Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story that you just can't make up.
'Cry Baby' is like this fairytale version of me. A lot of it is based on real events, and some of it is made up to make it more whimsical.
When you write a roman a clef, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to wonder how much of this is true, how much invented.
My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.
Because I'm a dramatist, I'm allowed to take liberties, but I want my films to be based in truth, and it's very important to me that the community we're focusing on is happy with the film. From an ethical point of view, that's everything.
It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.
At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.
We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.
When I wrote for Eazy, I wrote for the character. Everybody knew Eazy loved girls, so I would make him funny, even though it was somewhat misogynistic.
Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?
When you adapt a book to a film, you take all the best parts and put them into an hour and 15 minutes and have to compromise on the characters.
I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."
Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.
Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.
This is not a documentary. Are there essential truths that are captured by this movie? I think unquestionably the answer is yes. Do you have to change certain things to make it work? The book is called '13 Hours'; the movie is two hours long.
What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.'
Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don't necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They find that the liberties and the creative freedoms that you get in cable is more interesting to them than the censorship of a network show.
I would like to do a movie where the moments could be extended and you could have the freedom of that, but I'm not precious, if it moves the story and doesn't take away from it.
I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.
Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.
