I just read yet another review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon, and it made me wonder yet again about biopics. They are always "based on," which is a nice way of saying that they routinely lie about whoever's life they're selling. I gather that Napoleon is especially egregious on this front.
But why? Popular biographies in book form don't do this and are still big sellers. Why do movies have to do it?
I'm not talking about the need to create dialog where no record exists. As long as it tries to stay faithful to what's known, that's fine. I'm not even talking about compressing real events. A two-hour movie has limits on how long a scene can run.
But what's the point of putting people where they never were? Or having things happen at the wrong place and time? Or deliberately inventing dialog that was never even remotely said? Or making supporting characters into people they never were? Or inventing motivations that never existed?
Is it really impossible to make an entertaining biopic that's 99% faithful to the truth? Maybe it is. It's not like I've ever tried. But I still wonder.
"Popular biographies in book form don't do..."
Ha Ha Ha.
All biographies (and autobiographies) are best described as "reality based fiction".
All those pesky experts better watch out!
And what makes you say that? Are David McCullough's great biographies of Harry Truman, The Wright Brothers, etc mostly fiction? Of course not. There might be a certain amount of speculation about conversations, etc, but any biographer who doesn't mostly stick to the facts will be outed pretty quickly.
Historical fiction is different, but I agree with Kevin - why make up a wholly fictional narrative when reality, in the case of a figure like Napoleon, is just as compelling. But this is part of the reason I have never much liked biopics of any kind.
Sticking to the facts is not enough. Human being is far too complex to fully describe in a book, so you must leave a lot of facts out. The decision what you leave in, and how you decsribe what you don't, determine what result you end up with.
For example, you can have a biography of Trump which is all facts, in which he will look like a genius buisnessman. All you need to keep enough facts out.
So the fact that you cannot find false statements in a biography, on its own, doesn't tell you how accurate it is as a description of the person it describes. It can still be quite biased.
Considering how biased humans are in general, the fact that biased _can_ happen means it _will_ happen. In that sense they are fiction, and in general not useful for understanding history.
If I read or watched a biography that, through a choice to omit known facts, led me to a concludiing view of its subject that I subsequently discovered was or already knew to be false, I would be disappointed.
But the nature of that disappointment would be qualititatively different from the version I get when I find out that they just flat out lied.
That is a common view, but it is quite bad one.
People tend to be far too forgiving to misleading texts that don't use outright lies. That is part of the explanation for the success of disinformation.
I didn't say I would be forgiving. I said that the nature of my disappointment in each case would be different.
You are basically saying we can't know anything, because all narratives are selective by necessity. But I don't really buy that. A good biographer like McCullough can achieve a balance that comes through in the narrative and can be verified by reference to other sources.
"ou are basically saying we can't know anything, because all narratives are selective by necessity."
No, I don't. It depends on what the kind of literature.
Biographies try to do something that is effectively impossible, i.e. to describe a person in a reasonable length book. That forces them to be some distortion of the real thing, and sometimes large distortion.
More limited texts are more reliable. So for example, I wouldn't regard "a biogrpahy of Carter" as a good description of Carter, but something like "Carter as president" may be a good description of Carter as president.
I suggest you read the criticism of "John Adams" here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(book)#Criticism. Apparently in this case the omissions were pretty glaring.
Long time back I read some article that very carefully and accurately tore down a current biopic, and I realized that if I ever see any of these, I'd better be sure to read the person's Wikipedia page to make sure I knew the real story. But hey, common sense then dictates: why bother to see the biopic at then then? Cut out a step!
I mean, if am actually really interested to see the story of Person X, I could read a book about them anyway, or a decent article somewhere... really, a movie would likely be the least informative way to learn something about them.
Wait, wait, wait. Are you trash talking Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? Oh, it’s on.
That one's based on my favorite Gore Vidal book.
I read A Beautiful Mind about John Nash, then saw the movie. I came away thinking that even the most interesting mathematician isn't interesting enough for a movie, so they had to invent stuff to make it worth their while. But more generously, not everything translates to the screen, and they have to take liberties to get the point across sometimes. I don't know specifically about the Napoleon movie. There's also how movies get made, with any number of executives giving their opinions about what's going to sell.
But what's the point of putting people where they never were? Or having things happen at the wrong place and time? Or deliberately inventing dialog that was never even remotely said? Or making supporting characters into people they never were? Or inventing motivations that never existed?
Storytelling?
That, but also, I fear a big part of the answer is filmakers (or, more likely in many cases, the studios who finance them) don't trust the intelligence of the audience. We need (so they believe) highly cliched narrative structures, clunky exposition of plot elements, and a general dumbed-down approach, without which the production won't hold our interest.
Hence the fact that (it seems like) 90% of the movies out there these days are comic book franchises.
Speaking of the film that I'll definitely see and to illustrate the point of the OP, the emphasized scene of troops retreating across ice...
To attain a higher truth? To tell better the truth through universal themes...biographies are not sacrosanct either. Poor Walter Issacson just had to go though a humiliating retreat across many live TV shows on how he got Elon Musk and Starlinks betrayal of Ukraine so wrong....even when he cites specific e-mails that proved that Musk is a scumbag traitor....causing the prolongation of the war and thousands of Ukrainian deaths. (Simon and Shuster had to print a retraction of a central event in the book and burn 10,000 unsold copies, {actually, good for SS, it never actually went on sale as it was})
I helped an older woman that was caught by security trying to steal this book...I should have maybe let her take the fall instead of stepping in and suggesting to security and the woman that mistakes are made, "Just go pay for the book," she said "Yes," and walked back in to pay.
A final note on Biographies...We all love Sir Thomas More, the writer of Utopia and of course, Robert Bolt's a Man for All Seasons...." a true renaissance hero.
Well, one of mine.
But see Richard Marius Thomas More...the religious vain fanatic that burned Protestants at the stake....certainly a different view from Harvard University Press.
Amusingly I had trouble finding this on Amazon...eventually I did, but everything was full of love and peace for More...when you can't find him on Amazon...did he ever exist?
Let me say...Robert Bolt is the hero here, (really...a great writer writes great things) Traveller
What "higher truth" is attained with outright lies? In Braveheart, Mel Gibson apparently wanted to show the fecklessness of the English monarchy. So he invented a romance between William Wallace and Isabella. EXCEPT, they never met. Wallace was killed in battle long before she ever came to England -- in a battle with the army of King Edward I. Not so feckless. Also, she was never Princess of Wales, she married Edward II after his father had died and he was King. As far as we know there's no doubt he was the father of at leas the first 3 of her children.
The movie also left out the part about how Wallace got a lot of support for his wars from the French king. It certainly would have made King Edward I's fights against Wallace a lot more understandable if the movie audience had known that he -- Edward -- believed he was fighting an invader.
And the bit about Edward I throwing his son's friend out of a window? Wrong king. The father of Frederick the Great of Prussia did that in the 18th century.
Is it really impossible to make an entertaining biopic that's 99% faithful to the truth?
No. But many producers probably think it's impossible to do this and make a profit. Which is all that matters, sadly. You even see this effect (maybe even more so) in adaptations of literary fiction. Rings of Power anyone? Utterly ludicrous butchering of the meticulous backstory created by Tolkien.
The Rings of Power is a perfect example. It’s based on the Silmarillion, which reads more like a Wikipedia page with tons of interesting events. But it’s not exactly a compelling “story”.
Filmmakers likely recognize the exact same problem with biographies. Yes, a lot of interesting events to build a story around, but something that doesn’t put all but hardcore enthusiasts asleep after 10 minutes requires a plot arc and a lot more.
"The Rings of Power is a perfect example. It’s based on the Silmarillion,"
Actually no, it isn't--Amazon did *not* have the rights to the Silmarillion, but only to the *appendices* of the Lord of the Rings. As a result, they had an even more bare and spare narrative to work with than the Silmarillion, but on top of that, they couldn't flesh it out in any way that was consistent with the Silmarillion because that would infringe on IP rights that they didn't have.
So the (a?) problem was that the Rings of Power folks had the rights to a summary of a broader story, but not the broader story itself. A smarter studio would not have plowed a cool billion into such nonsense.
(The fact that the writers and showrunners were incompetent didn't help either, of course.)
I still liked it and am looking forward to the upcoming season(s).
The underlying problem was that the studio put people in charge who haven't the foggiest notion of what makes Tolkien good. This lack of understanding is not itself unusual, even among people who do get that Tolkien is good. They just don't understand why this is. At that point there is no hope of producing anything that resembles Tolkien in any but the most superficial way. It is akin to modern "sequels" to Pride and Prejudice. They are all dreadful, completely missing how Austen was a good writer.
"Based on a True Story" means fiction.
Biopics are the Historic Novels of motion pictures.
Do not get your history from movies.
That is all.
KD wasn't denying or contradicting any of that.
He was asking if and why it is necessary for biopic movies to be so innacurate (to the point of lying).
Filmmakers do not have a social circle that values truth - they value storytelling. So the truth becomes subservient to storytelling. Filmmakers also believe that their genius is greater than history or facts, and you can't be considered a genius if you just slavishly record reality.
Historians and biographers have a social circle that values truth more, which is why they try to be more truthful and pay a higher price when they make stuff up.
Biopics make most of their money and their accolades from people who don't care about historical accuracy either, so there is nothing really pushing them to be faithful to the past.
Nobody knows much about Napoleon, but if filmgoers are going to respond positively, the movie has to tell a gripping story well. It doesn't have to be accurate. Directors like to put their stamp on things, too, and that's another factor.
In my history classroom, I used certain films that got the main points right, like Gallipoli and The Elephant Man. If a fictional film got the period details right, I'd use that, too, notably Master & Commander, the Far Side of the World. These were very well made films, but they all contained inaccuracies. The inaccuracies were minor enough to be overlooked.
FWIW, even "documentaries" are pretty terrible. I used to use a History Channel special on the French Revolution in my 9th grade classes, which grossly oversimplified things, but it was compelling enough for the kids that I used it to complement primary document analyses and text narratives.
Nobody knows much about Napoleon? There have been more books written about him than any other historical figure with the possible exception of Jesus.
Maybe you meant no Americans know much about Napoleon, but I don't think that is true either.
The primary mode of book readin' is mental, spent over time, in isolation and digestive contemplation. Even crappy books have minium versions of these demands.
The primary mode of movies is visual storytelling, being expansive but within constraints, consumed with others, and, you know, ENTERTAINMENT.
This is only hard if you intellectualize it to death.
The makers of Band of Brothers probably did as good a job as anyone -- extensive interviews with many of the subjects no doubt helped. Even they made up stuff (like the interactions between Doc Roe and Renée) for better storytelling, however.
They did one weird change: the real life captain winters kept the German officer's gun.
"But why?"
The same reason the news went from someone doing just a bit more than reading a list of relevant events happening at the time, to the "discussion panels" style of infotainment their are today. To try to get more eyes (and thus dollars) on their product.
When it comes to the matter of biographies, most people's lives are incredibly regular (which means boring), even those that accomplished something remarkable or experienced things few do. Portraying that remarkable thing can in most cases be done in 10-20 min, which still leaves about 90 minutes of movie that need to be filled with things that need to be exaggerated or made up to keep the audience entertained.
I understand a certain Scottish play is not to be trusted...
Shakespeare rarely let history get in the way of a good story. A good example is Henry IV, part one. Shakespeare made Prince Hal's rival Hotspur a young man the same age as Hal when historically Hotspur was a generation older. The rivalry between two young men made for much more compelling drama.
Shakespeare had Holinshedd's Chronicles to work with and little else so he can probably be forgiven for trying to find what seemed real to him behind the dry pages.
Two totally different forms. A movie is a work of fiction that needs to reach 4 or 5 million people minimum and make a “point” in under 3 hours. That’s a tall order so everything has to serve the point. Facts are secondary.
A biography, by contrast, is by its nature factual or it won’t sell. Plus I’d guess if a biography sells 20,000 copies it’s a big success, but I know little about publishing.
Under 3 hours means a script of 90 to 120 pages. Reducing an 800 page biography to a 100 page script necessarily means a lot of cutting and compression.
“Is it really impossible to make an entertaining biopic that's 99% faithful to the truth?”
I don’t think people can tell you a story about what happened to them earlier the same day that’s 99% faithful to the truth. So much of our memory is invention, and the more time passes, the greater the invention.
I was burned in an accident this summer and when I hear other family members who were there tell the story I can’t help but interrupt. “What really happened was this….”
All stories are invented to a degree, and the best stories, often to a greater degree. People would rather hear a good story than the boring truth.
(A good story still needs to be believable. Too much invention, you lose the audience. Maybe that’s Scott’s error? I dunno. I’ll read about it after seeing the movie. I thought Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon might have been more involving with a little more invention.)
Don’t go to Napoleon for history for the same reason you don’t go to Richard III for biography. And if you go to a movie that starts “Once upon a time” don’t be shocked – shocked! – to find out that wasn’t quite what happened in Hollywood in 1969. You might think those are different kinds of movies, but they’re not.
This is really missing the point that i think KD is making.
Of course historical stories cannot be told accurately w.r.t the actual events of the time. No serious person disputes this.
But so many biopics egregiously discard facts known to be true, and insert stories known to be false at the time of their making.
This is quite different from "there is no single version of history".
You can blame the movie Silkwood. The scriptwriter 'acquired' a book proof of a book investigating the case without the author knowing about it. Hence to stop themselves from getting sued by illegally using the authors research they called it 'inspired by.' Since then, the phrase has just expanded in use to basically allow biopics to lie (see Social Network etc..)
Ah Monsieur Drum, great cinema is the product of a film seeking a higher truth, not some mere, fact-regurgitating movie…
Every historical movie, book, play, whatever is fiction. Except Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. That's practically a documentary.
"Weird" is, indeed, the "higher truth"...
"Oppenheimer" is really pretty historically accurate (and I speak as someone who teaches a university course on the history of the atomic bomb) and it's grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide, so evidently it can be done. But the temptation to juice the story for dramatic effect (and a better box office) keep most filmmakers from hewing too closely to the historical record.
I was irritated by the fictitious scene where Oppenheimer asks Einstein to calculate the odds the world would end with the first atomic test when Einstein was not a nuclear physicist and was not qualified to do such a calculation. It misrepresented physicists as interchangeable when even famous physicists have specialties and areas they know little about. This was all done to allow Oppenheimer to say a clever line later in the movie and to allow the directer to speculate about Strauss’ dislike of Oppenheimer.
Second on my list is “Ford vs Ferrari”, which had numerous made up scenes which probably did capture the tension between the two companies. The big screw up is showing Enzo Ferrari attending Le Mans and leaving early after his cars drop out, when the real Enzo was famous in his later life for never attending races.
You can't compare the Ford Vs. Ferrari movie to the book Go Like Hell, as too many scenes in the movie are Hollywoodized to an extreme, including leaving out the many drivers and fans who died (but I enjoyed both the movie and the book).
One movie that was nearly entirely true to the book was the movie Invictus, based on the book Playing the Enemy. The only fiction I caught was when the plane flew over the site of a World Cup Rugby match. The movie made that a "oh my god, here comes a plane that gonna deliberately crash" when the flyover was pre-planned and approved.
It's worse than that. Seeing it's believing, so the movie version feels more real if you don't think hard enough about it.
I think filmmakers are doing a disservice with such abuses of history. Other commenters excused this bad behavior because film is a different form of art, but for the average movie goer it's a trap.
There isn't any obvious statement the film is fiction, and it hits on a few facts the viewer knows well, so they are led to suspect the other events are true.
Napoleon will be seen in his hat with his hand in his shirt. We'll see him conquer Egypt and crown himself emperor and so on. If that much matches expectations, how readily should we question the rest?
All the blab blab blah here reminded me of reading Ward Carroll's blog about the movie Top Gun. He and his F14 pilot friends did a real life version called Pop Gun. Ward also interviewed pilots who had seen the latest version. They loved the flying scenes. They all knew it was just a movie and not a documentary.
Apparently, France is pissed about it. So maybe that was the point?
We should just face it: a person's "real" life isn't suitable for the movie treatment. American movies have a set of stringent requirements:
* Some kind of romance with an impossibly beautiful woman.
* Split second decision-making, with the "save" always at the last nanosecond.
* Car chases and gun fights.
* The protagonist as a real superman, whether physically (the best) or intellectually (as long as he's ripped and great looking).
* And a family that's preferably Hallmark-approved for lovingness etc. Or totally dysfunctional, indicating Triumph over the Odds.
If we fact check our own lives, we can see that few if any, of us are movie material. Nor is anybody else. Thus, roll the fiction machine! Pull out all the tired cliches! Bring in the stars!
As for me, I'll be watching "Godzilla Minus One." He's my kinda anti-hero.
FFS, anyone who knows anything about movies could spend all morning listing (even just American) movies that don't conform to your list.
Sometimes the exceptions do, in fact, prove that the "rules" are not rules at all.
Well, I meant popular movies, not the art house or chick flick ones. (Not to say that only "popular" is good ... or, for that matter, that "popular" automatically means "bad.")
I understand the need for directors to generate concise scences that seek to explain a more complicated reality (and make the movie more entertaining), yet I worry about all the mistruths. large and small, that a less well read audience picks up. A small example, but I was once discussing the moveie "Patton" with a colleague. In the movie when Patton defeats the Germans in his first battle he holds up a book on Armored Tactics with Rommel's name on it, and says "Rommel, I read your book". When I commented that Rommel's book was actually in infantry tactics and said nothing about tanks, my colleage replied "No it wan't, I saw it in the movie".
I'm also guessing that Rommel's book was in German.
I suspected Patton may have read a translation of Rommel's book (probably translated courtesy of some Army Intelligence group). Patton spoke flluid French, but I have never seen anything indicating he knew any German.
Getting history lessons from Hollywood is absurd (Birth of a Nation anyone?) and at one time I got angry at the myriads of misrepresentations in movies (the Dances with Wolves ending for example). Since then, and with the help of modern technologies, movies should be seen as a starting point to learn about history. Oppenheimer does stand out for its relative accuracy but for me the all time winner is 12 Years a Slave- what an incredible film. I wonder if a book has ever been published concerning this topic, it could be a good read on how the film industry subverts history throughout the world and perhaps most interesting when it doesn’t (Battle for Algiers).
I am utterly convinced that visual media have completely and utterly fucked over our view of the past, but worse, also our view of how we can and should live in the present.
There are exceptions, of course, and they are powerful, but too few in number to overwhelm the century-long parade of illusion and misrepresentation.
Often nonfiction does not provide the narrative arc of fiction, which cinema relies on even more than in writing.
More entertaining means more money. Simple as that.
Is this the correct hierarchy of plausible deniability,
based on a true story
suggested by a true story
inspired by true/actual events
?