After Batman Begins he did The Prestige. After The Dark Knight he did Inception. You may wonder what Christopher Nolan will do after his final film in the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Vulture has our first hint, as they exclusively report Nolan is interested in dusting off a long-shelved Howard Hughes biopic.
With Martin Scorsese already making his Hughes biopic The Aviator, how will this differ? They report it will be based on Michael Drosnin’s 1985 novel Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness, which used “over three thousand pages of Hughes’s own handwritten memoranda.” Scorsese’s film was “heavily based” on Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, which looked at Hughes’ earlier years. Nolan’s project would focus on when he went crazy with OCD and secrecy. If you want a more in-depth look at what we may see, check out their summary below:
We’re told Nolan’s Hughes movie will cover many later events and quirks on which Scorsese’s movie punted: 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.
While a lot of that sounds interesting, and a departure from The Aviator, it is still hard to believe Nolan wouldn’t focus on an original film. If this is a passion project for him though, he certainly has enough clout to get it made. In a post-Batman career it will also be nice for Nolan to focus on other genres, and I’d welcome a biopic.
Sources say Nolan would shoot the film late 2012 for a 2014 release, just in time for a 10-year anniversary of The Aviator.
What do you think about a Howard Hughes biopic from Nolan?