Earlier this month, Clint Eastwood directed Sully, a movie inspired by the 2009 emergency landing in the Hudson River. Had Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnecki stuck to the brief emergency and landing, they would have struggled to find enough material for a film (especially one where the audience already knows the ending). One route they could have taken was making it a new version of Airport by focusing on various fictionalized stories of passengers to add gravitas to a known story. Instead, Eastwood and Komarnecki wrote about the post-landing investigation, creating a story of a big bad government lining up to destroy the career of a heroic pilot. The story is half-based in truth – yes there was an investigation, no it wasn’t to demonize the pilot – but Eastwood’s off-screen conservative anti-regulation politics seem to have tainted the film’s content.

Inspired by a True Story is a trope that’s been used for ages to get around telling a true story without having to be considerate of the actual details of the story. Elements can change for a variety of reasons: political, racial casting, marketability, dramatic, etc. In Sully‘s case, a story about some brief airplane emergency landing and its follow-up investigation that resulted in a fem more pre-flight regulations would not have the same dramatic tension as a story about a demonized government trying to discredit the cinematic hero. But, knowing the very public politics of the director, were the changes made for dramatic or political reasons? Why not both?

Good or bad, changes to a story are inevitable. Characters may condense into a composite character for time constraints. Events might be dropped. The time line might move around. Writers and directors may add intent where there was none. The question isn’t whether or not changes to a true story should be made, but what changes are acceptable? Is it OK for a fictionalization to change the race or gender of its characters? Should directors add in their own political slant to a story? Does a director have a responsibility to stay as close to the actual story as possible? What changes are intolerable? Is there a limit to what changes can be made?