Conversations with Scorsese (43 page)

The only thing I knew of Howard Hughes was his involvement in
Hell’s Angels,
and what a lot of people know of him today: that he was a very famous, very, very rich man who died holed up in a room somewhere, and looking kind of strange toward the end.

By the way, I didn’t think the dramatic scenes in
Hell’s Angels
were all that good.

RS:
They were awful. But the flying was great.

MS:
William K. Everson showed it in
16 millimeter at NYU, and I sneaked into his class to see it for the first time. Then I saw the restoration of it. It was amazing—especially the flying sequence.
The Outlaw
I didn’t like. But I liked some of Hughes’s other films, like
Scarface,
which he produced. I loved that film. Not as much as
Public Enemy,
though.

RS:
You couldn’t see
Scarface
for a long time. Hughes had it held back.

MS:
You couldn’t see it, right.

RS:
It’s a movie
Howard Hawks directed, but never much liked. He said to me it was not in his style. He said, “You know, I’m hanging cameras from the ceiling and all around. My style is eye-level camera, real simple cutting.”

MS:
But he has the long tracking shot in the beginning which is very, very good.

RS:
But, really, he wasn’t a big tracker.

MS:
No, but that really worked with the shadow. And then, of course, Lucia’s whistle, which we use in
The Departed—
a reference to that. And we put the Xs all over the bar, one for everybody who gets killed.

RS:
What do you mean, Xs?

MS:
There are Xs in practically every frame in
The Departed
to reference
Scarface.

RS:
Honestly, I didn’t notice.

MS:
We literally put Xs on the walls with the shadows, and the light, even when they salute at the end, the two hands sort of cross.

RS:
And why did you do that?

MS:
So that if people ever go back, they would have fun noticing the Xs. I mean, it was too much, we put too much in. But you didn’t notice. That’s a good thing.

RS:
Let’s go back to your initial response to “The Aviator.”

MS:
It took me twenty pages to realize that at the beginning it’s about Howard Hughes directing
Hell’s Angels.
By the time I finished reading it, I saw that it goes from 1927 to 1947, which means it covers just twenty years of his life. It doesn’t deal with his end, just elements of it. There are nervous breakdowns in the film that lead eventually to the big one at the end. And also four plane crashes—two of them in the film. And one car crash, which did a lot to his head. Then, too, it had a sense of the obsessive, which was important to me—the obsessive nature of his cleanliness, and how he got wrapped up in it.

But the main thing was this was a very vibrant, alive young man—aging over twenty years, going through hell, with more hell to go through when the film is over.

What I hadn’t understood, but which
John Logan’s script made clear, was how important he was in aviation. I didn’t understand what the XF-11 flight was like, or the H-1, or particularly, the nature of the Hercules, the giant plane he built and how he’s affected a lot that we do in our lives.

The script had an upbeat feeling about him, before the illness set in. I think what John was trying for was something that had the spirit of adventure—a hope of what this country could be. It’s about this spirit of the explorer—the spirit of
someone who kept testing the limits and pushing and pushing, because this was the country to do it in. You know, when they got to
California, there was no place else to go. That’s it. Everybody who wants to make it big goes to California, because it’s the last place, it’s the furthest west you could be. You’ve got to make it there, or not make it at all. So you have everybody going out to be stars in California. That’s part of America. And then the disease sets in.

Meet the press: Howard Hughes, on the edge of madness, after getting the Spruce Goose into the air at the end of
The Aviator.

RS:
But these are also businesses that oddballs could go into. They were for outsiders, people who couldn’t go to Wall Street and be in investment banking.

MS:
They were going to do it on their own, they were going to make movies.

RS:
Or build airplanes. Something visionary.

MS:
“Visionary” is the word. And the thing about it, too, was the idea of the sky being the last frontier. When you couldn’t go any further west, you go up in the sky. But then the sense of rapaciousness sets in. It’s something we’re dealing with in this century.

I thought the story was fascinating, and a good introduction to Hughes. There are other people who may want to do other aspects of his life, but this film deals with the young Hughes, who is not only flying, but making a picture about flying. It’s crazy—you know there were four men killed making that film? He was shooting from the cockpits of those little planes, almost scooters. I was in one of them, though of course I didn’t go up in it.

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.