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While “Oppenheimer” has been promoted as the first Christopher Nolan biopic, this is not necessarily true. It’s only the director’s first biopic to hit the big screen. Decades ago, Nolan wrote the script for a biopic about pilot and entrepreneur Howard Hughes, but the project never took off because Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, beat him to it. Nolan said The Daily Beast In 2007, his biopic Hughes had the best screenplay he had written, and he even lined up Jim Carrey to star as Hughes. Nolan said Hughes is the role that Carrey was “born to play”.
A Nolan Howard Hughes movie never materialized, but learning how to distill the life of a famous American character into a movie script would pay off years later when it came time to write Oppenheimer.
“I have written [‘Oppenheimer] The script went relatively quickly once I started writing, but I had a lot of work beforehand,” Nolan said He recently told the New York Times. “Many years ago, I had written a script about the life of Howard Hughes that never got done because I wrote it right while Scorsese was making his own movie. But I broke down the script to my satisfaction, and that gave me a lot of insight into how to distill a person’s life and how to present a person’s life in an objective way, so that the film is more than the sum of its parts. So in some ways, the script, yes, it took a few months, but it was really the culmination of 20 years of thinking.”
Could Nolan try to dust off the Howard Hughes script off his shelf? It doesn’t seem likely, although he’s not one to discuss future business.
“While doing interviews and directing the movie, he always asks me, ‘Do you know what you’re going to do next?'” Nolan told the Times. And the answer is always the same. For me, I do one thing at a time and obsessively put it all in, and the movie isn’t over. Well, the way I like to put it, the audience finished the movie.”
One theme that always seems to revolve around Nolan when he’s getting ready to release a new work is James Bond. Nolan has always expressed interest in directing a James Bond film, so it’s only natural that he’d pop that question now during his Oppenheimer press tour.
“The influence of those films on my filmography is embarrassingly obvious. It would be a great privilege to do one,” Nolan said. Podcast “Happy Sad Confused” When asked about directing a Bond movie next. “At the same time, when you take on a character like that, you’re working with a certain set of limitations.”
Nolan continued, “It has to be the right moment in your creative life where you can express what you want to express and really delve into something within the proper constraints because you would never want to do something like that and do it wrong.” “You wouldn’t want to do a movie without being fully committed to what you bring to the table creatively. So as a writer, it’s all — it’s a complete package. You have to be really wanted and wanted in terms of realizing the totality of what you bring to the character. Other than that, I’m very happy to be the first to see what they’re doing.”
Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” opens in theaters July 21 from Universal Pictures.
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