I mean all of this going on, this great mysterious figure like an ancient king from Greece. And I thought, “Well, where do you start and where do you end?” I wouldn’t know where to begin. And so I thought it was more or less their territory until I read the script by John Logan. They didn’t tell me what it was, they just gave me the script. I was finishing up “Gangs of New York” and wanted to work right away again. And Leo De Caprio, that’s all I knew was that Leo DiCaprio was involved in it and I’d had a pretty good relationship working with Leo in “Gangs of New York.” That was sort a baptism of fire because it was a difficult picture to make. I read the thing, and I just saw the first scene of this mother washing a boy in the bath and she’s dealing with cholera and quarantine and all that sort of thing. I understood that. And then the next sequence is this young guy shooting a movie out in the desert and I realized, “My God, it’s Howard Hughes doing ‘Hell’s Angels’.” “Hell’s Angels” is a film I really like.
At first I said, “Now he’ll go through the entire life of Howard Hughes.” But he didn’t. What interested me is what John chose to leave out during that period, and what he chose to combine, fictionalize, attempting to really get the spirit of what Hughes was like. This visionary who was obsessed with speed. Young, energetic, filled with wonder and excitement, not only with aviation but also of Hollywood and making big movies. Big movies. I mean, “Hell’s Angels” was a big film. 1:33 aspect ratio when it was shown. The last sequence the tinting was very important, the color was very important. He did a two color sequence in it. And the last sequence of the dog fight that we keep clipping in our film here, the screen opened to magnascope, which was a slightly wider frame. Basically it was a cheat. It was a 1:85 lens that just blew up the image, cutting off top and bottom. But it was pretty effective. The screen opened at Grauman’s Chinese and the dog fight comes up. He was a real showman in a way.
Ultimately, what I really liked was the way the way the story developed into a struggle between himself and the government and Pan Am. I thought that was interesting. I think it has a lot of resonance for today, particularly the investigation committee smearing people. Here’s a guy who can easily be smeared. I mean, he was kind of strange. As Alan Alda says, “We picked up a lot of dirt on you.” “What do you want me to do,” he says, “Sell TWA to Pan Am. Get a good price. Get out if here. Nobody knows a thing. Nobody knows a thing. Make your deal.” And that happens every second now, and people don’t even think about it any more. So I found that was an interesting challenge to start a picture one way and then end with it climactically another way. Dealing with the climax another way rather than climactic sequences between, let’s say, him and Katharine Hepburn. There is one, but it has to do more with aviation, it has to do more with the government, more with what he thinks is right. And more with him and how much he has to come through, how much he has to break through his illness to get back in that Senate room and really pull himself together.
I hadn’t known anything about Pan Am and Juan Trippe and all that sort of thing. When I read it I thought that almost can’t be. He won his point in the Senate. He stormed out of the place and people actually applauded. This is true. I didn’t know that. It was true. Also that he flew the Hercules. I didn’t quite understand what a feat, what an accomplishment that really was until I read the script and then went back and did research. It was making a point, a point of honor, that the plane was airworthy. That was it. It may not have flown long but it got up in the air. And it’s the way we fly today.
Now the best part for me was the ending. The best part was literally thinking about jet planes and then all of a sudden getting stuck on the line “the way of the future.’’ That for me was fascinating because the way of the future implies his future, implies the future of our country, it implies the future of the world, really. What I mean about that is there’s a lot that goes on in the story that has to do with accumulating, greed, how much is enough, enough is never enough. The curse that he has, like an ancient Greek curse on his family in a way, the curse of wealth, and the curses in his genes. All of this is his undoing. I found that fascinating. It’s a universal story.
PAGE 3: Martin Scorsese on Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, and Kate Beckinsale
