Howard Hughes is not an obvious choice for a $100m biopic. Billionaires aren’t
the most sympathetic characters, and Hughes’s behaviour was bizarre at best.
“Like most English people, I thought he was this incredibly rich man who
went mental,” says the actress Kate Beckinsale. “I feel really stupid that I
didn’t have a clue about how much he was involved in aviation. You know,
there weren’t really passenger planes until he came along. But because we’re
so cynical in Britain, all we remember is him weeing in milk bottles and
growing his toenails long.”
Which is why Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have teamed up to bring us
The Aviator. The opulent film follows Hughes through his glory years, from
the late 1920s to the late 1940s, before his descent into paranoia and
madness, when he was producing and directing acclaimed movies such as Hell’s
Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932), dating Hollywood’s leading ladies, as
well as turning the aviation industry on its head with his revolutionary
aircraft designs. Not that Scorsese, now a dapper 62-year-old who starts
talking the instant he appears in the LA hotel room set aside for
interviews, would call the film a biopic. “I don’t know what the hell that
is. When Raging Bull came out, the reviews described it as a biopic, and I
was like, ‘What does that mean?’ I suppose it’s one way to try to
characterise them, but I think this is a story about a tycoon, about
America.”
Like Beckinsale, who plays Ava Gardner, Scorsese knew little about Hughes
before he agreed to direct The Aviator. But the asthmatic and unathletic
Scorsese wasn’t a boxing fan before he made Raging Bull, his stunning 1980
account of the rise and fall of middleweight champion Jake LaMotta. “Hughes
was a man who — and this is what fascinates me — used money as a weapon. I
don’t admire that, but it’s a cautionary tale to be told. He was a genius
with a fatal flaw.” For DiCaprio, Hughes is much more than that: not only
the most complex character he has played, but a man he sees as a genuine
American hero, who has been woefully misrepresented and sidelined by
history. DiCaprio is on a mission to rehabilitate Hughes and restore him to
the pedestal he occupied before he became known only as a weird recluse.
“He’s a character not many writers could conceive from their own
imaginations,” claims the tall and thin DiCaprio, who sits hunched forward
in his hotel suite, his short blond hair swept back. “When I’m looking for
multidimensional characters to play, I look into history, and eight years
ago, I happened to pick up a book on Hughes and just thought he was a
ready-made character for me.” DiCaprio’s speech can be clumsy at times, but
he’s a persuasive talker and a forceful personality. Having decided to play
Hughes, he commissioned a script and approached Michael Mann to direct. But
Mann dropped out and DiCaprio enlisted Scorsese, with whom he had just made
the underwhelming Gangs of New York. Nothing better illustrates DiCaprio’s
status in Hollywood than the fact that directors such as Mann, Scorsese and
Steven Spielberg, who directed him in 2002’s Catch Me if You Can, are lining
up to work with him.
But then DiCaprio, who looks younger than his 30 years, displays a maturity on
screen that older actors envy. Hughes may be his finest performance yet. He
has to age 10 years for the final third of the film, and his baby-face
transforms as we see him struggling with the anxieties that would eventually
send Hughes mad, while he reproduces Hughes’s croaky Texan twang perfectly.
(Jude Law seems much less at ease playing Errol Flynn, one of Hughes’s
Coconut Grove nightclub buddies.) “Leo was Howard to me. If you watch his
performance during the Senate-hearings sequences, he’s exactly like Howard
was when he appeared at those hearings,” Scorsese says. “I think this movie
really shows his range. He makes the journey right there on the screen. His
future is unlimited because he’s still so young and has all this ambition
and energy.” Scorsese and DiCaprio’s relationship is close enough for them
to be making a third film next year, The Departed, a Boston-set remake of
the 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs. It’s as if DiCaprio is
now Scorsese’s muse, in the way Robert De Niro was in the 1970s. “I don’t
know,” Scorsese says, “Bob and I are the same age, and we grew up in the
same area (New York’s Little Italy), so we had similar experiences, and
that’s something that can’t be duplicated. But De Niro was the one who first
told me about Leo, and he rarely tells me about people.”
DiCaprio stayed in character even when the cameras weren’t running. “In some
ways, he’s similar to Daniel Day-Lewis, in that he immerses himself in the
character, but I think it’s less painful for Leo than it is for Daniel,”
says John C Reilly, who worked with DiCaprio on Gangs of New York and plays
Noah Dietrich, Hughes’s consigliere, or fixer. DiCaprio saw the
key to Hughes as understanding the nature of the illness that would send him
insane. “He was a germophobe with obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he says.
“It has to do with the reptilian part of the brain that has a need to
organise and protect the nest and clean things up. People with OCD, it’s
like a sticky gear shift: they kind of get stuck in that mode and don’t
listen to the part of the brain that says, ‘That’s completely unnecessary’.
“We all do ritualistic, superstitious things in our lives, and so I wanted to
do the things I remembered doing as a kid: not stepping on cracks in the
sidewalk, or gum stains. So sometimes, I’d be late to the set doing stuff
like that, and wouldn’t shake hands with people, and the assistants would
laugh at me. But I don’t have OCD, so I was able to stop when I went home.”
The opening scene explicitly links Hughes’s OCD and fear of germs to his
relationship with his mother, an overprotective Dallas heiress preoccupied
with cleanliness. His dad was co-founder of the company that became Texaco,
as well as the inventor of a drill bit that was the basis of the Hughes Tool
Company’s fortune. With both parents dead by the time he was 18, Hughes was
a young multi-millionaire, free to pursue his interest in planes and movies.
He hit Hollywood in the early 1920s and spent four years making Hell’s Angels,
a hugely expensive but highly profitable first world war flying epic.
Subsequently, he went out with Katharine Hepburn (played here by Cate
Blanchett in a note-perfect performance), while also seeing Jean Harlow
(singer Gwen Stefani is less convincing in this walk-on part), Ginger
Rogers, Bette Davis and Ava Gardner at various times. He carried on making
films in the 1930s and 1940s but devoted more attention to aviation: he took
over the airline TWA, designed military aircraft and, in 1938, flew round
the world in four days in one of his own planes. His early life makes
today’s tycoons seem bland. “I think some of the billionaires around now
would do well to look at Hughes’s life and get busy,” Reilly says. “Is Bill
Gates going to build a new airplane and then get in it and fly it himself?
Howard had real courage and was a real technical genius. I guess Richard
Branson is the closest to him now; at least he seems like he’s having fun —
and with his space-travel idea, he’s not thinking small.”
It was a different story in the second half of Hughes’s life. He withdrew from
Hollywood, after driving RKO Studios into the ground, and retreated to a
desert hideaway near Las Vegas, where he wrote endless memos on the minutiae
of germs. Then there were his dodgy views on race, his financial backing for
Richard Nixon and his habit of bugging his business rivals and girlfriends.
Unsurprisingly, DiCaprio had no interest in making a film about Hughes’s
later years. “That period is a lot less cinematic: it’s one old guy in a
room.”
But while there’s little to admire about the older Hughes, The Aviator is
overly kind to the younger man and steers clear of controversy. Despite his
reputation as a Lothario there were those, such as Bette Davis, who said he
was gay. And, for all his business acumen and aeronautical achievements, his
path to becoming America’s first billionaire was made considerably easier by
the millions he inherited. “I wouldn’t have liked to be a director for one
of the films he produced, I can tell you that,” Scorsese chuckles. “I don’t
know if I’d have been flying with him, either. I suppose we are trying to
provoke the audience into thinking about the better aspects of the man. But
I can understand his obsession with making the perfect movie. There have
been times I’ve wanted to be isolated and might not have behaved too well,
so maybe that’s why I’m sympathetic to him.”
Perhaps that’s also why DiCaprio is such a fan of Hughes. “There’s a certain
amount of isolation,” he says of his life, “but I have a rebellious nature
towards the fame. I do whatever I want to do and go wherever I want to go. I
don’t want fame to limit me from having new experiences. But I have nothing
to complain about. There are far more horrible things than photographers and
people trying to shake your hand. I’m a lucky bastard.”
The Aviator opens in London on Dec 26, nationwide on Jan 6
