Why Christopher Nolan’s Howard Hughes biopic would have been better than Martin Scorsese’s
It would be foolish to suggest Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator isn’t a great movie, but it also wouldn’t stretch the bounds of credulity to say that it will never be remembered as one of the legendary director’s finest films.
Of course, there’s no shame in that, considering Scorsese has been responsible for a litany of classics dating back almost 50 years. Still, it’s hard to state a truly compelling case for his second collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio troubling the likes of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Silence, The Departed, The King of Comedy, or The Wolf of Wall Street in terms of sheer cinematic greatness.
Being a Scorsese picture, though, it was inevitably a critical and awards season darling that won five Academy Awards from 11 nominations, but it wasn’t as if he’d been passionately developing the project for years. In fact, DiCaprio was on board for The Aviator long before his muse, with Michael Mann initially set to direct before Scorsese stepped in not too long before the start of production.
Obviously, it’s ridiculous to suggest The Aviator would have been a better film were it shepherded by someone with a deep and vested interest in the material that fittingly bordered on obsession, but it nonetheless still stings that Christopher Nolan lost out when it came to the battle of the Hughes biopics.
Richard Hack’s Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters and Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness served as the main inspirations for a story Nolan had been developing since the turn of the millennium, which he celebrated as the greatest screenplay he’d ever written.
“It’s the best script I’ve ever written, and I had a really wonderful experience writing it,” he told The Daily Beast, before lamenting the “frustrating experience” of being pushed to the side once The Aviator gained traction on the other side of Tinseltown. Beyond hammering out multiple drafts, Nolan also knew exactly who he wanted to play the lead role.
As far back as 2002, Nolan anointed Hughes as the part Jim Carrey “was born to play”, hinting that his biopic “will have strong connections with the films I’ve already made”. At the time, that was a shortlist comprised of Following, Memento, and Insomnia, but still tantalising enough to guarantee that it would be far from a conventional retelling of a well-known life story.
Years later, Nolan would then compare his unmade passion project to both Memento and Inception as he continued filling in the blanks as to how he planned to approach his subject. “I tried to do it with my Howard Hughes project first,” he said. “And when that wasn’t going to fly, I put a lot of that thinking into this, into fusing the scale and entertainment value of a large film with something more – and I really don’t want to say ‘challenging for an audience’ because I don’t think it is – that’s just a little different and a little bit of a shift.”
Relating it to his “underlying philosophy”, Nolan acknowledged the “things that had allowed Memento to succeed with audiences in a very mainstream fashion could be tapped to make a huge-scale movie,” something he would bring to his Hughes drama. Not only that, but his abandoned film also played its way into the thinking behind Oppenheimer, too.
With one hand feeding the other, Nolan explained how his Hughes screenplay “gave me a lot of insight on how to distil 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,” with the three-hour epic “really a culmination of 20 years of thinking” having been born from a movie he never even made.
Absolutely no offence intended to Scorsese or The Aviator, which is a rollicking old-fashioned prestige picture in its own right, but virtually every single piece of information Nolan has let slip about his own Hughes tale has made it sound like the more intriguing – and superior – proposition of the two by far.
Carrey getting serious and gunning for Oscars glory in an unconventionally-structured biopic that carries shades of Memento, Inception, and Oppenheimer is nothing short of mouth-watering, and it’ll take some doing for it to be eclipsed as the most notable film that Nolan didn’t even get the chance to direct.
