Lance Oppenheim’s 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 mind-bending, strange, and breaking more than brains: It’s breaking box-office records. It’s also generating Oscar buzz .

But the genre-shattering documentary would never have happened without one cold email that was sent around 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.

Long before he was a seasoned director, a teenage Oppenheim used to reach out to filmmakers—the same strategy he used to connect with Fielder in 2020. Back then, Fielder was famous for Nathan for You , his offbeat, often cringe-inducing series on Comedy Central about “helping” small businesses. This was still a couple of years before his Emmy-nominated HBO show, The Rehearsal .…