Fact vs Fiction

Introduction: 

Biopics and documentaries are very similar when it comes to their topics, they both tell a true story. But is that true? Biographical pictures, or biopics for short, is a genre of film or television that is based on a true story. Even though they are based on true stories, they are considered fiction. Biopics usually explore the events of a historical figure or a famous event, from areas such as sports, politics, crime, war, musicians and many more. Biopics aim to focus on personal struggles, achievements or their impact on society. They are also made for entertainment purposes and are often biased towards who or what the film is about.  On the other hand, documentaries are a non-fiction film or tv show which presents true information about a certain subject, event or person. Documentaries use interviews, archived footage and reconstructions to drive the story forward. A documentary can be entertaining, like a biopic, but their purpose is to educate their audience and to show the world as it really is, not as it should be or as someone wants it to be.  According to Paul Jenkins (2021), “Documentaries don’t just tell you about something, they let you experience it. A good documentary film preserves, teaches, and entertains.” Biopics and documentaries do sound similar when it comes to their stories, but it's ‘how and why’ they are made that makes the two genres different. In this essay, I will be discussing the similarities and differences between biopics and documentaries, the different audiences that the two genres have, how spectacle and narrative filmmaking can be used, as well as comparing a biopic and documentary which tells the same story.  

Then vs Now: 

Biopics came around in the early 1900s when people wanted to watch something that is based on a true story, instead of reading about it. Joan Of Arc (Méliès, 1900) was the first biopic ever made which tells the story of Joan of Arc who was an inspired peasant who becomes an army captain for France, who is then martyred after she is captured. The 1990s and 2000s are when biopics started to become popular amongst audiences. A lot of filmmakers started exploring the lives of real people, with the main topics being about politicians, gangsters, historical events and figures, musicians and many more. A lot of these films explored emotional journeys and personal struggles which paved the way for the biopic genre. Some of these films include Malcom X (Lee, 1992), Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993), Donnie Brasco (Newell, 1997), Ray (Hackford, 2004), Zodiac (Fincher, 2007) and many more. Filmmakers of today mainly focus their biopics on famous musicians or bands, with a vast amount of these being released within the past decade. Some examples include Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer, 2018), Elvis (Luhrmann, 2022), Rocketman (Fletcher, 2019), A Complete Unknown (Mangold, 2025) and many others. Recently, filmmakers have been changing up the biopic genre with their creativity. Micheal Gracey’s new film ‘Better Man’ (2024) tells the story of British pop star, Robbie Williams. The film does something different that has never been done before in the biopic genre, which is that Williams is portrayed by a monkey. Gracey (2024) stated “To see himself as a performing monkey wasn’t just whilst he was famous — it was his whole life.” Robbie loved the idea of being portrayed by an animal, he stated “As humans, we care more for animals than we do for humans... the audience is probably going to have more empathy for me as a monkey.” 

Documentaries have been round since the late 1800s, but they were a lot simpler than they are today as they mainly featured something simple like a boat or a train. The Lumiere brothers, who are well known for creating the first moving images, filmed a lot of these short documentaries. One of them being called ‘Leaving the Factory’ (1895), which consisted of people leaving a factory and going for lunch. Although documentary filmmaking has been around since the earliest years of cinema, the term documentary was not used until the 1920s, when the founder of the British Documentary Movement, John Grierson, defined it as “the creative treatment of actuality.” Grierson was a socialist activist and his attitude towards life reflected his views of documentaries. ‘Nanook of the North’ (Flaherty, 1922) was one of the first feature length documentaries, which follows the lives of Nanook and his family who were Inuit’s living in the Artic circle. Flaherty spent a year with the family, where he filmed their everyday lives as they fished, traded and hunted. Nanook of the North, however, was criticized for its inaccuracy at the time. In 1922, Inuit's were living in buildings, not igloos, and had guns as weapons, not spears. The film was accurate for the 1800s, but not for the time of release, making it more of a biopic as the film was all set up and scripted. But it is marked by many as the first feature length documentary. Documentaries of today explore topics such as musicians, athletes, crimes and much more. A lot of modern documentaries are shown on TV channels like ‘History’ and ‘National Geographic’, or streaming platforms such as Netflix or Disney Plus. Like modern biopics, documentary filmmakers seem to be taking more of a creative approach. Piece by Piece (Neville, 2024) tells the story of Pharell Williams and his rise to fame and is told in LEGO pieces. Jill Wilfert (2024), LEGO’s head of global entertainment, stated “the whole idea behind Lego is its endless creativity and limitless possibility, and Pharrell really kind of embodies that.” Neville (2024) went on to say, “This whole film is an experiment in the tension between the specificity of real life and documentary and the imagination and universality of imagination.”  

Audience: 

Cinema attendance in the UK has dropped by 30% since the pandemic, so studios have been drawn to a winning formula, which explains the excess amounts of remakes, superhero films and music biopics. Pop-culture enthusiast Dermot McNamara (2025) stated “these biopics resonate across generations, offering nostalgia to older audiences while introducing younger viewers to legends they may not have grown up with.” As biopics are made for entertainment purposes, they explore emotional journeys and personal experiences within a certain character. The filmmaker wants the audience to feel something for this character, whether this be happy, sad, angry, annoyed etc. Christopher Nolans latest film ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023) tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer who helped build the atomic bomb. The film also explores the consequences he had to live with for the rest of his life. Throughout the film, Nolan uses extreme close ups of Robert’s face to grapple with who he is as a person and what he has done to himself and others. These close ups make the audience feel pitiful towards the character as he regrets what he has created, making Oppenheimer an anti-hero in the story.  

Filmmakers sometimes have to change the story to make it more engaging and exciting for the audience. A biopic has to fit the story of a whole life, or just a key part, into an entire feature length film, so some bits have to be removed from the story so the important parts can be seen. Filmmakers may also decide to rearrange or make up events to make things clearer or even create new fictional characters. Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer, 2018) is one of the most well-known biopics amongst people. It won 4 Oscars, one of them going to Rami Malek for his role as Freddie Mercury, and made a whopping 910 million dollars worldwide. But in reality, a lot of the story was changed. Just before the Live Aid concert is where the film makes its biggest departure from the truth. Freddie tells his bandmates that he has HIV, when in fact reports stated that he wasn’t diagnosed for another two years. This is obviously a difficult topic to tackle when it comes to a biopic, so changing this part of the story was crucial as it allowed the Live Aid performance to have more of a meaning. Paul (2020) from ‘Movie Related’ stated he was “heartbroken” when he found out that the film was mostly false. He went on to say, “what’s the point of doing a biopic, if its lies.” Dan replied with “you liked the movie when you saw it.” This supports my argument as even though some biopics don't tell the truth, people still enjoy them and choose to watch them. While biopics achieve their goal of being entertaining, they are not always a reliable source of information and are not meant to be watched for educational purposes. 

Documentary audiences are a lot different to biopic audiences. Most people will only watch a documentary about something they are interested in, as they want to get an insight into a certain person or event that interests them. The rise of streaming services has made documentaries more accessible and more popular than ever. In the March of 2020, Netflix released the docuseries ‘Tiger King’ (Chaiklin and Goode, 2020). By April, 15.6 billion minutes of the show had been watched, becoming the most watched show on Netflix at the time. In the April of 2020, ‘The Last Dance’ (Heir, 2020) was released which told the story of Micheal Jordan’s life and his final seasons with the Chicago Bulls. The docuseries received a lot of praise due to the lack of sports available during the pandemic. These two docuseries led to a demand for these streaming platforms to release more. Now, there are hundreds of documentaries about all sorts of topics on streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and many more.  

Spectacle vs Narrative: 

Spectacle filmmaking is the effect of watching something that the human eye has never seen before. When we encounter a visual effect that we’ve already seen, it fails to impress us. It only entertains us when we encounter them for the first time. Some forms of spectacle include CGI, settings, action and plot. For example, Jurassic Park (Spielberg. 1993) is known as a ‘spectacle’ film as the CGI dinosaurs is something that had never been done before. On the other hand, narrative is the process of telling an intriguing story, which an audience will be interested in all the way through. Whether this be by setting, plot or character development, spectacle and narrative filmmaking are often compared due to their ways of ‘wowing’ an audience.  

When it comes to true stories, spectacle films aren’t based off true stories, but they take something true and a make a fictional story. For example, Cars (Lasseter and Ranft, 2006) is a spectacle film when it comes to racing films. The film is inspired by NASCAR racing, and most of the cars are based on real car models, but the story itself is obviously fiction. What makes Cars a spectacle film is its incredible use of animation. At the time of release, the animation was state of the art, which no one had seen before. Cars was the first Pixar film to use ‘ray tracing’ which enables artists to accurately depict reflections without having to go through and ‘paint’ them individually. Each car character is also designed with unique personalities and expressions, making them feel alive and memorable. The backgrounds depicting the desert landscape and American highways are done with great detail, providing a visual experience that is pleasing to the eye. These aspects make the film very realistic for a Pixar film as it does a great job of creating the speed, intensity, and adrenaline of NASCAR racing. 

A biopics purpose is to tell an intriguing story, which makes narrative its filmmaking technique. Fitting with the theme of racing films, Ford V Ferrari (Mangold, 2019) tells the story of Car Designer Carol Shelby and Race Car driver Ken Miles who build a revolutionary race car for Ford in order to defeat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. The film is based on true events but as it is a biopic, something is always changed for entertainment purposes. The main part of the story that was changed was the ending of the film, where Ken Miles played by Christian Bale sadly passes away in a fatal car crash while testing one of the new Ford cars. In the film, the car crashes after experiencing brake failure, and Miles is killed in the ensuing fire. Whereas in real life, the car suddenly flipped, crashed, and caught fire. The exact cause of the crash has never been fully determined to this day, but it caused Miles to be ejected from the vehicle, killing him instantly. Mangold made these changes to the story as they improved both the narrative of Ford v Ferrari and its core message of why the death of Ken Miles was such a tragedy. However, despite the changes, the film has been praised in the racing community for its realism. All the racing scenes are 100% real with the only bit of CGI used is the shots of the crowd, which is due to the enormous size of the audience, which would have been difficult to recreate. Robert Nagle (2019), who was the stunt coordinator for the film, stated “my goal was to give the audience a sense of what it's really like racing." But at its core, Ford v Ferrari is about the relationship between Shelby and Miles and how the two characters battle on and off the track to win the 24hrs of Le Mans. As the film progresses, Miles and Shelby form a tight bond because of their mutual love of cars, creating a brother-like relationship. Matt Fraga (2019) from The Badger Herald stated, “their banter and fighting reminded me of my relationship with my brother.” A lot of the trailers for the film show Ford v Ferrari as a pure racing film, only focusing on Le Mans and the production of the Ford GT40, but what Mangold does with these two characters is amazing. He makes it more than a racing film, as he delves deep into the relationship between a race car driver and a race car designer.  

Biopic vs Documentary (Henry Hill): 

A filmmaker who has made himself renowned for his biopics is Martin Scorsese, who has been making biopics for almost 40 years. He mainly focuses on individuals who have had an interesting and intriguing life within the crime world. What makes his biopics so interesting is his use of distinctive characters. These characters aren’t just players in a plot; they’re windows into the human condition. Scorsese offers a rich tapestry of emotions and experiences, which gives an insight into his characters' gripping stories. His most notable biopic is Goodfellas (1990) which tells the story of the rise and fall of Henry Hill. Some other crime biopics he has made include Casino (1995), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Irishman (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). But is Goodfellas accurate according to the documentary ‘The Real Goodfella’ (George, 2006)? In the documentary, which includes interviews from Scorsese and Hill, the narrator states “Henry’s real life in the mob was far more vicious than Goodfellas could portray”. The film ends with Henry going into witness protection as he rats out his fellow members. The last shot of the film shows Henry exiting his house to grab the daily newspaper, with a voiceover from Ray Liotta, who portrays Henry in the film. The voiceover states “I’m an average nobody, I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook”, but according to the documentary, where the film ends is where Henry’s life turns into chaos. The mafia issued a multi-million dollar hit on Henry, causing him to live in fear for the rest of his life. The majority of the film though was pretty accurate when it came to the plot: Henry’s early life, the Lufthansa heist at JFK airport, and the brutal death of Billy Batts. But it’s the main characters of the film which were changed the most. Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci), Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and many other characters were changed for the film as most of the characters' last names are fictional, which was a creative option Scorsese chose to do. The reason behind the changes is because the film is about Henry Hills life and giving an insight into what life was like as a gangster through his experiences. Telling the story of each main character would create an over-haul of subplots which would make the whole narrative confusing. The attitudes of Jimmy, Tommy and Paul are also not accurate as the documentaries describes them as “some of the most psychotic gangsters in New York, far more brutal as the movie could ever portray.” In the film, Paul was portrayed as a father figure to Hill but in reality he was capable of brutal acts, and when it came to Jimmy, Scorsese “didn’t want to see what he was capable of”. But Tommy is probably the most vicious one in the film. In one scene he kills Spider, a young bartender, who forgot about his drink. Spider’s death is real, according to Henry, and happened exactly how it happened in the film. Henry described that moment as the one when he realized Tommy was “a total psychopath”. Even though Tommy is the most violent one, the film still doesn't capture it perfectly as Hill stated that the film “softened him up”. But even with these character changes, Goodfellas is still praised for its excellent performances. Joe Pesci won the Oscar for best supporting actor, and the rest of the cast perfectly capture the gangster life. Goodfellas is a mostly accurate adaptation which is considered by many as a cinematic masterpiece. The film explores power, loyalty and greed in the life of crime. It highlights the luxurious lifestyle of the mob, but also its risks and danger. Even though the film has underwritten characters, Scorsese manages to make an intriguing and exciting gangster classic film. On the other hand, the documentary about the same group of people tells the gripping and interesting story of what really happened. It shows the frightening life that Henry Hill had to live and reveals that the characters’ real-life counterparts weren’t as nice as they seemed in the film. The documentary includes interviews with Henry Hill himself, making it a reliable source but somewhat biased. Both pieces of media are entertaining and accurate, making them both enjoyable watches. 

Conclusion: 

In conclusion, while both biopics and documentaries share the aspect of telling true stories, they differ significantly in their approach and purpose. Biopics focus on dramatising real-life events, often altering facts for entertainment or emotional impact, and they tend to be shaped by creative interpretations. Documentaries, on the other hand, strive to present facts and provide an educational, sometimes more objective perspective, often relying on real footage and interviews. By comparing films like ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘The Real Goodfella’, we see how biopics embellish personal stories for narrative purposes, while documentaries preserve the raw, unfiltered truths of those involved. Ultimately, both genres offer valuable insights, but they do so in very different ways, catering to diverse audience needs and expectations. 

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