My first question is why. Why would Mr. Nolan decide to make a Howard Hughes biopic? It’s been done before. Scorsese did it in 2004 with The Aviator, and that was a pretty damn good film. Now if we rewind a bit further, in 2002, both Scorsese and Nolan were prepping Hughes biopics. As we all know though, Scorsese won that race. It seems as if Nolan isn’t done with Hughes though. He is planning on bringing back his biopic and will use Michael Drosnin’s “Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness” as his source material. He plans to shoot in 2012 with a 2014 release date.
Warner Bros. will likely take on the project and as for who will star as Hughes? Well, I mean I guess Leo could do it again, which would be interesting. Although I’m betting Nolan looks to one of his younger ‘usuals’, possibly Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Tom Hardy. Or who knows, he may go with someone who he has never worked with before.
Speaking about the film, Nolan said:
“The underlying philosophy for me, in terms of the complexity of the film, had always been that those things that had allowed “Memento” to succeed with audiences in a very mainstream fashion could be tapped to make a huge-scale movie. And that’s the premise on which “Inception”‘s been built. I tried to do it with my Howard Hughes project first. 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.”
Vulture also gives us some information and lets us know what we may see from the film:
We’ll meet the Howard Hughes who spent much of 1948 sitting naked in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel with only a pink dinner napkin covering his genitals as he screened movies from his studio, RKO Pictures, and ran up an $11 million tab; the Hughes who — obsessed with food safety — once bought every franchise restaurant chain in his home state of Texas, and who was similarly so concerned about air quality that he installed an aircraft filtration system in his 1954 Chrysler New Yorker, taking up its entire trunk; the Howard Hughes who had his hair cut and nails trimmed only once a year, and who was seemingly as addicted to Baskin Robbins Banana Ripple ice cream as he was to regular codeine injections; the Hughes who at the end of his life considered only Mormons trustworthy enough to be let into his inner circle.
To be honest, I’m not too excited for this. We’ve already seen a great Howard Hughes biopic and I think Nolan should be focusing his attention on more original and unique projects, like Inception and The Prestige. I’m sure he’ll do a good job with the biopic but really? A biopic? For Nolan? No thank you, I’d rather the usual mind bending stuff that he gives us.
What do you think?
