The surprising power of uncomfortable silence

11/4/2026

What do you tell beginning reporters about the trade of journalism to make them better interviewers? It’s a topic we plumb annually at the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat. Journalism is as much a trade as a profession, work one learns through work.

Now, I have an Exhibit A for two Interview Essentials in the mind-bending, genre-shattering and head-inhabiting documentary “You Can See Everything.” 

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s three-hour documentary on convicted Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is a masterpiece and a film that demands to be seen in a full theater with an audience to absorb the community aspect of the experience.

I saw “You Can See Everything” with about 250 people in the main Dundee theater at Film Streams in Omaha, Nebraska.

This may very well be the best film of the year. It sold out 2,000 showings in a weekend release of just 855 screens, The New York Times reported.

Should it be the first documentary to land a best-picture Oscar nomination? That’s a real debate now.

In “You Can See Everything,” Elizabeth Holmes and her family allow Fielder and his crew into their rented San Diego home a month before she reports to federal prison in Texas for crimes associated with her leadership of the controversial start-up company Theranos.

I can’t stop thinking about this film.

Scenes and turns of phrase and the conflict roiling in my internal monologue have consumed surprising amounts of my last several days. I know Holmes is lying, but when? How much?

It’s also a master class in interviewing cagey sources.

Essential 1: Earn respect of source by being prepared, having read about them and researched the story to inform questions. Fielder is prepared. Opening scenes of the movie show him reading up on Holmes in his hotel room before going to the Holmes family beach escape house.

Essential 2: And this is the takeaway. When it settles into a conversation, let uncomfortable silence roll. Don’t be the one to stop it. Human beings get anxious in moments of uncomfortable silence and often cannot help but be the ones to break it. Those who jump into the still breach of a conversation turned awkward often say revealing or regrettable things. Sometimes both. This is a game of chicken.

No interviewer I’ve seen — and perhaps no human being I have encountered, live or through any media — employs uncomfortable silence as effectively as Fielder. 

The close-ups of him in probing talks with Holmes are exquisitely shot and developed and bring theatergoers to the edge of their seats. And they yield narrative gold. ♦

Douglas Burns of Carroll is fourth-generation journalist and founder of Mercury Boost, a marketing and public relations company.