10 Things Filmmakers Need To Stop Doing Immediately

There is no way that a two hour film will be able to represent a whole person’s life or the nuances within their personality in a completely fair way. Certain dialogue will have to be made up and timelines, events - even people - will sometimes have to be condensed. But, at the very least, the gist of the truth should remain.

For most people, the film of a person’s life or of an historical event will become the reality once they have seen it played out in dramatic form – most people will not be fact-checking afterwards, despite the easy access to Google. This is why a film like Darkest Hour is so dangerous, as it helps to further cement the heroic status of a man who was a racist pro-colonialist.

Another notably problematic film was the admittedly great (and buttock-clenchingly tense) Paul Greengrass joint, Captain Phillips. Tom Hanks plays this heroic titular Captain who, in reality, was at fault for putting the boat and crew at risk of a pirate attack and was far from heroic or apparently even being that nice a guy.

The rewriting of history is nothing new, and certainly not confined to filmmaking, but due to the popularity of the medium filmmakers have a responsibility to be more careful.