Biopics the talk of TIFF, but how accurate do filmmakers feel they have to be?

TORONTO – At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, audiences rejoiced as Steve Carell shed all degrees of his usual gooey warmth to play ominous multimillionaire John du Pont, Eddie Redmayne twisted his body into knots to portray genius physicist Stephen Hawking and Benedict Cumberbatch chewed through reams of difficult dialogue as gifted British codebreaker Alan Turing.

Given that films about troubled Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson, chess prodigy Bobby Fischer and Colombian coke lord Pablo Escobar also whisked through the fest, this has been widely considered TIFF’s Year of the Biopic.

But the actors and filmmakers behind these true-to-life portrayals differ on exactly how true-to-life they needed to be, and whether the importance of storytelling trumps accuracy.

“You can’t be historically accurate in the strictest scientific sense,” said seven-time Oscar nominee Mike Leigh, whose film “Mr. Turner” is hoarding awards hype for Timothy Spall’s portrayal of English painter J.M.W. Turner.

“Documentaries are documentaries — OK, that’s one thing. This is (a film) that isn’t a documentary but is an intelligent but creative reflection … a distillation of the essenece of something.

“It’s something else, not a documentary.”

In fact, many filmmakers polled at the fest felt that their obligation was not to exactly recreate real-life events for the audience — but to nail the pertinent details for their subjects and those who know or knew them.

Directed by Academy Award nominee Bennett Miller, “Foxcatcher” is a masterfully sinister look at du Pont, the scion of a prominent Pennsylvania family who took an ultimately toxic interest in sibling Olympic gold medallist wrestlers Dave and Mark Schultz (portrayed by Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum respectively).

Over the course of a difficult shoot, Mark Schultz and Dave’s wife, Nancy, visited the set briefly, while Dave’s best friend John Guira became a mainstay. Nancy ultimately gave Ruffalo a pair of Dave’s real eyeglasses to wear in the film.

For the actors, the presence of those who lived “Foxcatcher” was not only a hugely valuable resource, but a constant reminder of what was at stake in their creative recreation.

“John Guira became my confidante, my kind of personal coach and instructor on the movie,” Ruffalo said in an interview this week. “At any given moment I’d say: ‘John, what would Dave have done here?’ He also helped me with the physicalization of Dave. He would show me how he would walk and move. He became a really close friend of mine as well.

“It was a blessing to have them.”

Ruffalo so dedicated himself to inhabiting all that Dave was, the 46-year-old ultimately felt as though he had a unique level of knowledge about his real-life counterpart.

He felt that he knew him.

“Bennett and I had a very telling moment at one point. We were having a little argument, and I said: ‘Not for nothing Bennett, but at this point, me, Steve and Channing know way more about these characters than you ever will. And that’s our job. And so the best thing is to just let us do it at this point. You’ve asked us to. Have some faith in us.’

“It was a kind of really nice moment. But it was the job that he gave us to do, and we had all these wonderful people who were willing to participate, who were opening their lives to us to tell a story.”

And yet, in some cases the dual ambitions to tell a true story and tell an entertaining story can require a nimble tightrope walk for filmmakers.

In “The Theory of Everything,” Redmayne portrays Hawking as a youthful Cambridge graduate student, one who is simultaneously falling in love with first wife Jane (Felicity Jones), dealing with his diagnosis of ALS and embarking on his groundbreaking investigation into the nature of time.

Oscar-winning director James Marsh was perhaps a uniquely qualified candidate to shape that story, given that he has a rich history in documentary filmmaking (including “2011’s “Project Nim” and 2008’s “Man on Wire”). And yet even he says that meticulous faithfulness to the truth may not be the best approach.

“You have two responsibilities,” he said. “You have that (responsibility to the subjects) and you also have the responsibility to make a dramatic story for the audience and reconcile those two things. It can really be quite tricky.

“Because even in documentaries I’ve had that complication … where you’re dealing with real people who don’t always agree with what you find out about them or the story that they’re in. So any stories in that shape (are) a mosaic of subjective opinions that you’re putting together in a certain kind of way. You hope you can reconcile them and I think we did in this one, because both Stephen and Jane are confident with the film.

“Both,” he added, “are broadly in sympathy with our approach and what we come up with. Which is amazing given the personal intimate details that we’re dealing with in their story.”

The situation is more complicated when the real-life inspirations for these stories aren’t around anymore.

“The Imitation Game” profiles Alan Turing, the dizzyingly innovative computer scientist who provided invaluable help to the Brits during the Second World War before being prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952. He died two years later.

Keira Knightley portrayed Joan Clarke, best friend to the mercurial whiz. She and Cumberbatch are in agreement that they felt a weighty responsibility in approaching the film — but not necessarily to approach journalistic levels of historical accuracy.

“Obviously with a real person with a real legacy and surviving family members, you feel that added pressure to get stuff right,” Cumberbatch reasoned.

“I think with any film like this, historical accuracy is always going to be an argument that is brought up,” added Knightley separately. “With any film, you’ll be able to beat it over the head with it, because it’s a drama and essentially it’s not a documentary and nobody knows what was said in the room and it’s always going to be slightly twisted.

“But I think what you’re always trying to convey is the essence of the story that first struck you. And I was first struck by Alan Turing’s story not from the script but from articles about it and I felt like, and I still feel like, this script really got to the essence of it in a very human and emotional way,” she added.

“I don’t know that you feel that there’s more pressure because of that. I think when you get to sort of make a film, the pressure of kind of trying to convey a story, convey an emotion, is the same whether it’s based on reality or not.”

___

With files from Canadian Press reporters Andrea Baillie, Laura Kane and Diana Mehta.

— Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.