…not to have it be gruesome. I wanted it to be scary and shocking, but I didn’t want people to get disgusted by it. So I wanted there to be no red at all. So that the plane never had any red on the logo, no one wore any read clothes. Because once it became a bloody mess — which, you know, was something that is probably more realistic — once it looked like a massacre, to me it would just be untenable and people would tune out. I wanted it to be shocking when you saw blood….If we had been realistic and had as much blood everywhere as there probably would have been, seeing that blood…would have had no effect.

I find this interesting, because it gets to the heart of what storytelling is supposed to do: lie in order to find the truth.

On the first-season Deadwood DVDs, creator David Milch talks along much the same lines in his one-on-one conversation with series star Keith Carradine:

The truths of storytelling are not the truths of reportage. The truths of reportage finally depend on their correspondence to an externally verifiable reality. That happened. The truths of storytelling may incorporate the so-called real event, but they don’t depend for their effect on the fact that a researcher can corroborate the event occurred. They have to come alive in the imagination of the viewer, and, for that to occur, the necessary precondition is that they come alive in the imagination of the storyteller.

And so once I sort of knew the facts, I tried to let the reality of the facts come alive in my imagination. Certain times, at certain places, certain events lacked a kind of living reality, and that’s when characters who hadn’t existed in real life came to be.”

Milch talks about creating characters who are “essentially true and historical,” who could have lived in the real world even though they really didn’t. There’s an oft-quoted old saw that says that “all writers are liars,” and that’s true. But, in the lie, we find the truth. By creating characters who didn’t exist, Milch is better able to get inside the lives of those who did. By portraying events less accurately than they would appear in real life, Abrams gives those events greater resonance and meaning for the viewer.