So it is Hollywood spectacle combined with internal conflict, and the destruction of this man—at least the seeds of it. Beyond that, of course, he was known as a great lover. From the year he was born, 1910, to about 1970, he had relationships with hundreds of important people. You mention a person’s name, Hughes was with him, or her.
I found the script particularly interesting because of the relationships John Logan decided to highlight. He fictionalized at times to give the essence of what it must’ve been like to be around him, to be like him. He left out sections of the life so that the sections that remain resonate more.
I said to John, You’ve got to deal with all the things he did with the women. But which ones do you drop, which ones do you use? John already had in the script three women. Katharine Hepburn is one whole story. Ava Gardner is another. We added one scene where she attacked him, because that actually happened, and I wanted something more for her. Then there was the woman made up to represent all the other women, Faith Domergue. I felt those three women would be it. The prime interest, of course, is in the Katharine Hepburn relationship, because they felt comfortable with each other, yet ultimately had to break up.
A lot of the film has to do with the nature of wanting to be famous, the nature of wanting to be stars, the nature of what that’s like for two creative people. He was creative and, of course, she was a genius at what she did. So you do feel something when they break up.
Also it’s got Hollywood in the 1920s, Hollywood in the ’30s. It’s got the Coconut Grove in those days.
RS: It is interesting, the notion of Howard Hughes kind of having it all in his earlier years in an almost innocent way. I mean, I love it when he just swoops down on the beach and picks Hepburn up and takes her flying. What the hell, he can do anything he wants, he’s so rich. And then he starts, almost imperceptibly, going crazy. That scene where he keeps repeating, “I want to see the plans. I must see the plans.”
MS: Oh, that was scary. He just gets brain-locked. And don’t forget, he had had two car accidents and two plane crashes; his concussions were bad, and that affected him.
RS: There’s now all this research in professional football on concussions. And they’re seeing these players who are addled from it and they don’t even know it. They reach their forties and they’re not completely with us any longer. I’m sure that happened to Hughes.
MS: I really believe that.
RS: Even though he was an oddball to begin with.
MS: Yes, absolutely. Some doctors told me, Oh, he had to be autistic, he was this, he was that. I don’t know. Whatever it was, he was certainly odd. But also the empire contains the seeds of its own destruction. He represented that to me. That’s why that repetition scene at the end—and the way Leo [DiCaprio] did it—was so good. And then, you know, “Moonlight Serenade” slips in.
That bland sound of Glenn Miller’s that was so nostalgic in a way: America right at the beginning of empire. That’s what I thought the movie was about. I thought it would be so nice to end it right before he flies the Hercules.
RS: But you let him have his triumph, getting the Spruce Goose [the Hercules] off the ground for a few minutes.
MS: I added the men with the white gloves, and especially John Reilly saying, “Everybody works for you, Howard.” When John Logan came up with that line, I said, “Perfect.” Whether it’s a dream or not, that’s what he’s feeling: “Everybody works for you.” And suddenly they’re all closing in on him. It’s the beginning of a long, long decline. He dies like an ancient Greek king, doesn’t he? I mean, he had his own doctors. He’s not going to go to a hospital. Why should he go to a hospital? His doctors give him the drugs he needs, the liquid codeine. And, you know, when regular doctors came in, if you read the reports, they said, “This isn’t neglect; what can we tell you?”
RS: It’s really a romance, often a dark one—the romance of flight, certainly, the romance of these beautiful women, and the romance as well of invention, where the individual inventor-genius could still make a difference.
MS: Right. It begins in the time of Edison. It’s the time of America inventing everything new. Hughes was a pioneer.
RS: Movies and aviation were invented at around the same time.
MS: The same time.
RS: And they were run by the same kind of people. The WASPs did aviation, and the Jews did the movies. But in terms of ambition, of inventing businesses that had never existed before, they were the same kind of people.
The film has a wonderful conflict between Hughes’s TWA and Juan Trippe’s Pan Am, though, which I didn’t know very much about. For some reason I remembered some old newsreel footage of a congressional hearing where they both appeared.
MS: Until I did some research, I didn’t realize how interesting Juan Trippe was—curiously, my wife and her father were friends of his. As the head of Pan Am, he wanted to keep those international routes to himself, away from Hughes’s TWA. The fight about the international routes was interesting to me. And then there’s the climactic sequence when Hughes does, ultimately, fly, just for a couple of minutes, the Hercules. It was a plane that was five stories high, you know.
He was like an ancient Greek mythological king, like Croesus or Midas, in a way. In my mind, his obsessive-compulsive disorder is like the labyrinth that he gets stuck in—sort of like the Minotaur. He’s got wings, like the ones Daedalus makes for his son, Icarus, the wings to get out of that labyrinth, but he flies too close to the sun and the wings melt, and he comes down. There’s a Hughes metaphor there. His pride and his ego destroyed him, too. But it was still worth it, in his mind, whatever happened.
The film has a pretty dark character at its center, but it’s a very light film in a way, too, in a good way, I think. It’s an upbeat picture, except for the last half hour.
RS: But even then he at least gets the Spruce Goose off the water.
MS: Yes, he does. We felt, though, that we were doing a film about hubris, the kind of thing that made all our European forefathers want to get across to the other side, to California. But at a certain point it’s going to stop. You know? [Laughs.]
RS: You run out of country, standing there on a beach in Malibu and wondering, What’s next?
MS: What’s next is that you’ve got to deal with yourself.
Crash and burn: Leonardo DiCaprio, as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004), faces one consequence of his passion for flight.
RS: Let’s talk a little about the style of the film—the use of color in particular, which is spectacular.
MS: The Aviator is a good example of really embracing two-color and three-color schemes of shooting. And then the scene in the Senate hearing was a more neutral color in a way, which eased the film into the modern world.
RS: In the early passages it’s very beautiful, and not just in the flying scenes. For instance, when he’s courting Hepburn on the golf course, it has a kind of Hollywood-of-the-time look.
MS: It’s two-color, Cinecolor. What we did was we dropped out the yellow. We had only red and green. And her lips are orange practically.
What she wears in the nightclub and when he takes her on the plane—the actual color of the dress is very different. That film’s green.
RS: Really?
MS: We made it into literally two-strip Technicolor. First of all, we did it in the costumes, in the color of the sets. We really had a lot of fun, playing with that. Then, finally, it was enhanced digitally. Until we got to the 1940s, the scene where he takes her to an opening. She’s with Louis B. Mayer, and he goes to the bathroom and can’t touch the doorknob. That’s when we slipped into three-strip Technicolor. And then from there it stayed three-strip.
RS: Since two-and three-strip Technicolor don’t exist anymore, how do you re-create that?
MS: Well, first I showed the crew many different films. Luckily, there was a color show in L.A. at the Academy, and they started with the beautiful nitrate black-and-white print of Midsummer Night’s Dream, just to show how b
eautiful black-and-white was. Then they showed whatever extant examples of two-strip Technicolor and Cinecolor films were available—some very bad films, but some of the colors were just beyond belief. Then, of course, they went into three-strip Technicolor with Robin Hood and Becky Sharp. Ultimately, they showed a beautiful clip of East of Eden in an original Scope print. And they showed some clips from Ryan’s Daughter in 70 millimeter, and it looked very beautiful. So we took the cast and crew to that Academy screening, and then I started screening films on big screens at the Sony studios—everything from Divorce of Lady X to The Mystery of the Wax Museum to Dr. X to Blithe Spirit. And then eventually Leave Her to Heaven, in color. Some of Ava Gardner’s clothes in our movie were based on what Gene Tierney was wearing in that film. The use of blues and the reds.
RS: Oh, that film seems to me—
MS: Dazzling.
RS: I mean, that color is just—
MS: Lurid.
RS: Blinding.
MS: So Leave Her to Heaven became very important, and a film which I love called Desert Fury—Lewis Allen directed with Burt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott, and Mary Astor.
RS: Oh, that’s an odd, wonderful film.
MS: And having designed the costumes and the sets as much as possible in those colors, we then went the extra steps in digital. I would show the designers old westerns in Cinecolor, and say, “You see the way the light is reflecting off the gun? That’s the blue we want.”
RS: So what was probably pretty easy in the day of three-strip Technicolor becomes an enormous task now.
MS: It was crazy, but it was fun. [Robert] Richardson did it and Rob Legato did the visual effects. And the lab did a great job. So the color meant something special.
RS: Let me stop you right there. The average viewer is not going to know that’s two-color or three-color. You could have done a completely respectable-looking movie that would have satisfied viewers and critics. So why go to all that trouble?
MS: I don’t know. I never even thought of it that way. I mean, part of it is the enjoyment of doing something special and creating a look, a certain look. It’s just the nature of the process. I just felt it was real important with Aviator.
I did it in New York, New York, too. I would get stills from Band Wagon and from all other films like it and literally say “duplicate this” to Boris Leven, and then he would add to it, including painting the sets. And we painted lipstick on the men. And the shoulder pads were exaggerated two or three inches. It was just the way I saw it. I mean, certainly, another person doing The Aviator or a Howard Hughes film could shoot it straight. It would be fine. It’s just a different vision of it. But I thought Hughes had a great love for movies. He was there at that time when movies were making the transition to sound and color. I thought it would be nice to make a little history of the movies, to show the texture of the color changing as the film went on. It kind of fits with the subject matter, you know.
RS: I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it’s a nice touch—well, more than a touch, considering the effort that went into it.
MS: It’s a history of color in a way.
RS: Certainly, though, looking back on the film, it did have a lot of the quality that I imputed to life in Hollywood in that age, maybe even the way you thought of it when you first went out there as a kid—just the way the personalities come into the premiere, for example. It had more excitement than I think those events actually had in life.
MS: But even when you saw the black-and-white newsreels of the Hell’s Angels opening, it was pretty stirring. I mean, at a certain point we colorized some of that. He’s sitting in the back of the car with Jean Harlow and, if you notice, the color seeps in. And it gets richer as he gets out of the car. Every shot was manipulated a long time.
RS: In postproduction?
MS: Some of that was post. But her dress was exactly what she wore that night, though the color of it was different. It was photographed the way we wanted it to be photographed, but it showed up in another color. That was part of the layers in the movie. It was one of the incentives to make it. Hughes loved movies so much, and he made all those terrible ones later at RKO in beautiful Technicolor.
RS: I know.
MS: I mean, I think if he had been around twenty years ago, he’d have colorized all those old black-and-white pictures.
RS: He might have. Eccentric billionaires get to do that.
MS: Yeah, they get to do whatever they want.
RS: Was there something in the contrast between The Aviator and Gangs of New York that attracted you? You know, the feeling that you could be beautiful and elegant in the old Hollywood manner?
MS: That was part of the attraction. But I liked John Logan’s script a lot. And also in my mind there was a somewhat religious aspect, flying like a god in the air.
Happy days: Hughes and Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) attend a Hollywood premiere.
RS: I never thought of that.
MS: Being closer to the final mystery, so to speak, of who we are and what we are.
RS: You’re up there, you feel that much closer to it.
MS: You’re much closer, and you become like a god.
RS: Now that I think about it, in your Hell’s Angels flying sequences you show him up there in godlike command of the sequence.
MS: It was amazing what he did. I don’t say that that’s good, I’m just saying he did it. It took us about a year to do the whole sequence. We finally found that Leadbelly song that’s on at the end of the film. Listen to the lyrics of Leadbelly singing about Howard Hughes: “I’m going to that world up there.” It’s beautiful because he has someone just drifting away into the stratosphere, flying away, never coming back. Which is what happened to Hughes in a way.
RS: Did you analogize at all between yourself and the obsessive Howard Hughes who’s driving everybody crazy with making Hell’s Angels or getting the Spruce Goose built or whatever?
MS: No, not really.
RS: What I’m asking is if there is something similar between the way you approach a task and the way Hughes did.
MS: We were getting the last shot, and there was something going wrong. They had begun to shoot before I had seen the setup. I said, “Stop! This has got to stop!” I said, “This is not worthy of Howard Hughes.” I found myself jumping up and down on the tarmac, with the whole crew surrounding me in a semicircle. They were saying, “What is he talking about?” And I’m yelling, “We’re not doing that shot! Get it out of there!” I had designed the shot according to the structure of what John Logan wrote in the script. It was the shot of Leo getting into the XF-11 cockpit before he takes off for the test flight that ends in the Beverly Hills crash. I wanted to boom down, but they just shot him getting into the plane. I said, “No. It has to be a boom down when he gets in to the cockpit.”
Then someone said that we were going to have to do the shot again anyway, against a green screen. But I had a feeling—the kind of feeling that builds up in your mind, like paranoia. We were all working together, we were not enemies. But you never know what a studio is going to do. Let’s say we go, God forbid, three weeks over schedule, four weeks over schedule. At a certain point, in order to satisfy the schedule, I might start to feel, You know what, I think I’ll use that shot we did by accident on the set. And we’ll forget the boom down.
But I didn’t want to sacrifice that shot. I felt it would have been one of the worst things you could do—making aviation scenes not on the highest level. Basically, I was saying, Let’s not sacrifice that shot. Let’s not compromise here, because in desperation to finish, I may sacrifice that idea and use the less interesting shot.
I had a feeling that day. Maybe it had something to do with the hotel we were in. It was an old Spanish mission, and it was haunting. I couldn’t sleep.
And I wasn’t the only guy. Everybody felt it. I looked out the window and across the courtyard there was a monk, a Franciscan monk with a crucifix pointing at me. And I closed the curtain right away.
We had just gotten there. It was early evening, and Joe Reidy came by. I said, “Joe, come in the room.” Joe is an old Irish Catholic. I said, “I just want you to look out the window and tell me what you see out there.” He opened it, and he looked. “Son of a —” I said, “Look at that. It’s a clock tower, and they’re life-size effigies of monks.” I took another look and I said, “Wait a minute, it’s a different monk.” They had different ones. And it was turning. And they were all aiming their crucifixes at me.
I kept wondering why they gave me this suite directly across from the clock tower. Then, that night, Leo and the producer of the film went to Leo’s room and they were talking, and the producer says, “What do you want to do? Do you want to go to sleep now?” “Oh, I don’t think so,” Leo said. So they watch a film. After the film was over, they looked at each other and one of them says, “Why don’t we watch another film?” They didn’t want to go to sleep! There was just something creepy about the place. And everything around us was burning.
RS: I find I’m very uncomfortable living in California. I find the place very spooky.
MS: I do, too.
RS: I feel much safer in New York.
MS: Me, too.
RS: There’s very little chance that an earthquake will wipe your house out in New York.
MS: Or a major fire.
RS: You’re always on the edge in L.A.
MS: All that potential for catastrophe.
RS: Not that a solipsist like Hughes would have noticed that. Not that he would have noticed that he was living a kind of perverse American epic. Finally, The Aviator is your American epic.
MS: Maybe.
RS: What you’re saying is that a Howard Hughes would not arise in France or England. He had to come out of something that’s—
Conversations with Scorsese Page 27