As a filmmaker, I employ empathy as a core strategy in my methodological approach to writing a biopic about boxer Randolph Turpin. But is empathy a reliable way of accessing the interiority of others? To explore this question, I take a trans-disciplinary approach to reflect on arguments for and against using empathy to access the interiority of others. Research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has generated empirical evidence of our ability to use our imagination and empathy to understand the interiority of others as a measurable inter-subjective process (Allen and Williams in Frontiers in Psychology 2:1–16, 2011; Bilek et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112:5207–5212, 2015; Currie in Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press; Galle in Psychopathology 36:171–180, 2003; Lamm et al. in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19:42–58, 2007; Marchetti and Koster in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8:1–4, 2014; McAdams in Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research and Clinical Practice 37:359–372, 2018; Nichols and Stich in Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003; Pfeifer et al. in NeuroImage 39:2076–2085, 2008; Singer in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30:855–863, 2006). While this might be useful in arguing the case for the demonstrable efficiency of empathic knowledge in the formation of humans as social beings, the discourse is still firmly situated within an empirical framework that delimits the scope of the enquiry towards the taxonomization of experience (McAdams in Journal of Personality 63:365–396, 1995; Morton in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility and Fiction. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006). Echoing the objections to empathy raised by historians, the conversation turns once again to a need to define an alternative framework that centres on creative practice, encompassing accounts of fiction writing that include empathy as method. English literature scholars Michael Lackey and Bethany Lane propose just such an alternative framework when discussing the relationship between biographical fiction and the historical referent in a series of interviews with three acclaimed contemporary writers—Emma Donoghue, Colum McCann, and Colm Tóibín (Lackey in Éire-Ireland 53(1/2) (Spring/Summer): 120–149, 2018; Lane in Éire-Ireland 53(1/2) (Spring/Summer), 150–166, 2018). Rather than conduct the interviews within the empirical framework of a historian, Lackey and Lane suggested two reference points within the field of biographical fiction, as articulated by Oscar Wilde and William Styron. Re-framing the conversation in this way allows the writers to offer a breadth and depth of insight into their writing practice unconstrained by empiricist notions of historical fidelity. In doing so, they begin to articulate their creative practice as methodology. Similarly, to gain deeper insights into the cinematic process of engaging with a biographical subject, a clearer articulation of filmmaking practice (as methodology) is needed. Only then can a fuller understanding of the form of the biopic be achieved which accounts for the inter-subjective process of authorship, a process that is often spearheaded by a screenwriter with a keen sense of their (ethical) responsibility to the biographical subject.