Every director has one big project that never materialized but still serves for interesting thought experiments, from Darren Aronofsky‘s “Batman: Year One,” Stanley Kubrick‘s “Napoleon,” to Guillermo del Toro‘s hundred different passion projects (but really, especially “At the Mountains of Madness“). Despite his very successful career with practically blank check status, there is one film Christopher Nolan has never been able to do, a Howard Hughes Biopic.
The year he was offered to do “Batman Begins,” Nolan had already spent a year writing a script about the eccentric business magnate and filmmaker. As he explained in a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “I labored over it for a very long time and I couldn’t crack [the story], couldn’t crack it, couldn’t crack it, and I finally cracked it just as they went into production on ‘The Aviator,”’ he chuckled. “You know, that’s Hollywood, right?”
Martin Scorsese‘s “The Aviator” came out in 2004 and earned both Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio Oscar nominations, so it’s understandable Nolan wouldn’t want to compete against that. But that was then. Now, he’s made multiple blockbuster films with huge budgets and box office results, he could go back to it, right? Nolan isn’t so sure.
“It’s tricky because, I’m passionate about the re-interpretation of the character, but having had a significant movie [made by] Scorsese and [with] DiCaprio’s interpretation, it’s a tricky proposition,” Nolan said. “I’ll probably look at it again sometime soon and see if it still speaks to me, but I was very happy with it when I wrote it. It was kind of the most fun — not the most fun —, but the best writing experience I’ve had.”
Though this is Nolan’s biggest project that got away from him, it doesn’t mean he has a treasure trove of old scripts he can simply dig up and revisit. As he tells it, “That’s the only finished one that was ready to go.”
That being said, the filmmaker does admit he used elements of incomplete screenplays he was working on, and used them for other movies. He cites “Interstellar” as an example. A screenplay was originally written for Steven Spielberg by Jonathan Nolan, before eventually gifting it to his brother.
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According to Nolan, when Spielberg passed on it, “I went to Jonah and I said, ‘Can I take this and put it together with a couple of other ideas,’ a couple of other scripts I’d written that hadn’t quite come together for me, but I had big chunks of things. I wanted to take some of those things and integrate them with what [his Interstellar’ script] was doing and fortunately he said yes.”
You can listen to the rest of the podcast below, and you absolutely should if only to hear Nolan talk about his love for “Tokyo Drift.”