Although “The Aviator” took precedence over his intended Howard Hughes biopic, Christopher Nolan’s career recovered rather well. Whether does not, however, imply that he has seen Martin Scorsese’s film on the well-known eccentric aviator and businessman. According to Variety, Nolan acknowledged to Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio that he had never seen Scorsese’s 2004 historical drama “The Aviator” before working with the actor on “Inception.” Warner Bros., the studio that Nolan collaborated with for nearly two decades, distributed “The Aviator”.
Jim Carrey was supposed to star in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Howard Hughes, but Nolan was forced to abandon the script after Scorsese’s movie started shooting. Regarding the project, Nolan remarked, “It was very emotional to not get to make something I’d poured all that into.” Despite being recognized by Scorsese as one of the few directors who continue to uphold the artistic values of film today, Nolan said to Variety that he hasn’t seen “The Aviator” in the twenty years since it came out.
In July 2023, Nolan stated to The New York Times that his film starring Howard Hughes “never got made because I wrote it right as Scorsese was making his own film. But I cracked the script to my satisfaction, and that gave me a lot of insight on how to distill 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. So in some ways, the script, yes, it took me a few months, but it was really a culmination of 20 years of thinking.”
Even though Scorsese felt that Nolan’s portrayal of Howard Hughes would not qualify as a “biopic,” he recalled how the Warner Bros. and Miramax-funded film “Aviator” nearly drove him to leave Hollywood altogether. Scorsese declared, “The last two weeks of editing and mixing ‘The Aviator,’ I said if this is the way you have to make films then I’m not going to do it anymore. It’s like being in a bunker and you’re firing out in all directions. You begin to realize you’re not speaking the same language anymore, so you can’t make pictures anymore.”
Furthermore the filmmaker of “Oppenheimer” went on to express his contempt for conventionally produced biopics in general. “Oppenheimer” is based on the true narrative of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb and expressed contempt for the term “biopic” at a City University of New York public session.
Nolan remarked, “Biopic is something that applies to a film that is not quite registering in a dramatic fashion. You don’t talk about ‘Laurence of Arabia’ as a biopic. You don’t talk about ‘Citizen Kane’ as a biopic. It’s an adventure film. It’s a film about somebody’s life. It’s not a useful genre the same way drama is not a useful genre. It doesn’t give you anything to hold onto.” He continued his speech by furthermore adding, “This is where the concept of a biopic fails you completely as a genre. It’s not a useful genre. I love working in useful genres…There is a tendency in biography post-Freud to attribute characteristics of the person you’re dealing with to their genetics from their parents. It’s a very reductive view of a human being,” Nolan said. “If you’re writing a book that’s 500 pages or 1,000 pages, there’s a way to balance that with their individuality and experiences. When you compress and strip down to the necessary simplicity of a screenplay, it’s incredibly reductive.”