Screenwriters on Springsteen, Christy Martin, and the moral weight of telling true stories

Adapting a Living Person: The Ethics and Art of the Real-Life Biopic

There is a particular kind of trust that forms between a screenwriter and a living subject, and the writers who have navigated this relationship most honestly will tell you that it does not resemble anything else in the craft. You are not inventing characters. You are interpreting real human beings who will sit in theaters and watch actors embody the most painful moments of their lives. The ethical and artistic responsibilities that attend this work are unlike those of any other form of dramatic writing, and the fall 2025 film season offered an unusually concentrated group of examples from which to draw instruction.

Kristen Stewart and the Interior Biopic

Kristen Stewart’s directorial and writing debut, “The Chronology of Water,” premieres in American theaters in December 2025 after debuting in the Cannes Un Certain Regard section. The film adapts Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about surviving childhood abuse and addiction, and Stewart’s approach to the adaptation is notable for its rejection of the conventional biopic structure. There is no voiceover narration organizing the chaos of a life into coherent retrospective meaning. There is no three-act arc moving from wound to healing to triumph. Instead, Stewart used sound design to place the audience inside her protagonist’s consciousness, creating a film that she describes as being about all of us through the specificity of one woman’s experience.

This is a philosophical position about the ethics of adaptation as much as an aesthetic one. Stewart spent eight years raising financing for the project because she refused to compromise on this approach. She told her subject directly that she would not make a film that processed her trauma into comfortable narrative resolution. The result is a biopic that resists the genre’s most dangerous tendency: the transformation of a living person’s suffering into entertainment catharsis for an audience that is asked to consume but not to share.

Scott Cooper and the Psychology of Springsteen

Scott Cooper’s approach to “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” was the opposite of Stewart’s in method but similar in ethical intention. Where Stewart pursued formal experimentation, Cooper pursued emotional precision through direct, extensive conversation with his subject. He met with Bruce Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau, received Springsteen’s blessing to write the screenplay, and then spent countless hours in deep conversation with the musician about the making of the 1982 album “Nebraska” and the depression, romantic failure, and parental estrangement that surrounded it.

Cooper was explicit about his ethical framework with his subject. “I’m not interested in myth or nostalgia,” he told Springsteen. “I don’t want to dramatize your pain. I’m asking to explore the courage that it took to face it.” This distinction, between dramatizing pain and exploring the courage required to face it, is one of the most useful frameworks a biopic writer can adopt. The former positions the subject as a spectacle. The latter positions them as an agent whose interior life the film is attempting to understand. Springsteen had no script approval, but the trust Cooper built through honesty about his intentions proved more valuable. Springsteen reportedly has watched the finished film thirteen times.

The Christy Martin Story and the Complexity of Consent

Director David Michod and co-writer Mirrah Foulkes faced a different set of challenges with “Christy,” their portrait of female boxing pioneer Christy Martin. Martin’s story involves sustained domestic abuse at the hands of her boxing coach and husband, her near death, and her emergence into an authentic life after decades of coercion and concealment. The writers secured Martin’s life rights and spent many hours interviewing her via video call from their home in Australia.

The ethical complexity here is considerable. Martin’s story involves not only her own trauma but her own moral complexity. She adopted a persona that she now acknowledges caused her to treat people unkindly. She was coerced into concealing her relationship with women for years, which shaped her public behavior in ways she now regrets. The writers had to navigate the representation of both the victim and the complicated person the victim became under pressure, with their subject’s full awareness and cooperation.

The The Wrap has covered extensively how the industry’s approach to life rights agreements has evolved, with subjects now often securing greater consultation and review rights than in earlier decades of biopic filmmaking. Foulkes has described their process as one of ongoing dialogue rather than a single interview followed by independent creative decision-making.

The “Roofman” and the Ethics of Likability

Derek Cianfrance and writer Kirt Gunn’s “Roofman” offers yet another ethical variant. Their subject, Jeffrey Allen Manchester, is a criminal who broke into fast-food restaurants through their roofs and hid inside a Toys R Us, but who was conspicuously humane to his victims. He spent years in maximum security prison, where the writers spoke with him more than four hundred times over several years. The ethical question here is not whether their subject might be harmed by the telling but whether the telling itself participates in a kind of romanticization of criminal behavior. The writers addressed this by pursuing verification. When Manchester’s stories were checked with his former pastor and girlfriend, both described him as genuinely transformative in their lives. The WGA blog on adaptation issues is an essential resource for writers working through these frameworks in their own projects.