If you know the history....

How much responsibility does a director have to the audience in terms of its awareness about the story he is telling? I only ask after a week of watching films and TV shows that are based on true stories but whose impact would undoubtedly be altered by what the audience already knew. Coincidentally two of the pieces, which I watched on consecutive nights, both starred Michael Fassbender.

The first was the finale to Peter Flannerys' excellent The Devil's Whore which turns on the central character (John Simm) deciding to assassinate Oliver Cromwell (Dominic West) because he has betrayed the values of the revolution to which they had all signed on. The final scenes are an obvious homage to Dallas in 1963 with Simm as Lee Harvey Oswald and they are undoubtedly tense. However that tension is mitigated by the fact that I knew that Cromwell had not been assassinated therefore I knew broadly how the scene must turn out. Did it affect my enjoyment? Possibly, although altered may be a better word in that rather than wondering
if the plot would succeed I wondered instead how they would finish the scene. But what of those who don't know the story of the British Civil War? How different must it be for them and how does Flannery take that into account in his structure of the scene?

For someone of my age it is almost unthinkable that there would be people who did not know what happened to Cromwell but we must accept the reality of the modern world and its increasing self-centredness. I was told, for example, by more than one cinema manager that there were audience members during the run of Titanic who were devastated that the boat sank; they were unaware that this was a true story and were shocked that Kate and Leo were not saved as Hollywood convention would dictate.

Moving on, the following night I watched Hunger, again with Fassbender this time in the key role of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. As an aside the YBA crowd e.g. Sam Taylor-Wood, Tracey Emin have all been dabbling in film to limited success but only Steve McQueen has genuinely made the transition from visual art to cinema with this haunting film.

Unlike The Devil's Whore, Hunger makes no concession to the audience's understanding of events. We open up in The Maze Prison and the appalling conditions and we are completely immersed in the experience of the H Block prisoners. Even the voice over of Margaret Thatcher is not identified so if you don't know what she sounded like - a slim possibility I grant you - then you have no idea who it is. Surprisingly this works very well because the lack of context focuses the mind on the central argument which is the morality of the hunger strike. This is a huge issue and frankly you don't want to be distracted by wondering if the chronology is right or that Fassbender doesn't look much like Sands.

This is an issue that also affects Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon where the dramatic fulcrum of the story is an invented conversation. Peter Morgan admits he invented the scene simply for dramatic effect which is permissible because this is drama not documentary. However there are those who have accused the film of other, less evident, alterations as in this article from The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-drew/ifrostnixoni-a-dishonorab_b_150948.html

To go back to my original question I think the answer is 'none'. The director's responsibility, it seems to me, is first and foremost to the film he wants to make; how the audience wants to respond to it is their own business.