Howard Hughes Biopic: Last News

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.

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.”