Factual Representation Quotes

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

The simple fact is that what you see on the screen is pretty much real.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

It's very hard to dramatise something factual and not make it look overdone, but also not to make it look so under-dramatised that it's dull.

Paul's the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that's just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn't matter. So I don't know, maybe I'm being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

If you have to tell the truth about the fat content in a hamburger, why shouldn’t you have to tell the truth about another individual who is offering for public office.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

Sometimes movies gloss over things, and it was important to me that this was realistic.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it-you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

In many ways, it is very real, because I sat there for 9 days, and it was constantly happening, and that was the 9 days of making the film. But you can't say that it's 100% true, because there are places where I've been intrusive and interfered.

As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.

When we name things correctly, we comprehend them correctly, without adding information or judgements that aren't there. Does someone bathe quickly? Don't say be bathes poorly, but quickly. Name the situation as it is, don't filter it through your judgments. Give your assent only to that which is actually true.

I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.

The point is that a filmmaker is like a journalist in projecting reality in the true sense of the word. Only thing is he dramatically packages it to make more effect.