Rajkumar Hirani Quotes

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

Truth is quite constricting, in a way. You endlessly see at the start of a film 'This is a true story'.

If a film is based on a true story and you don't use anyone's name, you can do what you like.

I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one.

What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'

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.

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

I think it's fair to ask how truthful a film is as opposed to how factual it is.

When you are doing a film about real people, you don't have a lot of manoeuvrability when it comes to how much you can add by way of imagination. You have to replicate what they were like. What you can add to it is your version of it.

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps.

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

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.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

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

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 best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

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.

When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.

I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right.

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've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.

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.

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

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 …