‘The Aviator’: Martin Scorsese recalls nightmarish scene that took “nine days and nights” to shoot
Martin Scorsese has been working at a breakneck pace since his twenties, which means he’s been speeding breathlessly through life for approximately 60 years. That explosive, all-consuming style of making movies, which he himself has described as “kamikaze” filmmaking, has yielded some of the greatest feats in cinema history. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas would each be career-defining movies for any filmmaker, but for Scorsese, they were just chapters in a decades-spanning career.
It’s hardly surprising that he’s faced many hurdles throughout his working life. Aside from the emotional highs and lows of box office success that nearly killed him in the 1970s, he had to cram himself onto the floor of a car to get the shots he wanted for Taxi Driver, go to war with Harvey Weinstein over his vision for Gangs of New York, and juggle thousands of extras and over a hundred filming locations for The Irishman. However, all of this paled in comparison to a scene in 2004’s The Aviator, which the director described as nothing short of hellish to shoot.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life engineer and Hollywood mogul Howard Hughes, who used his money and unparalleled determination to produce several groundbreaking films across several decades during Hollywood’s Golden Age. One of them, 1930’s Hell’s Angels, featured death-defying aeroplane stuntwork that remains legendary in the industry. Even as he was at the height of his influence, however, Hughes struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that, at one point in his life, was so crippling that he locked himself in a darkened screening room for months, urinating in jars and arranging tissue boxes.
The Aviator depicts this period in all its oppressiveness, with DiCaprio sitting naked in an armchair, repeating phrases over and over and only picking up objects with tissues. It was, the director revealed, a nightmarish scene to shoot. “Nine days and nights,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was hell, absolute hell.”
Considering some of the other scenes in the film, particularly a plane crash in a suburban neighbourhood that leaves Hughes permanently injured, it’s surprising that an indoor scene with only one actor would prove so nightmarish by comparison. However, when you watch the scene, the discomfort and claustrophobia leap off the screen. It’s one of the most memorable moments in the film and clearly took a toll on those involved.
For DiCaprio, The Aviator was a turning point. He’d been a star since he was a teenager and had already worked with Scorsese on Gangs of New York, but he brought a new form of ownership and maturity to the Hughes biopic. “It was really a miraculous part of my life,” he said. “I had never submerged myself and really focused on absolutely nothing but that film for eight or nine months of my life. I was so dedicated to that process. I felt a real responsibility for a movie for the first time.”
That desire to completely submerge himself in a project is directly in concert with Scorsese’s approach to filmmaking, which is probably why they have collaborated with each other on four features since then and are currently working on another.
