As director Christopher Nolan prepares to shoot The Dark Knight Rises this spring, new details have emerged via Vulture that he wants to direct a biopic on Howard Hughes soon after he wraps the final chapter of his Batman trilogy.
Christopher Nolan originally scrapped his plans for this biopic after Martin Scorsese beat him to the punch with the 2004 movie The Aviator. While The Aviator was based off the biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, written by Charles Higham, Christopher Nolan’s project will be taken from a different book titled Citizen Hughes: The Power, The Money and the Madness by Michael Drosnin.
This book delves into Howard Hughes’ later years, including his obsessive-compulsive disorder issues and his life as a recluse, an area that was covered in The Aviator, but not to a great extent. The book is based on thousands of Howard Hughes’s own hand-written memos, which were leaked after his office was burgled in 1975.
The current plan is for Christopher Nolan to shoot this untitled biopic in late 2012, with it to be released in 2014. This will be 10 years after The Aviator’s release. It isn’t clear if Christopher Nolan is adapting the screenplay himself. The project isn’t set up at a studio yet, although, if everything comes together, it is likely that the movie will be set up at Warner Bros.
However as with everything Nolan related, this info is very unofficial. He doesn’t like to say (or even 100% decide) what he’s doing next until he’s finished the movie he’s working on, so it’s more than possible that by the time The Dark Knight Rises he’ll have changed his mind. However a film concentartin on Hughes’ later year could be interesting, with the businessman locked up in his Vegas suite, still holding immense power and influence even as his obsessive compulsive demons overtook him.