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    Sundance Film Festival USA

    Outlaws in Love: Ain't Them Bodies Saints makes Texas debut at Sundance Film Festival USA

    Clifford Pugh
    By Clifford Pugh
    Feb 17, 2013 | 12:48 pm

    The Sundance Film Festival USA's second outing in Houston was a Texas affair — with a little help from Louisiana.

    Organizers of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah decided to spread the film wealth across the nation, choosing Houston and nine cities for a one-night screening of movies directly from the January festival.

    Ain't Them Bodies Saints seemed the perfect choice for Houston since the impressionistic drama about an outlaw (Casey Affleck) who escapes from prison and sets out to reunite with his wife (Rooney Mara) and daughter he has never met is set in small-town Texas and comes from Dallas-based director David Lowery, who also wrote the movie, and Toby Halbrooks, who produced the movie with James M. Johnston.

    Although the film is set in Texas, they filmed most of it in Shreveport, since Louisiana offers lucrative tax breaks to filmmakers who make movies there.

    (The trio founded the Sailor Bear production company in Dallas. Variety recently named Halbrooks and Johnston to its 10 Producers to Watch list and praised Lowery in its 10 Directors to Watch.)

    Lowery and Halbrooks were on hand at the Sundance Cinemas to participate in a question-and-answer session with the capacity audience, which I moderated.

    The movie came together "amazingly fast," which doesn't always happen, Halbrooks explained.

    Lowery had worked on the film at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, an immersive, five-day writers’ workshop, last winter while Halbrooks and Johnston completed a producing fellowship at Sundance.

    "Then last February we went to Los Angeles and found the actors and financing. The challenges were which financiers to pick and who you work with. They responded," Halbrooks said.

    They met with Mara on the day after she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She instantly liked the script and agreed to be in the low-budget movie.

    One catch

    But there was one catch. Although set in Texas, most of the movie was made in Shreveport since Louisiana offers lucrative tax breaks to filmmakers.

    "It was a challenge to try find a place that wasn't Texas, because were all disappointed about (not filming there). We scoured Louisiana because that was our option. Either that or Canada, which didn't seem very exciting to anybody," Lowery said.

    "It's a weird title but it sticks in your head in a nice way. Rooney was the one who pointed out the fact that if you say it with a Southern accent they get it right away."

    "If any legislators are l istening, we would love to make all of our movies in Texas entirely, but for the time being we were able to raise money by going to Louisiana," Halbrooks said.

    To give the movie more of a Texas feel, they filmed in the tiny central Texas city of Meridian, as well as Austin and Dallas.

    "It was really hot — we shot in July and August — but the challenges are always keeping your head straight for the amount of days shooting and think about the end product," Lowery said. "Because it's really hard to see the forest for the trees when you are in the middle of shooting and you work for 14 hours steady and everyone is really working hard. You just try to trust yourself."

    After his last movie, St. Nick, an impressionistic story of two young siblings who run away from home and try to survive on their own, Lowery set out to write a fast-moving action western. But once he started writing Ain't Them Bodies Saints, "it stopped being an action movie very quickly," he recalled.

    "The idea was to do something in the vein of the classic American movies that I loved from the '60s and '70s — Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands were certainly among them but also films like Two-Lane Blacktop — awesome old movies that feel like they were part of the American culture of that era. So I just started writing."
    Best Cinematography Award
    The film won the Best Cinematography Award at Sundance. Those who want to get an idea of cinematographer Bradford Young's work can check out Untitled (Structures) at the Menil Collection through May 13. Young and Leslie Hewiitt collaborated on the project film installation featuring civil rights photography.
    Lowery came up with the unusual title for his movie after hearing an old country-western song. Although the lyrics of the song didn't fit his vision, the title had "as ease of use that works," he said.
    "It's a weird title but it sticks in your head in a nice way. Rooney was the one who pointed out the fact that if you say it with a Southern accent they get it right away."
    The film was warmly received at Sundance and IFC Films purchased it after protracted two-day negotiations, with plans to release it in theaters and video on demand in late summer or early fall.

    During Sundance Festival USA's one-stop night in Houston, the familiar 2013 logo from the Sundance Film Festival appeared on screen. In lower part of photo, CultureMap editor-in-chief Clifford Pugh, right, interviews director David Lowery, center, and producer Toby Halbrooks talk about the film.

    Sundance Film Festival, Ain't Them Bodies, Toby Hallbrooks, David Lowery, Clifford Pugh, February 2013
    Photo by Tom Adams
    During Sundance Festival USA's one-stop night in Houston, the familiar 2013 logo from the Sundance Film Festival appeared on screen. In lower part of photo, CultureMap editor-in-chief Clifford Pugh, right, interviews director David Lowery, center, and producer Toby Halbrooks talk about the film.
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    Movie Review

    Elizabeth Holmes' doc You Can See Everything is an audacious genre-bender

    Alex Bentley
    Oct 15, 2026 | 2:30 pm
    Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything
    Photo courtesy of A24
    Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything.

    Elizabeth Holmes faced one of the most public downfalls in recent history after she was accused of defrauding investors in her health technology company, Theranos. Her subsequent indictment and conviction drew the interest of many, including, it seems, comedian/actor/filmmaker Nathan Fielder. Fielder somehow convinced Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, to make a documentary about her final days of freedom, called You Can See Everything.

    It’s not immediately clear why Fielder — who only has one previous feature-length documentary to his credit — is interested in profiling Holmes, but the approach that he and co-director Lance Oppenheim (Primetime) take is one that puts Fielder in the spotlight as much as her or Evans. Fielder looms over the couple — sometimes literally, sometimes from afar — as they care for their children, make meals, try to re-establish business relationships, and prepare for Holmes’ prison sentence, which is due to start about a month after the film begins in 2023.

    Fielder quizzes Holmes and Evans about predictable subjects — such as how Theranos worked, her relationship with COO Sunny Balwani, and her conviction — and ones that are slightly off-kilter, including the miniseries The Dropout, which dramatized Holmes’ rise and fall. He is met with seeming openness by both of them — the title of the movie is uttered by Holmes at one point — but there are times where their idea of transparency doesn’t jibe with Fielder’s expectations.

    Through it all, the quirky reputation that Fielder has from TV shows like Nathan for You, The Curse, and The Rehearsal colors his participation, as well. He appears sincere, if surprisingly intense, in his questioning, but there are more than a few moments where it’s fair to wonder if the whole thing is an act of performance art. That suspicion grows in the second half of the nearly three-hour film as Fielder and Oppenheim go down roads that stretch the definition of what a documentary is or can be.

    The film is utterly fascinating as the filmmakers go on what seems to be a full-on exploration of the meaning of truth. Holmes and Evans, either intentionally or unintentionally, carry on conversations with Fielder with wide-open, unblinking eyes, something that conveys honesty and creepiness in equal measures. Fielder meets them with squinting expressions, looking like he’s trying to determine how candid they’re actually being.

    One of the biggest things the film reveals (or does it?) is that — if she’s not a sociopath — Holmes might be someone who’s either oblivious or naive. As cryptic or strange as she can be in words and actions, Evans is even more so, and as the film progresses it’s him whose motives and ideas are called into question. Control over the narrative of the film wobbles back-and-forth between Fielder, Holmes, and Evans, and even at the end it’s unclear whose perspective has truly won out.

    There is no way to accurately get across what it’s like to watch You Can See Everything for the first time. The motives of everyone involved are up in the air, resulting in a roller coaster ride that’s full of astonishment, laughs, and a number of surprises. It’s an audacious film that can’t be categorized, one that will challenge the thinking of voters when it comes time for awards season.

    ---

    You Can See Everything opens in theaters on October 16.

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