Based on a True Story
“It should be a film. It shouldn’t be a documentary or a fiction film; there should be no difference… It shouldn’t be pigeonholed into ‘a documentary is this way, and that’s nonfiction.’ What if it’s all together? What if you could pull from everything and experiment with it?”
— MARTIN SCORSESE, November 2019
ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING and influential cinematic trends of the last thirty years has been the cross-pollination of techniques, tropes, and strategies between documentaries and fiction films and television shows. Following the ground-breaking success of Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (1989), which became the highest-grossing documentary to that time with a domestic box office gross of $6.7 million (US), there has been a shift among documentary filmmakers away from the more staid, information-driven approach of the past and toward an adherence to Moore’s first rule of documentary filmmaking: “Don’t make a documentary—make a MOVIE.”
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were among the first documentarians to embrace this philosophy to both broad acclaim and box office success. Berlinger has explained that, for their debut feature documentary, (1992), he and Sinofsky “pushed the form in a couple of ways. For example, evocative title sequences, the use of an original music score, all these things that, a couple of decades ago, were unheard of in a documentary. But I think the thing that we were most conscious of, that I think
