Abstract

A biopic is neither a documentary nor a fiction film. Each biopic will find its own path in a hybrid territory between these two ways of organizing speeches.
Fiction and documentary are different tracks, but not entirely separate. All films are fictional, said Christian Metz. After filming the documentary Nanook, Flaherty reflected: “it is necessary to add fiction so that the real becomes more evident”. But also, as Odin argued, all films can be considered documentaries, because the camera records everything that is placed in front of it, streets, houses, bodies, faces, which are used but not created by the filmmaker.
Nowadays, when most fictional films show in the trailer and credits the guarantee “inspired by real events”, it is not surprising that there is a resurgence of biopics, apparently more obliged to be faithful to someone’s biography, but in which the cultural context plus the narrative and dramaturgical needs make it necessary 1) to chose between the facts 2) to invent when there are unknown areas and 3) to make sense of all those choices, often made from our own projections. As Stierle argued, the world is the horizon of fiction and fiction is the horizon of the world as a hypothesis of another world.
With a practice-based research approach, we will try to reflect on this genre based on our choices when writing and making the 2017 biopic Zeus.