| Leonardo Di Caprio has taken on many fascinating characters in his young career. From real life impersonator Frank Abagnale to Shakespeare’s Romeo, a fictional passenger on the Titanic to a mentally challenged teenager, DiCaprio has always taken risks. Now he plays one of the most eccentric characters of pop culture, Howard Hughes, in the biopic The Aviator.
“As an actor, you’re constantly searching for that great character,” DiCaprio said. “Being a history buff and learning about people in our past and amazing things that they’ve done, I came across a book of Howard Hughes and he was set up basically as like the most multi-dimensional character I could ever come across. Often, people have tried to define him in biographies. No one seems to be able to categorize him. He was one of the most complicated men of the last century. And so I got this book, brought it to Michael Mann and [screenwriter] John Logan came onboard and really came up with the concept of saying, ‘You can do ten different movies about Howard Hughes. Let’s focus on his younger years. Let’s watch his initial descent into madness, but meanwhile have the backdrop of early Hollywood, these daring pioneers in the world of aviation that were like astronauts that went out and risked their lives to further the cause of aviation. [He was] the first American billionaire who had all the resources in the world but was somehow unable to find any sense of peace or happiness.” It’s that great see-saw act in the movie that goes on. On one side, he’s having all the successes in the world and on the other side the tiny microbes and germs are the things that are taking him downwards because of his OCD and being a germaphobe.”
Since research materials raised questions of accurate historical perspectives, DiCaprio went to many different sources for his interpretation of Hughes. “The real research began after we committed to the movie, Marty [Scorsese] and I. It was a year of preparation. It was not only those marathon sessions with John Logan and Scorsese but I got to meet a couple of people who actually worked with Howard, who knew Howard. Jane Russell, I drove up north to spend a day with her and talk about Howard and Terry Moore, his ex-wife, she provided a lot of information about him. When you read a script and it says in the script ‘he has obsessive compulsive disorder’ and then you read two pages of a man repeating the same
line over and over again - not that it’s easy for a writer to write that because he has his own thought process - but when you’re an actor and reading that you say, ‘How in the hell am I gonna say this? What is the driving force behind repeating something twenty times in a row and why the hell is he doing it?’ So that brought me to work with Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA who is the leading physician on obsessive compulsive disorder and treating it in a non-medicated fashion. He really explained to me what OCD is and the brain mechanism that goes into it and the sort of faulty gear shift, the sticky gear shift that happens when your mind obsesses on one thing and you don’t listen to the other part of your brain that tells
you you’re being ridiculous. So, I worked a lot with him and a patient of his. I spent a few days with him, living around him and talking to him and really trying to find out why he had to repeat or do things obsessively. Then, reading every possible book I could on him and his life.”
The film traces not only Hughes’ accomplishments, but his many romantic interests. An icon of the gossip media himself, DiCaprio reflected on what drew the celebrities of the ‘40s to Hughes. “With Howard, it’s an interesting dynamic because I honestly feel that as much as he had love and adoration for these women and genuinely cared for them, he kind of looked at them like airplanes. He was a technical genius and
obsessed with finding the new, faster, bigger airplane and that was simultaneous with women. He was constantly finding the new hotter female to go out with. It all related back to him being orphaned at a very young age and sort of having this empty hole in his soul that, I think, he was always trying to fill with new, more exciting things in his life. He ended up, obviously, not a very happy person. I don’t know if he was thinking about whether, historically, he was going to become a legend. I’m sure he had that sort of cat and mouse things going on in his mind where he wanted to be famous but it was more like, ‘Look at me! Look at me! No, don’t look at me.’”
All that said, no one film can totally capture the life of a man as complicated as Howard Hughes. The Aviator only tries to portray a portion of Hughes’ life. “Like I said, there is so much information. There’s the whole later years of Howard’s life which is a film in its own right anyway. But the reason this film was made, and I think the first true distinctive film on Howard Hughes was possible because of focusing on his younger years and being able to show not only the growing up of this man in this time period, but our country, the state of our country and what kind of people were around in the beginning of early Hollywood and the attitudes of people. “
The Aviator opens Friday in select cities and wide on Christmas Day.
By: Fred Topel |
