The perceived “responsibility” of films to faithfully reproduce real-life events is a sensitive and debatable issue, with some believing that false statements are disrespectful, while others insist that artists will have to be able to take artistic license.
But rarely do filmmakers decide to deviate from reality, not for cynical or crude reasons, but simply because they don’t believe that mass audiences will actually settle for the event as it was intended to happen.
And so, encouraged by this recent Reddit thread on the topic, those 10 films ended up converting an aspect of their production (from storytelling to costumes to visual effects) to move away from anything audiences would likely never buy.
After all, if all those films had stayed the course and gotten closer to the truth, it’s incredibly simple that audiences would have laughed at many of those off-screen moments, in turn contaminating the film as a whole.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, and while there will be filmmakers who blatantly deviate from the facts, in most cases, you can at least see where they’re coming from. . .
When the unforgettable original trailer for Cloverfield was released, audiences were fascinated by one image in particular: the head of the Statue of Liberty thrown onto the streets of New York City via the unseen monster.
Some, however, have complained that the statue’s head looks too small, because even though visual effects director David Vickery and his team rendered the head to perfect scale, the average user imagines that it is much larger than it is.
So, during the post-production process, the head of the Statue of Liberty was made about 50% larger than it actually is, to ensure that it has a presence and majesty that matches many people’s misperception. In a 2020 interview with Before and After, Vickery said:
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