Can you talk a little bit about the breakdown scene in the screening room?
We shot a lot more than was actually in the movie because we didn’t know what we were going to use. There’s literally entire report documents that are the size of huge novels. Howard Hughes took all his technical brilliance that he would use for airplanes or engineering or whatever it may be, and reverted all that energy into how his lunch was delivered. It’s truly some of the most frightening, astonishing stuff I’ve ever read. I mean transcripts and memos that went on for hours and hours and hours about the angle of the lunch, the way the milk was to be delivered, the way the knock was supposed to be, whether the man could smile, cough, breath, how many times he could blink, and the angles of the way the food was to be delivered, his gloves. It was frightening, frightening stuff. And we incorporated a lot of that, but unfortunately there was way, way too much to put in. I think we definitely got the essence of his madness and portrayed what we wanted to portray. But, like I said, Howard Hughes in his later years, that’s another film unto itself. It’s not as cinematic, a man locked in a room.
How did you feel spending a week doing that? Do you feel like you were losing it?
Sometimes yeah, sometimes definitely. You sort of get into your own headspace and don’t really want to talk to anyone. I spent a lot of time just sitting around in the screening room alone. But, pain is temporary, film is forever, and that’s the fun part of knowing on the day that what you’re doing will actually show up on screen. That’s the best feeling.
Do you think Howard Hughes would have been the genius that he was without the OCD?
I think they’re a direct result of one another. It’s like he would have not been as obsessed about making the largest plane ever built. He wouldn’t have been obsessed about breaking every speed record. He wouldn’t have been obsessed about flying around the world faster than anyone else. He wouldn’t have been obsessed about reshooting “Hells Angels” for sound, having
that movie go on for four years. He wouldn’t have been… It was all completely a part of his obsessive nature and his OCD that made him have such an amazing, astounding life.
OCD at the time was undiagnosed. People didn’t know what it was and he was such a private introverted person that he would have never, even if there was a doctor out there that could have cured him, he wouldn’t have had that meeting with the doctor to begin with, nor taken any medication to solve it. So he just thought it was his own essence, his own being, not knowing that he had any kind of condition whatsoever. And absolutely it propelled him to do everything that he did, I believe anyway. But also, he was a huge dreamer as well. It was a crockpot of different things that made Howard Hughes who he was. It was a combination of stuff, but OCD was a huge part of it.
What are your film tastes like these days?
I’m still doing my homework, still watching a lot of old movies. A lot of old films. Some of my favorites, the last thing that I really got into was the whole neo-realism movement with De Sica and all those great Italian directors, “The Bicycle Thief,” and all of his great work.
It’s so funny because here we are doing movies at this day and age and you don’t realize that these directors have attempted these things almost 100 times before you. We think we’re so original with our ideas and things we’re trying to accomplish, but some of these great directors of our past have gone to those extremes and even further. And that’s why film preservation is so damn important, so directors and actors can have a library of seeing what people did in the past and learning from it and trying to improve or not make the same mistakes or whatever it may be.
PAGE 5: Leonardo DiCaprio on Sticking to His Dreams and Family Support
