Earlier in the Summer, Christopher Nolan had told The New York Times that his Howard Hughes film “never got made because I wrote it right as Scorsese was making his own film (“The Aviator”).
I cracked the script to my satisfaction, and that gave me a lot of insight on how to distill a person’s life and how to view a person’s life in a thematic way, so that the film is more than the sum of its parts. So in some ways, the script, yes, it took me a few months, but it was really a culmination of 20 years of thinking.
This must have been around 2003-2004, as Nolan’s career was only beginning to hit its stride, and “The Dark Knight” was just a few years away. One does wonder, if he had released his Hughes biopic, how differently Nolan’s career would have turned out.
Nolan’s take on Howard Hughes was expected to star Jim Carrey as the lead, but Nolan walked away from the script after Scorsese’s film went into production and was subsequently released. It was nominated for 11 Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.
Nolan tells Variety that he still hasn’t actually seen Scorsese’s 2004 period piece, mostly due to the depressing toll the scrapped project inflicted on him: “It was very emotional to not get to make something I’d poured all that into.”
Maybe Nolan should revisit this project in the future. I don’t believe, for a second, that Nolan’s film would have been the same one as Scorsese’s. Both filmmakers are radically different in their approaches.
“The Aviator” was an unusual film, one of the best ones ever made about OCD and mental illness. Leonardo DiCaprio captured Howard Hughes’ inner and outer demons in very personal ways. He nailed the smallest of details in brilliant fashion — it’s still one of DiCaprio’s greatest performances, capturing the quirks and eccentricities that came in being Howard Hughes.
Hughes was a neurotic, eccentric billionaire who, as his obsessive compulsion grew, isolated himself entirely from society. Scorsese zeroed in on that particular aspect of Hughes. Whereas, Nolan has hinted that his Hughes biopic would have had a similar structure to his recent “Oppenheimer” —a narrative interested in the passage of time.
I wouldn’t bet on Nolan’s film not ever seeing the light of day. It’s not like “The Aviator” put a major stamp on film history, there is definitely room for another Howard Hughes movie to be made.