In James Cameron’s Titanic, as the ocean liner plunged deeper into the Atlantic’s icy waters, First Officer William Murdoch drew his gun. Passengers were pushing for spots in what few lifeboats the ship had to offer, and Murdoch was struggling to keep order. Panicked, he fired into the crowd. An Irish worker, Tommy Ryan, collapsed to the floor, cradled by a friend as he bled to death on the sinking deck. Realising the horror of what he’d done, Murdoch gave one last nautical salute to a nearby colleague before turning the gun on himself.
When the blockbuster hit cinemas in 1997, audiences lapped up this pulse-racing scene. Except, that is, in the small town of Dalbeattie, Scotland, where the real-life Murdoch grew up (a stone plaque on the town hall hails his “heroism” to this day). Family members’ public condemnation of the movie’s depiction of Murdoch – which, his nephew Scott Murdoch claimed, was fabricated to make the film’s crescendo more exciting; there was no evidence his uncle had killed anyone – was so fierce, the executive vice president of 20th Century Fox flew all the way to Dalbeattie to apologise. A £5,000 cheque was presented as compensation for the “distress” caused, with Cameron himself describing his regret on Titanic’s DVD commentary: “I think I have come to the realisation that it was probably a mistake to portray a specific person.”
A quarter of a century on, Hollywood still hasn’t solved the moral quandary Cameron encountered making a movie inspired by real people and events. What do film-makers owe the people whose stories become the basis of (or even, in the case of Murdoch in Titanic, a small part of) their box office hits? Is there a line that is sometimes crossed between directors’ desire to tell the most entertaining story possible and their responsibility towards the people – alive or dead – whose experiences they’re mining for content? “I think historically in Hollywood, there’s definitely a tension between those things [underpinning] a lot of biopics,” Zach Baylin – the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of King Richard and forthcoming Bob Marley biopic One Love – tells me, days after a row over the recent Todd Haynes drama May December brought those questions back to the fore.
May December was inspired by the tale of Mary Kay Letourneau – a real-life American school teacher, then aged 34, who was jailed in 1997 for having sex with a 12-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. After serving a six-year prison sentence, the pair married and had two kids. May December fictionalised many elements of their marriage, adding in Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry, an actress set to star in a film based on their lives. But, as the film’s screenwriter Samy Burch recently told me: “I think of it as, if you take your glasses off, you know who it’s about. Like Succession – you know who that’s about.” To the real-life Vili Fualaau, this was precisely the problem. “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me – who lived through a real story and is still living it,” he told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this month.
Fualaau isn’t alone in hitting out against a film based on his family’s life this awards season. Lisa Marie Presley reportedly told Sofia Coppola that she thought the script for her latest film, Priscilla, was “shockingly vengeful and contemptuous” and depicted Elvis Presley as “a predator”. Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of the nuclear physicist immortalised in Christopher Nolan’s Golden Globe-winning drama, meanwhile recently voiced his discomfort with the film for its inclusion of a scene in which the scientist tries to poison a tutor with a potassium-cyanide-laced apple. “That’s a serious accusation and it’s historical revision. There’s not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true.”
Speaking to the Guardian, Oppenheimer – who was in contact with Nolan during the making of the film, but wasn’t directly involved – explains that, on the whole, he was happy with the movie. “It’s a good piece of art that people should use as the starting point of understanding who Robert Oppenheimer was,” he says, adding that he’s overjoyed by the spotlight the drama has shone on his non-profit organisation The Oppenheimer Project, devoted to advancing nuclear energy while decreasing nuclear weaponry. “It’s brought a lot of beneficial attention. [But] it’d be nice if Hollywood would invite the family members in because otherwise, it feels like this very kind of disconnected thing where these people are productising and making a profit off your family story and you don’t have any say in how.”
These types of flare-ups are nothing new. 2018’s best picture Oscar winner Green Book drew criticism from the family of its subject, Dr Don Shirley, who complained the film “misrepresented” the revered Black pianist’s relationship with his chauffeur. Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, found himself at public loggerheads with the family of Bruce Lee after the release of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood when the martial arts icon’s daughter Shannon criticised the 2019 film for depicting the star in a “troubling” manner. (Tarantino’s response wasn’t exactly diplomatic, reiterating his opinion that “Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy” and inviting those bothered to “go suck a dick”.)
Venture back further in Hollywood history, and examples become even more contentious. Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams is an American physician and activist who was famously played by Robin Williams in a 1998 film based on his life, which he has spent advocating for a radical new form of free-to-use, patient-oriented healthcare for Americans. The movie, however, “shrank Patch down to a funny doctor”, the 78-year-old says, describing how the film left him “embarrassed”. He agreed to the film because “I wanted to build a hospital. I had big hopes because it starred Robin Williams, who most everybody in America loved.” Instead, he felt misrepresented. (“A movie wants to sell tickets. Love doesn’t sell tickets. Peace doesn’t sell tickets. Justice doesn’t sell tickets. Funny sells tickets. So then people see the movie and go, ‘Patch! Funny doctor.’ Not a doctor who wants to end capitalism,” as he put it in 2012).
There’s no one-size-fits-all rule to how much consideration biopics should give to their subjects, suggests Baylin. A film such as 2010’s The Social Network, which its subject Mark Zuckerberg says he “found kind of hurtful”, is clearly very different to the Green Book controversy: one expressed something culturally important about the misogynistic foundations on which modern Silicon Valley sits; the other left an everyday family aghast at the idea that their beloved relation’s name had been co-opted to tell a cosy, revisionist story about race in the US. When it comes to his own work, Baylin prefers to work closely with his subjects and/or their families.
“It can be incredibly helpful because in the best scenarios, they trust you, open up to you and you get insights into relationships and situations that you would never get from reading historical accounts,” he says. “The flip side is there’s a natural protectiveness around the story [of their loved one] and who they want the world to see these people as. It can become a negotiation in some way between trying to really advocate for what’s best for the film, and what’s best for their desire of how the family is portrayed. But in my experience, I think movies are better for actually having [subjects’] involvement.”
He’s not alone in favouring this approach. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, JA Bayona’s Society of the Snow and Ava DuVernay’s Origin are just a few of the films likely to feature in this year’s awards season that were made in close collaboration with the subject or families of their subjects – perhaps an indication of Hollywood’s evolution when it comes to telling rather than exploiting real people’s stories; a line that the industry hasn’t always navigated perfectly. It’s about time if that is the case, some might argue. Cinema has a habit of locking in perceptions that are difficult to break. As William Murdoch’s nephew lamented after 20th Century Fox’s apology in Dalbeattie: “In three or four years people will have forgotten about this ceremony. But the film will still portray my uncle as a murderer.” The question of what film-makers owe their real-life inspirations, to paraphrase Titanic’s theme song, is likely to go on and on.
