Diamond.

As co-director, too, Lance Oppenheim makes a significant artistic contribution.

In his recent Robert Pattinson starring drama, Prime Time, and his past nonfiction films, like Some Kind of Heaven, Oppenheim shows a remarkable formal control, which accounts, I suspect, for why You Can See Everything is so strikingly shot and hauntingly scored.

This is a documentary to see in a packed house on an enormous screen.

The images have a crystalline clarity, but mysteries abound in every frame.

I'm your host, Mike Vilensky, and today I'm excited to welcome Daniel Garber.

Daniel is an award-winning editor who cut films such as How to Blow Up a Pipeline, The Reagan Show, Some Kind of Heaven, The Drop, Moonglow, and his new film, Prime Time.

I thought we can invite him on to hear about the making of Prime Time.

But first, before we dive in, we'd like to thank our friends at AJA Video Systems, Broadfield Distributing, CSS Music, OWC, and ZEISS.

I think that he, he really felt like a kindred spirit from that point on.

And so I've worked with him now on multiple occasions.

I cut Some Kind of Heaven, Sperm World, and then I consulted on Ren Fair, one of his other documentaries.

And, um, that just segued so naturally into working on Prime Time together, in part because Lance, I think, brought a lot of his documentary sensibilities into the world of narrative filmmaking.