Christopher Nolan is revisiting his best unmade film, a biopic of Howard Hughes.
The writer-director of “Oppenheimer” revealed it. The New York Times who achieved “satisfaction” with his shelved script being overshadowed by Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett. “The Aviator” was released in 2004, with Nolan following 2002’s “Insomnia” instead of being “Batman Begins” in 2005.
Now, Nolan details how Hughes’ scrapped film inspired the writing process of his other biopic, ‘Oppenheimer.
“I wrote the script (‘Oppenheimer) relatively quickly once I started writing, but I had worked a lot before that. Many years ago, I had written a script about the life of Howard Hughes that never came to fruition because I wrote it just as Scorsese was shooting his movie,” Nolan said. “But I cracked the script to my satisfaction, and it gave me a lot of insight into how to distill a person’s life and how to see a person’s life thematically, so that the movie is more than the sum of its parts. culmination of 20 years of reflections”.
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Nolan added, “As I’m doing interviews and the movie is coming out, I’m always asked, do you know what you’re going to do next? And the answer is always the same. For me, I do one thing at a time and obsessively put everything into it, and the film isn’t finished. Well, the way I like to say it is the audience finishes the movie.
The ‘Interstellar’ director previously said The daily beast that Jim Carrey was attached to the early 2000s film as Hughes, a role the comedian was “born to play.”
As for Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated “The Aviator,” the author admitted that the big-budget Warner Bros. film nearly made him leave Hollywood.
“In the last two weeks of editing and mixing ‘The Aviator’, I had quit the business due to stress. I said if this is how you make movies, then I’m not going to do it again,” Scorsese said The New York Times in 2020. “It’s like being in a bunker and shooting in all directions. You start to realize that you don’t speak the same language anymore, so you can’t take pictures anymore.”
