Documenting historical figures: When consent is impossible

I watched a producer freeze mid-sentence when I asked who had reviewed the intimate scene they’d scripted between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The answer, of course, was no one who could actually consent to it. The couple has been dead for decades. Their diaries are public domain. Their love letters sell at auction. And yet here we were, choreographing a sex scene between two real people who never agreed to be portrayed this way.

This is the paradox sitting at the heart of most historical productions: we treat dead people’s stories as raw material while insisting we honor their legacy. We build entire productions on the premise that these lives matter enough to depict, then make creative choices the subjects themselves might have found humiliating, reductive, or false. The absence of consent isn’t a technicality. It’s the entire ethical landscape.

I’ve worked on three biopics where the subject died before filming began, and two historical documentaries where some interview subjects passed away during production. Each time, the same pattern emerged. Early development treats the historical figure with tremendous reverence—researchers hired, archives consulted, estates contacted for cooperation. Then somewhere between scripting and shooting, that reverence curdles into ownership. The person becomes a character. Their contradictions get smoothed into narrative arcs. Their sexuality, trauma, or private grief becomes a dramatic set piece. The people who knew them, who might push back, aren’t in the room.

The standard defense is that these stories need to be told, that public figures forfeit certain privacies, that historical importance outweighs individual dignity. I don’t dismiss these arguments entirely. But I’ve also sat with family members watching rough cuts, seeing them flinch at moments that felt true to the filmmakers and unbearable to the people who actually loved the subject. That flinch matters. It’s data about what we’re doing when we claim someone else’s life story.

The framework I use starts with a basic inversion: instead of asking what we’re allowed to show, ask what burden of proof we’re willing to meet. If you’re depicting a real person’s intimate moment—physical, emotional, psychological—can you document why that specific choice serves the story in a way a more restrained approach wouldn’t? Can you name what’s lost if you pull back? Not in abstract terms about “authenticity” or “unflinching honesty,” but in concrete narrative function. Most productions can’t answer this. They default to showing more because more feels like courage.

The second layer involves pressure-testing the depiction against available evidence and gaps in the record. I worked on a film about a civil rights activist where the script included a detailed breakdown scene—a moment of private anguish that fed into the activist’s public transformation. Beautiful writing. No documentation it ever happened. When I asked the writer about sources, she said it “must have happened” given what came after. That “must have” is where we cross from interpretation into appropriation. If the record is silent, that silence has meaning. We can acknowledge what we don’t know. We can leave space for ambiguity. We don’t have to fill every gap with our best guess about someone else’s interior life.

The third element is substitute consent: who can speak for this person now, and what’s our obligation to them? Legal consent from estates is a low bar—it protects productions from lawsuits, not from ethical failure. But there are usually people who knew the subject, who carry specific knowledge about their values, their humor, their boundaries. I push producers to involve these people not as approvers with veto power, but as sounding boards before scenes are locked. A daughter who says “my father never would have said it that way” isn’t trying to sanitize his image. She’s offering precision. That precision makes the work better.

This gets harder when the historical figure is controversial or when their modern defenders have agendas that conflict with honest portrayal. I consulted on a documentary about a writer whose estate wanted certain relationships erased from the narrative. The filmmakers had letters, photographs, journal entries—clear evidence these relationships existed and mattered. We didn’t erase them. But we also didn’t need to dramatize them with invented dialogue and imagined bedroom scenes. We could present the evidence, describe what it suggests, and let the audience draw conclusions. The writer’s own words carried more weight than our speculations.

The practical impact on production is mostly in pre-production and script development. It’s cheaper to solve these questions with a researcher and a sensitivity consultant before you’re on set with a crew waiting. By the time you’re shooting, the cost of restraint feels enormous—we’ve got the location, the actors are here, the lighting is perfect. Walking back a scene at that stage feels like failure. But if you’ve built the ethical framework earlier, you’re not improvising under pressure. You’ve already decided what standard you’re holding yourself to.

1. Replace “what are we allowed to show” with “what burden of proof can we meet”—make the case for each intimate or private depiction with concrete narrative justification.

2. Treat gaps in the historical record as meaningful silence, not blank space to fill with dramatized speculation about someone’s inner life.

3. Involve people who knew the subject as precision instruments, not approval gatewayers—they offer specificity that improves accuracy and depth.

The Frida and Diego scene got rewritten. Not cut—rewritten. We kept the emotional stakes but pulled back from explicit choreography. The intimacy coordinator worked with the actors on physical language that suggested passion without prescribing specific acts. In the final cut, you understand what’s happening between them. You feel the intensity. But we’re not claiming to know exactly how Frida Kahlo moved in bed. That’s not our story to tell with that level of certainty. The scene still works. It might work better. Restraint created space for the audience to meet these people as full humans, not as our reconstructions of them.

Todd Max Carey — Seven Journeys