The Problem and Solution for Bio Pics

I was asked on Quora: 

When creating a Movie that's Based on a True Story & the Audience knows what will happen even before seeing the movie. How do you create that moment of Suspense in a specific scene that makes the Audience think that something different will happen?

Here's my answer:

Bio pics (“true” stories about known people) rarely do well at the box office. There are two fundamental reasons. (1) If you tell the true (physical) story the movie will not be dramatically structured to be entertaining to general audiences and thus it will bore all except for the small number of people who are fans of the person. Solution: enlarge the audience by making the movie suitable as entertainment to a large audience. That leads to the second reasons bio pics do poorly. (2) To structure a story so it appeals to a large audience you must tell the story so there’s a regular emotional rollercoaster ride, that is, you must make it entertaining. No doubt this will require fictionalizing the story, which will alienate the person’s fans and result in bad word of mouth—a death knell for a movie.

The Tuohy Family (L, movie; R, real)

There are two solutions: 

(A) Select a significant moment in the person’s life that changed their life’s trajectory and tell it in such dramatic detail (you’ll have to still fictionalize (add, omit, compact, or exaggerate) to make it interesting) that you avoid the two problems above. The exaggeration was done in the hit movie starring Sandra Bullock titled BLIND SIDE where the personality characteristics of the real-life Tuohy family and Michael Oher’s life were exaggerated. In Amadeus, Salieri’s motivations and involvement was heavily fictionalized. (B) Focus on (and make visual) a significant aspect of the person’s internal, personal, or spiritual life that is typically unknown to the public but nonetheless documented historically but not elaborated upon. Here the filmmakers are fictionalizing the story (probably) but no one can effectively argue with their take on the story.

American Hustle

The last bit of an answer is that IF the above aspects of story telling can be satisfied, the storytellers will focus on not WHAT happened (as everyone knows), but we probably don’t know the back story of HOW it happened or WHY nor the potential intrigue, suspense and conflict that was involved. Heavily fictionalized, a great example of this is AMERICAN HUSTLE that feeds off the Abscam political scandal, and of course TITANIC and many others. So, a good storyteller will focus on something that the audience doesn’t fully know, and then make it true at a moral level.

Titanic

In the end, all successful movies may be fictionalized externally, but the successful ones are true at the inner moral level. What’s on screen thus becomes a metaphor for the moral journey the character(s) must inwardly travel. Remember, all actions by real people (and characters we identify as real) originate first in the mind as a motivation based on moral values. That’s why all good stories (whether intended this way or not by their makers) are based on a true and consistently applied Moral Premise.