A completely fabricated news story, courtesy of the Beeb:
BBC: U-571 writer regrets 'distortion'
Screenwriter David Ayer has admitted his 2000 film U-571 distorted history and that he would not do it again.
No he hasn't.
I heard the full interview with Ayer on the radio this afternoon. At the end of the interview, he was challenged about the historical accuracy of his historically inaccurate film, U-571. He pointed out that it was a work of fiction, which required Americans to be the heroes for it to stand any chance at all at the box office. He gave due respect to the real-life (British) heroes who rescued a German Enigma cypher machine from a sinking U-boat in 1941. Then, when pressed, pathetically, for an abject apology, he, rather engagingly, joked (as quoted at the very end of the aforequoted item), "I won't do it again".
In other words, Ayer didn't, as implied above, say that, given the chance, he wouldn't do it again; he simply promised not to do it again in future. The joke being that he would never need to.
So the BBC has blown up a droll joke into a totally misleading non-news story.
Kind of ironic, bearing in mind the BBC was accusing Ayer of distorting the facts.
- Gruts: Das Boot
