Christopher Nolan is known for his meticulous attention to detail and his hands-on approach to filmmaking. With an unwavering dedication to his creative vision, Nolan delves into the intricate process of writing his scripts by himself. This has resulted in some of the most critically acclaimed films of recent years, including The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Interstellar.
However, there’s one movie that he wrote script for, but it never happened. But it was made by Martin Scorsese instead. Since then he keeps waiting to write any script till the exact moment when he is sure that it’s actually going to be made by him.
Christopher Nolan’s Unmade Howard Hughes Biopic: The Story Behind the Script That Never Soared
Decades ago, Nolan fervently penned a screenplay centered on the enigmatic figure of Howard Hughes, aiming to delve deep into the life and persona of the legendary aviator and industrialist. Nolan once told The Daily Beast that that was the best script he had ever written. He in fact lined up Jim Carrey to star as Hughes.
Yet, fate dealt a surprising hand when Martin Scorsese, another maestro of the cinematic realm, fast-tracked his own Hughes biopic titled The Aviator, starring the incomparable Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular character. Scorsese’s film swiftly moved through production, beating Nolan’s project to the finish line.
“It was very emotional to not get to make something I’d poured all that into,” he confessed to Leonardo DiCaprio when the duo was making Inception. (Via Variety)
Christopher Nolan Wrote the Oppenheimer Script in Just a Few Months
Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer etched its name in cinematic history by becoming the highest-grossing biopic of all time. The film, starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, surpassed the previous record holder, Bohemian Rhapsody, with a global box office gross of over $950 million.
Nolan took just a few months to finish the script for this movie, though it was the fruition of 20 years of thinking. Speaking about the process, Nolan told The New York Times:
“I wrote the script relatively quickly once I started writing, but I had a lot worked out beforehand.”
He continued:
“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. But I cracked the script to my satisfaction, and that gave me a lot of insight on how to distill a person’s life and how to view a person’s life in a thematic way, so that the film is more than the sum of its parts. So in some ways, the script, yes, it took me a few months, but it was really a culmination of 20 years of thinking.”
Nolan really wanted to make the biopic on Howard Hughes.
Watch The Aviator on Prime Video
