What does Christopher Nolan want to do after THE DARK KNIGHT RISES? Apparently he wants to get to work on his Howard Hughes biopic.
A while back, Nolan wanted to do a biopic on Mr. Hughes but decided to shelve it when he realized that Martin Scorsese’s THE AVIATOR would make it to the big screen first. Don’t think that Nolan is doing a repeat though. Scorsese’s film was based on Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, which covered the early years of Hughes’ life up to 1947. Nolan’s movie would be based on Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness. That novel covers the later half of Hughes’ life covering all the crazier shit–sitting naked in your personal theater peeing into milk bottles was only the beginning.
I own Citizen Hughes and it probes deeply into the mind of Hughes through papers and documents (over 3,000) that were stolen from his home. The paranoia that Hughes’ experiences becomes more severe while his constant struggle with various phobias only fuel the fire. The book opens the door to Howard’s life and secrets. It’s a great read. After Scorsese’s film, I sort of fixated on Hughes.
Here is some of the stuff that Nolan’s movie will cover:
“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.”
Nolan wants to shoot the film in late 2012 then release it in 2014. The director feels that 10 years would give it enough time so there will be little comparison.