Do you have an absolute philosophy as a director about historical fact versus fiction in a movie like this?
It's interesting, sometimes people call it 'Faction' in the publishing world where a book is based on fact, but it's also fictionalized. It's a mixture of the two. I love documentaries. I don't think that you get anything more dramatic than actual events occurring like the Penny Baker films in the '60's. I really love making documentaries. I'm working on one now that's a two-parter called “The Life of Bob Dylan until 1966.” It gives me a great deal of inspiration, but when you're dealing with a character like Hughes or other characters in history, I think that to a certain extent one can take a kind of poetic license in a way to combine and fictionalize certain aspects of lives and what happened. I think that a lot of it has to do with if you're truthful to the emotion. If you're truthful to the very core of the ideas of what happened in his life, I think you can.
There will always be people who disagree with you because it's based on a real character, but I think that you can deal in that way. This is what happened. Ava Gardner shows up at his house and straightens him out and then he gets all taken care of. He gets shaved. He gets his hair cut later. They get him a suit. And he goes to the Senate. That happened. It happened. It really did happen. I don't know if it was Ava Gardner. People say it was Cary Grant. But his friends gathered together and the fact that Ava is there represents what she had said in her autobiography in my mind of the 22 year friendship. Screaming, yelling, fighting, “'Alright, lets go to dinner.” “Ava, will you marry me?” ”No. I will not marry you.” It sort of was the spirit of his friends coming [together]. The spirit of what he did for Katharine Hepburn with the pictures of Spencer Tracy is a fictionalizing of what really went on. But the reality is that after they'd broken up for so many years, when she needed “The Philadelphia Story” to propel her back to being a star, she knew that was the perfect vehicle for her, he bought the rights to the play and it was made into a film and changed her career. But that means that you have to know that her career was really on the skids. Box office poison. Nobody can relate to that today. That can't understand that she was so big, she wins the Academy Award for “Morning Glory” and then nobody makes a film with her. They're making all these films and no one goes to see them.
Dramatically, I think that what John [Logan] did was very interesting. Also, it was interesting in that it was honest to the truth of the emotion between the two of them. I think that's what was interesting to me. And the film is meant to be an impression of views, an impression of the spectacle of Hollywood. And at the same time, a man who wants to fly to the sun like Icarus. But his wings really are wax, ultimately.
