Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.
What I want you to know is that 'Zero Dark Thirty' is a dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts.
How can an article about me or the Batman be the true story when I am not consulted or interviewed?
My duty is that of a chronicler; and if I perform that conscientiously, the lessons which my observations suggest will need no pointing out.
I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were.
If your story is being told by someone who doesn't really know it, it's not going to come out accurate. A lot of it has to do with context. Whoever's behind the camera or pen or whatever.
One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.
On American sets, you work 12-, 14-, 16-hour days sometimes. All that volume over a short course of time can actually be less conducive to telling a story accurately.
As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.
I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes.
There's definitely a delicate line you have to walk in telling someone else's story that's not quite as delicate in telling your own story. I think when I'm working on a personal story, there's less pressure to try to get it exactly right.
Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.
