Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus never manifested. You will be surprised to know that the film was supposed to feature Jim Carrey in the lead role.
It is needless to say that Christopher Nolan is a veteran filmmaker. His widely considered magnum opus isn’t even his highest-grossing film. However, we are not talking about Inception when we say that Christopher Nolan hasn’t made his best film yet as, of course, you very well know that the film is a widely watched 2010 blockbuster.
Christopher Nolan never made his best film, and there is a reason behind it.
After Nolan was done with Al Pacino starrer “Insomnia” (a film which introduced him to the studio Warner Bros. and gave the latter worldwide success), Nolan began working on a biographical flick based on the life of Howard Hughes.
In fact, Nolan had made some serious progress in the pre-production, and “The Mask” actor Jim Carrey was all set to star in the film. Nolan then later explained that Howard Hughes was a role that he thought the “Bruce Almighty” actor was destined to play.
Nolan did go on record while speaking with The Daily Beast that he had written the script for the film, and it was the “best script” he had ever written. Yes, the guy who has written masterpieces like Inception, The Dark Knight, and Dunkirk said that the screenplay for “Howard Hughes” biography was his best work. He added in his interview with The Daily Beast that he had quite a wonderful time writing it.
However, Nolan’s vision of Howard Hughes never manifested on screen because the film never went into productions as he came to realize that another veteran director Martin Scorsese is busy making his own Howard Hughes film (which we now call “The Aviator”) starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the leading role.
It was not Nolan who had scrapped the movie, just in case you are thinking in that way.
The director revealed during his promotional campaigns for his film “Dunkirk” that he is still in favor of making his Howard Hughes film, but he hasn’t heard from Warner Bros. regarding it since then.
In 2017, Nolan had expressed his desire to make a film on Howard Hughes to Deadline.
In case you didn’t know, Howard Hughes was one of the most financially successful men of his time. However, he died alone in a hotel room, and his physical state was in such a dire condition that the FBI had to use his fingerprints to identify that the dead body was really his. While Martin Scorsese’s film was based on a book written by Charles Higham and mainly focused on the aviator’s life from the year 1927 to 1947, Nolan’s vision was planned to shed some light on the chaotic and depressing years of his life, which sort of suited his “Memento” mode of storytelling.
It looks like Nolan already has a handful of projects in his bag, but it would be interesting to see what he had written for Howard Hughes and especially how it would have put Jim Carrey at the center of everything.
You can imagine that Nolan now does not have a lot of grudges because when he was denied the opportunity to make the film, he was immediately offered a chance to revive the character of Batman for the DC studio.
Now, we know that rest has become history since then.
