Morris frames the footage as a neutral historical document exploring the psychology of self-deception, insisting he never knowingly promoted a fraud and was simply hired for his visual style.
The drama here is the gatekeeping. Morris claims he doesn't know how Gibney got his outtakes, while simultaneously holding the keys to a two-hour raw interview that could redefine the 'true believer' narrative.
Fact 1: Morris conducted a two-hour Interrotron interview with Holmes in 2015 that remains unseen by the public. Fact 2: He admitted in a Reddit Q&A post-collapse that he 'believed in Elizabeth Holmes' and compared her self-deception to Joan of Arc.
Errol Morris is finally opening the vault on a Theranos era that he helped mythologize. Whether this release vindicates him or exposes his blind spot is the real story.
Errol Morris has a confession, and it’s one that might sting the ego of the documentary world. The 78-year-old Oscar winner, famous for *The Thin Blue Line*, admitted in a recent Variety exclusive that he has never watched Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary *The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley*—until now. Why the avoidance?
Morris was the director behind the glossy, wide-eyed Theranos commercials that helped build Elizabeth Holmes’ cult of personality. He was hired in 2015, at the peak of Holmes’ fame, to shoot ads that depicted the founder staring into the camera with unsettling intensity. Morris claims he had no reason to believe she was a fraud at the time, noting she was on the cover of Forbes and riding high on hype.
But now, with Holmes in prison and the culture obsessed with her downfall, Morris has finally sat down with Gibney’s film—and discovered his own face was used as the bookends of the documentary. But here is the tea that matters: Morris is sitting on a two-hour, unedited interview with Elizabeth Holmes that the public has never seen. Conducted using his signature Interrotron device, this footage captures Holmes at the height of her delusion, before the indictments and the lawsuits.
Morris revealed he is seriously contemplating releasing this raw cut. He argues that while the criminal justice system looks for guilt or innocence, his interest lies in the psychology of self-deception. "To what extent did she believe in her own bullshit?" Morris asks.
He wants to show "Elizabeth before and Elizabeth after," positioning the unreleased interview as a crucial artifact of a grifter who may have actually believed her own lies about revolutionizing blood testing. The tension between Morris and the rest of the narrative is palpable. While John Carreyrou, the journalist who broke the Theranos story, insists Holmes knowingly committed fraud and deserves her prison time, Morris remains fixated on the gray area.
He even drew a controversial comparison to Joan of Arc in a post-collapse Reddit Q&A, stating, "Do I think she thought that God was directly communicating with her? She did!" This isn't just about defending his commercial work; it’s about defending his judgment. He insists he wasn't knowingly promoting a fraud, pointing out that he joined a board of directors that included heavyweights like Henry Kissinger (whom Morris interviewed just before Kissinger’s death).
Morris is defensive about the criticism of the ads, claiming they were standard corporate storytelling, not propaganda for a scam. Perhaps the most amusing detail in this saga is Morris’s inability to get a screener for *You Can See Everything*, the new Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim docu-series that has taken the internet by storm. He pleaded with Variety to get him a copy, claiming he’s been rebuffed by the powers that be.
It’s a bizarre irony: the man who helped create the visual language of Theranos is now locked out of the latest cultural conversation about it. Meanwhile, he holds the keys to the original source material. Will he drop the two-hour interview and let us see the "true believer" in her own words, or will he keep this piece of history locked in his vault? The receipts are ready; we just need the release date.
