Bennett Miller Quotes

If there's anything about someone's life that's important enough to make a movie about it, I have to take responsibility to get all of it right. It's a huge responsibility.

Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the telling of a good story. But they don't get in the way of the truth.

I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.

There’s dramatic license, which is necessary or nothing’s fun, and historical truth, which is necessary or nothing’s understood.

Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.

Whenever you're telling a story about true-life events and about real people, there's a tremendous responsibility-slash-burden to get it right.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

I felt that as long as we were being honest, and that we didn't bend the truth to accomplish another goal, to be entertaining or to be a happy ending, I was confident that we'd be able to tell the story the way it happened.

I can just say exactly what happened.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

I do not make stories up, full stop.

When you make movies based on real life, you try to exaggerate it.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

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.

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

I always like when things are loosely based on real events. That always makes it more interesting because there's a lot of research you can do.

Nonfiction means that our stories are as true and accurate as possible. Readers expect - demand - diligence.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

History is more robust than poetry because it is more truthful.

There's truth and then there's fiction - I think truth does exist and you can present it.

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.

You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie.

Anything in which you're playing someone real does make you feel responsible for making the story as true as it can be.