The Aviator is a 2004 epic biographical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by John Logan. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner. The supporting cast includes John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda and Jude Law.

The film depicts the life of Howard Hughes, an aviation pioneer and director of the film Hell's Angels (1930). The film portrays his life from 1927 to 1947, when Hughes became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).

Filmed in Montreal, The Aviator was released in the United States on December 25, 2004, to positive reviews. It grossed $214 million on a budget of $110 million, thus emerging as a moderate commercial success at the box office.

The Aviator received a leading 11 nominations at the 77th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (for Scorsese), Best Actor (for DiCaprio), and Best Supporting Actor (for Alda), and won a leading 5 awards, including Best Supporting Actress (for Blanchett). At the 58th British Academy Film Awards, it received a leading 14 nominations, including Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role (for DiCaprio) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (for Alda), and won a leading 4 awards, including Best Film and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (for Blanchett). It received 6 nominations at the 62nd Golden Globe Awards, including Best Director and Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture (for Blanchett), and won a leading 3 awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama (for DiCaprio). The film also received 3 nominations at the 11th Screen Actors Guild Awards, including Outstanding Male Actor in a Leading Role (for DiCaprio), winning Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role (for Blanchett).

Plot In 1913 Houston, eight-year-old Howard Hughes's mother gives him a bath and teaches him to spell "quarantine", warning him about the recent cholera outbreak. Fourteen years later, in 1927, he begins to direct his film Hell's Angels, and hires Noah Dietrich to manage the day-to-day operations of his business empire.

After the release of The Jazz Singer (1927), the first partially talking film, Hughes becomes obsessed with shooting his film realistically, and decides to convert the movie to a sound film. Despite the film being a hit, Hughes remains unsatisfied with the result and orders it to be recut after its Hollywood premiere. He becomes romantically involved with actress Katharine Hepburn, who helps to ease the symptoms of his worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and germaphobia.

In 1935, Hughes test-flies the H-1 Racer, pushing it to a new speed record despite having to crash-land into a beet field when the aircraft runs out of fuel. Three years later, he flies around the world in four days, breaking the world record. He subsequently purchases majority interest in Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA).

Juan Trippe, company rival and chairman of Pan Am, asks his crony, Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, to introduce the Community Airline Bill, which would give Pan Am exclusivity on international air travel. Hepburn grows tired of Hughes's eccentricity and workaholism, and leaves him for fellow actor Spencer Tracy. Hughes quickly finds a new love interest with 15-year-old Faith Domergue, and later actress Ava Gardner. However, he still has feelings for Hepburn, and bribes a reporter to keep reports about her affair with the married Tracy out of the press.

In the mid-1940s, Hughes contracts two projects with the Army Air Forces, one for a spy aircraft, and another for a troop transport unit for use in World War II.

In 1946, with the H-4 Hercules flying boat still in construction, Hughes finishes the XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft and takes it for a test flight. However, one of the engines fails midflight; he crashes in Beverly Hills and is severely injured, but miraculously survives. The army cancels its order for the H-4 Hercules, although Hughes still continues the development with his own money. Dietrich informs Hughes that he must choose between funding the airlines or his flying boat. Hughes orders Dietrich to mortgage the TWA assets so he can continue the development.

By 1947, his OCD worsens and Hughes becomes increasingly paranoid, planting microphones and tapping Gardner's phone lines to keep track of her, until she kicks him out of her house. The FBI searches his home for incriminating evidence of war profiteering, searching through his possessions.

Brewster privately offers to drop the charges if Hughes sells TWA to Trippe, but Hughes refuses. Hughes's OCD symptoms become extreme, and he retreats into an isolated "germ-free zone" for three months. Trippe has Brewster summon him for a Senate investigation, certain that Hughes will not show up. Gardner visits him and personally grooms and dresses him in preparation for the hearing.

An invigorated Hughes defends himself against Brewster's charges and accuses the Senator of taking bribes from Trippe. He concludes by announcing that he has committed to completing the H-4 aircraft, and that he will leave the country if he cannot get it to fly. Brewster's bill is promptly defeated.

After successfully flying the aircraft, Hughes speaks with Dietrich and his engineer Glenn Odekirk about a new jetliner for TWA. However, he begins hallucinating and has a panic attack. As Odekirk hides him in a restroom while Dietrich fetches a doctor, Hughes begins to have flashbacks of his childhood, his love for aviation and his ambition for success, compulsively repeating the phrase, "the way of the future".

Cast

Production Development Warren Beatty planned to direct and star in a Howard Hughes biopic in the early 1970s. He co-wrote the script with Bo Goldman after a proposed collaboration with Paul Schrader fell through. Goldman wrote his own script, Melvin and Howard, which depicted Hughes's possible relationship with Melvin Dummar. Beatty's thoughts regularly returned to the project over the years, and in 1990, he approached Steven Spielberg to direct Goldman's script. Beatty's Hughes biopic was eventually released under the title Rules Don't Apply in 2016. Charles Evans Jr. purchased the film rights for Howard Hughes: The Untold Story () in 1993. Evans secured financing from New Regency Productions, but development stalled.Hughes, p.144-147

The Aviator was a joint production between Warner Bros. Pictures, which handled Latin American and Canadian distribution, and Disney, which released the film internationally under its Miramax Films banner in the United States and the United Kingdom. Disney previously developed a Hughes biopic with director Brian De Palma and actor Nicolas Cage between 1997 and 1998. Titled Mr. Hughes, the film would have starred Cage in the dual roles of both Hughes and Clifford Irving. It was conceived when De Palma and Cage were working on Snake Eyes with writer David Koepp. Universal Pictures joined the competition in March 1998 when it purchased the film rights to Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes (), written by Donald Barlett and James Steele.

The Hughes brothers were going to direct Johnny Depp as Howard Hughes, based on a script by Terry Hayes. Universal canceled it when they decided they did not want to fast-track development to compete with Disney. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, director Miloš Forman was in talks to direct a film about the early life of Hughes with Edward Norton as Hughes. In 2001, another version was announced to be produced and directed by William Friedkin, who intended to make a three-hour film about Hughes based on the book Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters by Richard Hack.

In a 2002 report from Variety, it was revealed that Norman Jewison had been developing a Hughes biopic based on Terry Moore's autobiography The Beauty and the Billionaire for "more than a year" and was going to meet with John Travolta for the role. Also in the early 2000s, director Christopher Nolan had developed a film about Hughes, also based on Hack's biography. All other versions were shelved when Martin Scorsese came aboard to direct The Aviator, although Nolan would return to his Howard Hughes project after completing The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, using the book Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness by Michael Drosnin as the source. Nolan wrote the script, which followed the darker and final years of Hughes's life. Nolan again, shelved the project when Warren Beatty was developing his long-awaited Hughes film. It was reported that Nolan's version would have starred Jim Carrey as Hughes.

Disney restarted development on a new Howard Hughes biopic in June 1999, hiring Michael Mann to direct Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Howard Hughes, based on a script by John Logan. The studio put it on hold again following the disappointing box-office performance of Mann's critically acclaimed The Insider. New Line Cinema picked it up in turnaround almost immediately, with Mann planning to direct after finishing Ali. Mann was eventually replaced by Scorsese, who had worked with DiCaprio on Gangs of New York. Scorsese later said that he "grossly misjudged the budget". Angelina Jolie was approached by the studios to have a role in the film, but she turned it down after learning executive producer Harvey Weinstein was involved with the film.

Hughes suffered from obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), most notably an obsession with germs and cleanliness. DiCaprio suffered from a mild version of the disorder as a child, which returned when filming the movie. Scorsese and DiCaprio worked closely with Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz of UCLA to portray the most accurate depiction of OCD. The filmmakers had to focus on the previous accounts of Hughes's behaviors, as well as the time period; when Hughes was suffering from the disorder, there was no psychiatric definition for what ailed him. Instead of receiving proper treatment, Hughes was forced to hide his stigmatized compulsions; his disorder began to conflict with everyday functioning.

DiCaprio dedicated hundreds of hours of work to portray Hughes's unique case of OCD onscreen. Apart from doing his research on Hughes, DiCaprio met with people suffering from OCD. In particular, he focused on how some individuals would compulsively and repeatedly wash their hands, inspiring the scene in which his hand starts to bleed as he scrubs it in the bathroom. The character arc of Howard Hughes was a drastic one: from the height of his career to the appearance of his compulsions, and eventually, to him sitting naked in a screening room, refusing to leave and repeating "the way of the future".Kinsey, Beck. "The Affliction of Howard Hughes: OCD – Aviator – Martin Scorsese – Leonardo DiCaprio" January 2014 via youtube.com. Retrieved October 22, 2014.

Cinematography

In an article for the American Cinematographer, John Pavlus wrote, "The film boasts an ambitious fusion of period lighting techniques, extensive effects sequences and a digital re-creation of two extinct cinema color processes: two-color and three-strip Technicolor." For the first 52 minutes of the film, scenes appear in shades of only red and cyan; green objects are rendered as blue. According to Scorsese, this was done to emulate the look of early bipack color films, in particular the Multicolor process, which Hughes owned, emulating the available technology of the era. Similarly, many of the scenes depicting events occurring after 1935 are treated to emulate the saturated appearance of three-strip Technicolor. Other scenes were stock footage colorized and are incorporated into the film. The color effects were created by Legend Films.

Production design