Inaccurate biopic: The scene Ron Howard admitted he “fudged”
Although he’s tackled almost every genre that the industry has to offer, much of the best work to come from Ron Howard has been when he’s dealing in true stories, which make up a larger percentage of his filmography than any other corner of cinema.
He won Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ when A Beautiful Mind regaled audiences with the story of influential mathematician John Nash, while he was nominated for the same two trophies after recreating the 1977 interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon as the big screen equivalent of a two-hander play.
Howard has also detailed the aborted Apollo 13 mission in the film of the same name, stepped into the ring with boxing biopic Cinderella Man, explored the doomed whaling mission that inspired Moby Dick in In the Heart of the Sea, adapted J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and squeezed himself into subterranean caves to dramatize the Thuam Luang rescue in Thirteen Lives.
The man knows his way around a picture rooted in real-life events, then, and one of his best is undoubtedly 2013’s racing drama Rush. Zeroing in on the legendary Formula 1 rivalry between charismatic playboy James Hunt and the studious Niki Lauda, Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl are on excellent form as the central characters.
Despite their vastly different approaches to their chosen profession and the intense competitiveness that drives them even closer to the physical and psychological brink in the pursuit of perfection, a mutual respect ultimately forms between the disparate personalities.
The racetrack sequences themselves are thrilling, white-knuckle recreations of Formula 1, but Howard was nonetheless open to applying some creative and artistic licence to better serve Rush‘s inherent cinematic potential, as he explained of one particular incident to Autoweek.
The first major accident Hemsworth’s Hunt encounters has similarities to that of Francois Cevert’s fatal crash during during Saturday morning qualifying at Watkins Glen in 1973, which the filmmaker admitted wasn’t based specifically on a single incident.
“We sort of fudged that one a little bit,” he conceded. “We made it kind of an amalgam. Trying to collapse a period of time like that down, and you’re forced to do that sort of thing. We were trying to represent something, and out of respect, in a lot of ways, be sort of nonspecific about it.”
Not every biopic is obligated to seek 100% accuracy and authenticity, but Rush was respectful about taking any sort of liberties with actual events. Lauda was a regular source of information for the production, while the family of Hunt were happy to let Hemsworth pick their brains to gain better insight into his character.
The end result resides firmly among the upper tier of Howard’s back catalogue, so “fudging” the facts was far from a detriment to the movie.
