Michael Bentham

Medium or ventriloquist? Navigating the (ethical) tensions between fact and fiction when writing dialogue for a modern biopic

University of South Australia

This paper will explore some of the ethical questions that arise when writing dialogue for a biopic. Conversations between historical characters are rarely recorded, so dialogue is the most common locus of fiction in historical re-presentations. While writing a biopic about British boxer Randolph Turpin, I discovered that there were very few vocal traces of the man, so the words I have put into the protagonist’s mouth are almost entirely imagined. Invented dialogue is considered the dividing line between literary biography and the biographical novel (Edel 1957; Lee 2009). Similarly, it is one of the key dividing lines between written history and the historical novel, so is central to any discussion regarding the ethics of re-presenting historical subjects. Even the writers of memoir struggle with the ethics of the spoken word. In the absence of a recording, memory can rarely be relied on to retrieve an accurate rendering of past conversations. The late Joan Didion, when writing her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, stated that the idea of imagining words into the mouth of her dead husband “would seem obscene, a violation” (Didion 2005, p.194). Contrast this with memoirist Nancy K Miller, who noted that the least verifiable elements of her work were the scenes that she created through dialogue, and yet these invented words, she discovered, were what seemed most truthful to her readers (Miller 2004, p.149). During the authorship of the biopic, therefore, the writing of dialogue is where the tension between fact and fiction, the screenwriter and historical other, pulls tight. Does putting words into a dead person’s mouth result in the construction of a lie, or can the use of fiction techniques vivify the historical referent in a way that has its own validity within the intersecting domains of the biopic form?

Michael’s work as a writer/director spans feature films, documentary and shorts. His feature drama Disclosure (2020), was nominated for an Australian Academy Award (best indie film) and an Australian Directors’ Guild Award (best direction in a feature film), and is currently streaming on Stan. Michael’s research activities at the University of South Australia are exploring the articulation and application of moving image narratives as methodology.