Simon Beaufoy Quotes

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

If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.

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

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

In Iranian cinema, all the lying takes place before making the film. In order to be able to make the film, you have to lie.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

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.

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.

You amp things up and you speed things up, but technically, you can still be legally correct. This is the big beef I have with novels as well as television shows - it actually makes for a better show when you accommodate the truth.

I think everybody is allowed, especially when they're telling a story, as long as it's not based on somebody's real life, you're allowed a certain liberty.

You're not doing the scene exactly the way it is in the book [The Hunger Games], but the intention of the scene is there.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director.

As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

You have to take some dramatic license just to make it entertaining sometimes.

I thought I understood the story very well, because I've lived with it for so long. But movies change and take on a life of their own once they start to be made, and you have to keep your eye on the real ball, not the ball that's in your head.

I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.