Stories in code
Authenticity: Is a Film Ever Worth Dying For?
Striving for authenticity in film doesn’t equate with good storytelling, but as we have seen, it can kill.
With the recent tragic fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust (Saperstein, 2021) the question of safety on film sets has once again found its way into the public domain. The question being asked in the popular press is whether real guns should ever be used in films. This question is too narrow in focus and is really a question to provoke an argument rather than a conversation. In an American context, this question falls into the highly politicised and incendiary debate on guns that plagues that country. It also papers over a far more insidious and dangerous trait of film making: the argument for authenticity.
The desire to achieve authenticity is a powerful motivator to push the boundaries of the medium, to take more risks creatively and consequently, take more risks with the safety of cast and crew. Tom Cruise, for example, makes headlines for doing his own stunts and each headline announces how the stunts are getting more complex and dangerous. The latest Mission Impossible film includes headlines such as:
“Tom Cruise shows off latest daredevil ‘Mission: Impossible’ stunt” (Reuters, 2021)
When asked in interviews why he does it, he insists that
“It has to do with storytelling … It allows us to put cameras in places that you’re not normally able to do.”
The article goes on to say,
Cruise definitely has a point. It is sometimes obvious when a camera cuts around an action sequence to switch between the actor and stunt performer, and too many of these cuts can remove the viewer from the scene’s emotional core. One advantage the Mission: Impossible movies have over other actioners is how the direction smoothly follows Cruise’s movements, capturing angles that showcase the actor and make the action feel more authentic. (Ferguson, 2021)
Authenticity is also used to attack the encroachment of computing in live action film. The argument is that computer generated imagery (CGI) or visual effects (VFX) will never deliver authenticity to an audience. As one armourer stated in an article in American Cinematographer:
CGI may be used for close-range gunshots that could not be safely achieved otherwise, but yes, even with all the advancements in visual effects and computer-generated imagery, we still fire guns with blanks. The reason is simple: We want the scene to look as real as possible. We want the story and characters to be believable. Blanks help contribute to the authenticity of a scene in ways that cannot be achieved in any other manner. (Brown, 2019)
Authenticity and film are a highly questionable combination. Feature film is a fictional medium where truth (if that is what the authentinistras are really talking about) is a product of the artifice of the storytelling, not a vague nod to the scientific method. The importance of the concept and craft of artifice in film is taught in basic film studies as part of the art of film storytelling (Thompson and Bordwell, 2006). Artifice in film is the ingenious trickery used to tell a fantastic story in a believable way. It is the art and craft of making an audience suspend their disbelief.
How important is authenticity in this context? The film archive is full of films that got things wrong, that failed the authenticity test. The article 8 movies that really got science wrong (Stat, 2018) provides examples that are fact checked by experts in fields related to those in the films. Examples include:
Skyfall (2012)
The villain in the James Bond movie “Skyfall” is an embittered former spy whose jaw was supposedly melted away by a hydrogen cyanide suicide pill gone bad. Except … hydrogen cyanide is best known as a poisonous gas and hydrocyanic acid, from which it can be derived, is less corrosive than lemon juice. If it was that corrosive, it would have melted the capsule itself long before. I was so annoyed that my son later said he would never go with me to a good spy movie again.
— Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT
Jurassic Park (1993)
I love the visual effects. I went to see it with my then boyfriend (now husband) on the big screen and it really captured my imagination. But, even back then, I knew extinction is not reversible!
— Dr. Reshma Kewalramani, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Prometheus (2012)
I have to say the movie that really annoyed me was “Prometheus.” The cartographer gets lost immediately, and as soon as the biologist sees an alien animal he wants to cuddle with it. Then the whole crew just continues to do idiotic things to put everyone in danger.
— Danielle Tomasello, postdoctoral researcher at the Whitehead Institute
As a person who has spent thousands of hours writing computer code, my experience is that pretty much every hacker movie ever made scores low on the authenticity scale. From Wargames (1983), Hackers (1995) Swordfish (2001), Source Code (2011) to Ready Player One (2018) the computing experience is not authentic. It bears little or no relation to the lived experience of coders, computer scientists or hackers. I could list numerous details where the depiction is not authentic, but one that gets me harrumphing at the screen is when the computer genius is able to magic up a beautifully sharp image showing the details of a face or number plate from a highly pixilated blurry thumbnail photo taken by a CCTV camera at an oblique angle in the dark. And they do it using what looks like Microsoft Paint. Even with advances in machine learning, the way it’s done in film is simply not possible! And yet, I still watch these films and enjoy them, as apparently do millions of others.
There are two points to be made from this micro-rant. The first is that the authentic depiction of somebody sitting at a computer writing code is not entertaining. If the depiction was authentic, the audience would probably be bored. As Alfred Hitchcock famously observed, “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out”.
The second is not to confuse the notion of authenticity with realism in film. An analysis of realism in film is way beyond the scope of this article (there is a substantial body of scholarly literature on this for those interested). An often-cited example which demonstrates realism in film is the depiction of war in Saving Private Ryan (1998). In conversations with war veterans, director Steven Spielberg was struck by the fact that they universally dismissed the cinematic recreation of war: ‘They all said, there were two wars fought, there was our war and there was Hollywood’s war.’ (Haggith, 2007) In making Saving Private Ryan he stated
I did not want to shoot the picture in a way that could seem like a Hollywood production… a simulation of Omaha Beach, and making a gung-ho Rambo-kind of extravaganza. I wanted this film to be in a way uneasy for audiences to bear through. (Haggith, 2007)
To achieve this aim, Spielberg exploited a multitude of filmmaking techniques, notably by mimicking actual footage that was shot by official military camera operators (ibid.). As he states, his aim was not a simulation, it was to use the language of film (artifice) to create empathy and access another person’s truth.
This is the power of storytelling. The fact that we still watch and enjoy films that lack technical authenticity suggests that as an audience we prefer the artifice. The engagement is not about accuracy, rather about a truth being communicated through the motivation of the storyteller and their telling of the story.
Most of Saving Private Ryan was filmed in England, not France where the story is set. Does this lack of authenticity really make a difference to the quality of the story? No. Does holding a real gun loaded with blanks or real ammunition really make a quantifiably substantive difference to an actor’s performance when we consider how a performance can be altered in post-production or when an actor is creating a character in a different period or a fictional intergalactic world?
The argument being made for authenticity is dangerous. Tom Cruise, cited earlier, stated that doing his own stunts allowed cameras to be put in places that were otherwise difficult. However, when this increases the risk of injury, damage or death, is being able to do a scene in a single shot rather than using cuts and transitions justifiable? In 2017 Cruise seriously injured himself doing a stunt while filming Mission Impossible 6, which also put the whole production in jeopardy, including the jobs and livelihoods of crew and minor cast (Keslassy et al., 2017).
Actors are trained to be good at creating believable characters and they are frequently tasked with, for example, staring at a green screen and being asked to convince an audience that they are looking at a battle in space, or a medieval joust or that they are floating in zero gravity.
Similarly, cinematographers, production designers, editors, VFX people, sound designers and the many other crafts are all good at they do. Its their job. But like all people who get up each day to go to work, they expect to come home at the end of the day, alive and uninjured.
Unfortunately, death and injury on film sets is too common. Making a fictional film should not be a matter of life and death in the name of authenticity or in any other name. Any death is too many.
Film is the ingenious medium of artifice, and we love it for it. Authenticity as described here is a conceit, and, on a film set can be deadly.
Wikipedia has a page dedicated to listing the injuries and deaths of people in film and TV (Wikipedia, 2021). It is a long list but unfortunately not exhaustive. Please visit the page and look. If you know of somebody who has been injured or died in the making of a film or TV show, please consider adding them to the list. It’s the least we can do.
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References
Brown, D. (2019). Filming With Firearms — The American Society of Cinematographers [online]. Available from: https://ascmag.com/blog/filmmakers-forum/filming-with-firearms [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Ferguson, M. (2021). Why Tom Cruise Does His Own Mission: Impossible Stunts [online]. Available from: https://screenrant.com/tom-cruise-mission-impossible-stunts-own-reason/ [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Haggith, T. (2007). Realism, Historical Truth and the War Film: The Case of Saving Private Ryan. In Paris, M. (ed.). Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 177–191 [online]. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_14 [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Keslassy, B.L., Elsa, Lang, B. and Keslassy, E. (2017). ‘Mission: Impossible 6’ Faces Production Delay After Tom Cruise Injured (EXCLUSIVE). Variety [online]. Available from: https://variety.com/2017/film/news/mission-impossible-6-faces-production-delay-after-tom-cruise-injured-exclusive-1202528831/ [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Reuters (2021). Tom Cruise shows off latest daredevil ‘Mission: Impossible’ stunt. Reuters. 26th August [online]. Available from: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/tom-cruise-shows-off-latest-daredevil-mission-impossible-stunt-2021-08-26/ [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Saperstein, P. (2021). ‘Rust’ Production Shuts Down ‘At Least Until Investigations Are Complete’. Variety [online]. Available from: https://variety.com/2021/film/news/rust-shooting-shut-down-production-alec-baldwin-halyna-hutchins-1235096647/ [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Stat (2018). 8 movies that really got science wrong. STAT [online]. Available from: https://www.statnews.com/2018/08/15/movies-that-got-science-wrong/ [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Thompson, K. and Bordwell, D. (2006). An appetite for artifice. Observations on film art [online]. Available from: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2006/12/25/an-appetite-for-artifice/ [Accessed 28 October 2021].
Wikipedia (2021). List of film and television accidents. Wikipedia [online]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_film_and_television_accidents&oldid=1052138116 [Accessed 28 October 2021].
