Christopher Nolan Says His Unmade Howard Hughes Biopic With Jim Carrey Made ‘Oppenheimer’ Easier, Calls Potential Bond Directing Gig an ‘Amazing Privilege’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director While “Oppenheimer” has been touted as Christopher Nolan’s first biopic, that’s not necessarily true.

It’s only the director’s first biopic to hit the big screen. Decades ago, Nolan wrote the screenplay for a biopic about aviator and business tycoon Howard Hughes, but the project never took flight because Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, beat him to it.

Nolan told The Daily Beast in 2007 that his Hughes biopic was the best script he’d written, and he even lined up Jim Carrey to star as Hughes.

Nolan said Hughes was the role that Carrey was “born to play.” Nolan’s Howard Hughes movie never materialized, but learning how to distill the life of an iconic American figure into a movie script would pay off years later when it came time to penning “Oppenheimer.” “I wrote the [‘Oppenheimer] script relatively quickly once I started writing, but I had a lot worked out beforehand,” Nolan recently told The New York Times. “Many years ago, I had written a script about the life of Howard Hughes that never got made because I wrote it right as Scorsese was making his own film.