Nicholas Meyer Quotes

Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.

What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.'

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.

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.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.

When I was young, watching historical movies made me feel absolutely sublime. But the first few times I visited costume museums, I was really disappointed because it was not at the level I saw in movies. It was not the level of the image I'd imagined.

I think that I altered history in 'Elizabeth,' and I interpreted history far more than Danny Boyle or Richard Attenborough did to 'Slumdog Millionaire' or 'Gandhi.' They took Indian novels or Indian characters and very much stayed within the Indian diaspora.

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

The American obsession with 'Downton' amuses me slightly because it's such a fiction. I've always been questioned about my historical veracity, and 'Downton' just flies past, when it's completely made up.

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.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

I like storytelling movies and more than that I like historical movies; and I think someday I'll definitely make a movie about the past 50 years history.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

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.

It's something I'd find rather distracting in a historical piece, looking at characters that have obviously just gotten off their Ab Blaster. You see a piece set in the 1300s or the 1800s, and you've got characters who have perfect abs and are incredibly well-groomed, not a hair out of place, and it just doesn't make sense.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Literature invents its own rules.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

Anyone who says a movie about history is a historical document is crazy.

If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction.

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.