We’re telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

Whitford distinguishes narrative art from documentary reportage. In fiction, the primary obligation is not exhaustive factual completeness but coherence, emotional truth, and credibility within the story’s constructed world. His emphasis on “belief” and “faith” points to the tacit contract between storyteller and audience: viewers agree to suspend disbelief if the work maintains internal logic and earns trust through consistent characterization and plausible motivations. The remark also implies that importing documentary standards into drama can be a category error—what matters is whether the narrative convinces us enough to stay invested, not whether it reproduces reality with journalistic precision.