Screenwriting the Contemporary Biopic

The personal crisis that I experienced caring for my dying partner, Alison, was described by a disability counsellor as “grieving in instalments”. As a filmmaker, one way I tried to process Alison’s dying was by writing screenplays about biographical subjects who had all suffered from psychological trauma. For this process to have any benefit, I felt it essential to gain an accurate understanding of the interiority of my historical referents. I also knew that choosing to engage with these characters in the form of the biopic would involve navigating the ethical tensions that arise between fidelity to the facts, and the commercial storytelling imperatives of making a mainstream biopic. But my concerns about capturing the essence of my historical subjects were challenged from an unexpected source. It was not the film producers pushing for a marketable story that created a pull between fact and fiction, but my disability counsellor, who suggested that my tales of biographical others were, possibly, all about me. My counsellor’s insight was the catalyst that compelled me to take a deep dive into the intersection of screenwriter and biographical subject in the authorship of the biopic. This book charts that journey. My biographical subject is British middleweight boxer Randolph Turpin, who died in 1966, the year I was born.

The journey towards articulating my creative practice as a filmmaker began at the side of boxer Randolph Turpin's grave, where I knew my greatest (research) challenge as a screenwriter was coming to know a man I could never meet. If Randolph had been alive he would have been my key interviewee and, like Martin Scorsese's relationship with Turpin's contemporary, ‘Raging Bull’ Jake LaMotta, I would have had the opportunity of getting to know Randolph, of conducting a life-story interview through which I could come to know, through an inter-subjective process, Randolph's ‘identity as life story’ (McAdams in Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research and Clinical Practice 37:2018, 361). But Randolph Turpin is dead and, for a man who gained such fame as a world champion boxer in the 1940s and 1950s, he left remarkably few personal traces of his existence. So how could I fill the gap between events as depicted on the public record, and the interiority of Randolph Turpin, the man? A starting point for a methodological approach to exploring this question stems from the formative years I spent as a postgraduate filmmaking apprentice at the UK's National Film and Television School (NFTS). As my research progressed, NFTS founder Colin Young’s notion of the contemporary filmmaker as an ethnographically-engaged ‘cultural producer’ became foundational in developing a working definition of a narrative fiction filmmaking methodology.

An enquiry into how screenwriter and historical subject intersect in the authorship of the contemporary biopic raises important ethical questions. Can the essence of a biographical subject, like boxer Randolph Turpin, be revealed at this intersection, or will the process of making a narrative fiction result in the construction, and sale, of a lie, or something else entirely, with its own validity as narrative re-presentation? In Ethics in Screenwriting, Steven Maras proposes engaging with such questions through a cross-fertilisation of screenwriting practice and an applied media ethics (Maras in Ethics in Screenwriting. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). I argue that this is problematic due to the links between applied media ethics and journalistic notions of objective ‘truth’, evidenced in prescriptive media ethics models that conflate fiction with lying (Black and Roberts in Doing Ethics in Media: Theories and Practical Applications, Routledge, New York, 2011; Deaver in Journal of Mass Media Ethics 5:166–177, 1990). As an alternative to prescriptive media ethics models, I offer an alternative proposal, to cross-fertilise screenwriting practice with an ‘ethics of authenticity’. An ‘ethics of authenticity’ shifts the locus of ethical evaluation and decision-making to authorial performance, (re)situating the screenwriter as ‘ethical subject’ (Eakin in Living Autobiographically, Cornell University Press 2008, 78; Parker in The Ethics of Life-Writing, Cornell University Press, 2004, 53). In other words, by substituting the ethics of authenticity for media ethics in the process of writing a biopic, a significant shift is made away from a fidelity-to-fact relationship to the historical referent, and towards an inter-subjective relationship to the historical referent, governed by authorial performance. This ethical positioning offers profound storytelling possibilities for the screenwriter working in the fiction form of the biopic. One such possibility is to use narrative fiction to reshape the past to give agency to victims of injustice. This concept of ethical re-visioning has been developed by auto-ethnographers as an explicit ethical code, called ‘writing to right’ (Denzin in Handbook of Autoethnography, Routledge, 2015). I demonstrate the application of ‘writing to right’ in the final scenes of my Randolph Turpin biopic, My Brother, My Killer, where I frame a real letter (fact) within a re-visioned scenario (fiction) so that Randolph's real-life tormentors can be fictionally held to account (see Fig. 3.2).

For a man who gained such fame and fortune as a world champion boxer in the 1940s and 1950s, there are remarkably few traces of Randolph Turpin left in the archives. Faced with such a scant record, how could I, situated in the present, bridge the temporal, spatial, and psychosocial gap to the interiority of my historical subject, situated in the past? My search for an effective process led me to a series of BBC Reith Lectures, delivered in 2017, by the late novelist Hilary Mantel. These texts reveal insights into how Mantel, as a writer of historical fiction, spanned the gap between herself, living in the twenty-first-century, and her historical subjects—the Tudors—living in the sixteenth-century. Mantel identifies her core methods as imagination and empathy. However, the notion of imagination and empathy as appropriate ways to access the past is met with vociferous objections from historians. Even a post-modern historian, like Keith Jenkins, draws the line at the idea that a writer can gain an empathic knowledge of their historical referent without thinking a-historically and anachronistically (Jenkins in Rethinking History. 4th ed. Routledge, 1995, 39–45). Mantel’s core methods of generating knowledge, therefore, amount to a paradigmatic rejection of the methodological framework of the historian. However, despite writers of historical and biographical fiction pursuing a kind of knowledge that sits outside the academic field of the historian (Mantel in The Day Is for the Living, 2017; Mantel in The Iron Maiden, 2017; Mantel in Adaptation: Can These Bones Live?, 2017), novelists are repeatedly expected to defend their practice on the methodological terms of the historian (Clendinnen in Quarterly Essay 23:1–72, 2006; Mantel in The Day Is for the Living, 2017; Mantel in The Iron Maiden, 2017; Mantel in Adaptation: Can These Bones Live?, 2017; Marr in Start the Week. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation. Radio Series Episode, 2015). It is perhaps not surprising that these conversations quickly become bogged down in a methodological impasse. To offer a depth of insight into the truth claims of fiction therefore, we need to re-frame the conversation in a way that encompasses accounts of writing that situate empathy and imagination as core methods in generating knowledge about the historical and biographical subject.

As a filmmaker, I employ empathy as a core strategy in my methodological approach to writing a biopic about boxer Randolph Turpin. But is empathy a reliable way of accessing the interiority of others? To explore this question, I take a trans-disciplinary approach to reflect on arguments for and against using empathy to access the interiority of others. Research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has generated empirical evidence of our ability to use our imagination and empathy to understand the interiority of others as a measurable inter-subjective process (Allen and Williams in Frontiers in Psychology 2:1–16, 2011; Bilek et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112:5207–5212, 2015; Currie in Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press; Galle in Psychopathology 36:171–180, 2003; Lamm et al. in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19:42–58, 2007; Marchetti and Koster in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8:1–4, 2014; McAdams in Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research and Clinical Practice 37:359–372, 2018; Nichols and Stich in Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003; Pfeifer et al. in NeuroImage 39:2076–2085, 2008; Singer in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30:855–863, 2006). While this might be useful in arguing the case for the demonstrable efficiency of empathic knowledge in the formation of humans as social beings, the discourse is still firmly situated within an empirical framework that delimits the scope of the enquiry towards the taxonomization of experience (McAdams in Journal of Personality 63:365–396, 1995; Morton in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility and Fiction. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006). Echoing the objections to empathy raised by historians, the conversation turns once again to a need to define an alternative framework that centres on creative practice, encompassing accounts of fiction writing that include empathy as method. English literature scholars Michael Lackey and Bethany Lane propose just such an alternative framework when discussing the relationship between biographical fiction and the historical referent in a series of interviews with three acclaimed contemporary writers—Emma Donoghue, Colum McCann, and Colm Tóibín (Lackey in Éire-Ireland 53(1/2) (Spring/Summer): 120–149, 2018; Lane in Éire-Ireland 53(1/2) (Spring/Summer), 150–166, 2018). Rather than conduct the interviews within the empirical framework of a historian, Lackey and Lane suggested two reference points within the field of biographical fiction, as articulated by Oscar Wilde and William Styron. Re-framing the conversation in this way allows the writers to offer a breadth and depth of insight into their writing practice unconstrained by empiricist notions of historical fidelity. In doing so, they begin to articulate their creative practice as methodology. Similarly, to gain deeper insights into the cinematic process of engaging with a biographical subject, a clearer articulation of filmmaking practice (as methodology) is needed. Only then can a fuller understanding of the form of the biopic be achieved which accounts for the inter-subjective process of authorship, a process that is often spearheaded by a screenwriter with a keen sense of their (ethical) responsibility to the biographical subject.

Descriptions of creative practice by writers Emma Donoghue, Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín demonstrate how re-framing a conversation about biographical fiction, outside the (empirical) methodological positioning of the historian, points the way to a richer discipline-specific discourse about the cinematic process of engaging with an historical subject. But these insights can only be generated through a clearer articulation of the creative practice that is filmmaking, of which screenwriting is a part. And so the conversation returns to the question of methodology. This chapter reviews some recent texts that seek to define methodologies within the field of screenwriting and screen production practice, including a new framework designed to shift fundamentally our thinking about methodological approaches to generating screen production outputs (Batty and Zalipour in Media Practice and Education, 2024). Once the process of screenwriting and screen production is understood as ‘research-enabled practice’, employing core storytelling strategies such as mise-en-scène, a detailed working definition of narrative fiction filmmaking methodology can be outlined, one that stems from NFTS founder Colin Young's vision of filmmakers as ethnographically-engaged cultural producers.