Leonard DiCaprio, first stumbled upon a Hughes biography seven years ago, and after director Michael Mann first agreed to collaborate, and then backed away feeling burned out on biopics, having just finished "The Insider" and "Ali", DeCaprio offerred the script for the 'Aviator' to revered director Martin Scorsese, with whom he'd just finished the much-troubled "Gangs of New York.

"I didn't know if Scorsese  would respond to it," recalls DiCaprio. "He has an intense fear of flying, and I knew that."

But Scorsese said yes and, as DiCaprio recalls, added, " 'I don't know anything about flying at all, and I'm petrified of it, but I didn't know anything about boxing and I did "Raging Bull," so … '

'Aviator' from Scorsese's view "Is an ancient Greek myth of a man who has everything in the world, who's king, and deep down his own worst enemy is himself, his pride, his ego, his greed."

This article gives an interesting insight into Howard Hughes, Scorsese, and DiCaprio,
and THAT's quite a trio to draw to!!!

Perhaps it's the nature of our media-obsessed times that one of the most famous men of the '30s and '40s — Howard Hughes — is being played by one of the most famous men of our day, Leonardo DiCaprio. In the two decades covered by "The Aviator," Hughes produced scads of films, directed the most expensive movie of his day, set aviation records for the fastest trip across the country and fastest trip around the world, launched Hughes Aircraft (now part of Raytheon Co.), built the airline TWA and battled a Senate investigation into his role as a war contractor.

He was Bill Gates, Buzz Aldrin and Jerry Bruckheimer rolled into one, with the sexual voraciousness of Wilt Chamberlain.

It's Hughes' carnal appetite that makes DiCaprio sound a little giddy. In his prime, the mogul, who died a bedsore-ridden, codeine-addicted recluse, romanced seemingly every pretty girl in Hollywood, including Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth.

That was one facet of his character that DiCaprio wanted to make sure got into the biopic of Hughes' life, directed by the revered Martin Scorsese. DiCaprio even added an improvised scene in which Hughes picks up a cigarette girl at a nightclub with the kind of callow, but not uncharming, droit du seigneur taken by the young, the handsome and the exceedingly rich.

"I wanted to make it abundantly clear that he was not just a ladies' man, but the fearless ladies' man. He was the Casanova, the swashbuckler of the 20th century, unmatched, unrivaled. Girl, you know it's true!" DiCaprio says, laughing. He's been picking desultorily at a chopped salad at Dan Tana's, the unpretentious Italian joint that happens to be a Hollywood stalwart, when he suddenly perks up. "There are people that are in his category, but no one matches up to Howard Hughes. It's the quality of the women, and the quantity."

He sounds almost awestruck.

"It awes any man," he clarifies. "He had girls stashed away in bungalows in Bel-Air. He had every gorgeous starlet, and if he wasn't with her, he'd probably rejected [her]." He leans back to theatrically dispense a can-you-believe-it fact, hair falling across his forehead. "The rumor was that he rejected Marilyn Monroe. Didn't like her feet."

Of course, DiCaprio, who happens to be young, handsome and exceedingly rich knows nothing — nothing — about chasing beautiful women. This reporter once observed DiCaprio and other luminaries such as Jack Nicholson cutting a swath through a party thrown by the Ford modeling agency, obviously there to enjoy the conversation.

DiCaprio acknowledges there are parallels to today's Hollywood, that magnetic pull between powerful men and the model-actress-whatevers.

Still, it's one thing to be interested, another to be pathological.

"I would never dream of doing something like that myself," he says. (He's been off-and-on dating the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen for the last five years.) "He could be relentless with women. He committed a huge portion of his life to bedding as many beautiful women as he could. His perseverance! He wouldn't let up, just like he wouldn't give up with his planes or movies or anything. A man obsessed."

He pauses, thinks. He likes how it sounds. "That's a great thing that I'm going to keep saying." DiCaprio is beginning the kickoff of a global publicity blitz to promote "The Aviator," which opens this week, and is making mental notes about the part of his rap that he can reuse. "They're going to ask me about him, and I'm going to say quite simply, 'a man obsessed.' It simplifies things."

DiCaprio sounds like a politician honing his message, but in a sense his persona has become his message — with the stunning success of "Titanic," the actor was transformed into an icon.

As is often the way of the very famous, DiCaprio is both affable and elusive. He is excitable and occasionally waggish when discussing Hughes and vague in discussing everything else. He's just turned 30, but he's still baby-faced and walks with the loping, slightly stooped grace of a teenager. He's wearing brown pants and a loose black sweater, although at one point he lifts up the sweater to rip out the label and reveals his Calvins in the process. Although it's lunchtime, he has that hazy just-woken-up look.

DiCaprio certainly didn't have to research Hughes' ambivalence toward the limelight.

Hughes' attitude was "Look at me! Look at me! Don't look at me! Don't look at me!" DiCaprio says, speaking in breathy bursts to convey the conflict between the need for attention and the need for privacy. "I'm just kidding," he adds almost reflexively. Actually he's not, but he's suddenly self-conscious about sounding too on-point about his own celebrity.

"I'm sure he loved all its advantages and detested all the disadvantages. He was very shrewd in knowing that the less he gave about himself the more people would want to know."

"Look at me sitting here," says DiCaprio. "Hughes would never sit and do an interview like this. Watch any Hughes footage or any interview. It's him talking about airplanes. He would not discuss anything else."

Part of DiCaprio's job is to sell movies, by offering choice glimpses of himself. Still, he also believes in not revealing too much, not for the usual celebrity-proffered reasons of privacy, etc., but because of a higher purpose. He explains: "It's a fundamental need to say I want people to believe me playing different characters."

Indeed, in some ways, the real DiCaprio is almost irrelevant because it will never compare to his mythic status.

Even in Hollywood there are gradations of fame, from those who merely sport publicists, to the rarified few such as DiCaprio and Tom Cruise whose decisions affect the fates of studios. The more iconic the star, the more likely their persona has fused with some strand of the national identity.

Cruise once embodied the striving '80s yuppie. In his post-"Titanic" glory, DiCaprio personified the youthful promise of the '90s, the go-go Clinton years, the Internet boom. His famous "Titanic" cry — "I'm the king of the world" — will no doubt be the most famous six words he ever utters.

"The Aviator" presents the perils of being King of the World.

While the film, which cost an estimated $100 million, highlights the glory days, it also depicts Hughes' slowly deteriorating mental state as he turns into a milk-swilling germaphobe with obsessive-compulsive disorder. There is a long sequence in which he locks himself into a screening room for a year and watches films naked and unbathed and collects bottles of his own urine, all neatly arranged in straight lines.

"I was really captured by his inability to stop at anything unless it was perfect in his own mind," says DiCaprio. "Being America's first zillionaire, he had all the means to do it. What's it like to have everything? The fact he had everything at his disposal, all the dreams in the world, and he probably led in the last years of his life one of the most lonely, sad existences that I've ever heard of."

Adds Scorsese, who took on the film at DiCaprio's request, "It's an ancient Greek myth of a man who has everything in the world, who's king, and deep down his own worst enemy is himself, his pride, his ego, his greed."

A passion for the project

The boy king of Hollywood has been the project's prime progenitor.

DiCaprio, a credited producer on the movie, first stumbled upon a Hughes biography seven years ago and broached the idea to director Michael Mann, with whom he'd wanted to work. John Logan ("Gladiator") was commissioned to write the script.

"Other than me, Leo is probably the only person on Earth who's read every draft — 15 — of the screenplay," Logan says. "His DNA is all over the screenplay."

But by the time it was done, Mann had finished "The Insider" and "Ali" and was tired of biopics, so DiCaprio gave the material to Scorsese with whom he'd just finished the much-troubled "Gangs of New York."

"I didn't know if he would respond to it," recalls DiCaprio. "He has an intense fear of flying, and I knew that."

But Scorsese said yes and, as DiCaprio recalls, added, " 'I don't know anything about flying at all, and I'm petrified of it, but I didn't know anything about boxing and I did "Raging Bull," so … '

"[Scorsese] has an inherent desire to portray characters in their own mental descent into their own personal hell," DiCaprio says, smiling, as if he has a private joke going on. "I know he likes to lock himself in screening rooms and watch movies over and over again. The screening room sequence was certainly something he read in the script and said, 'I know how to film that.' "

Fortunately for all involved, DiCaprio did no flying while making "The Aviator," as the film's insurance company was less than thrilled to have their biggest asset gallivanting through the skies in World War II-era airplanes. Also, Scorsese was able to channel his fear productively, as the film features a numbers of scenes where Hughes crashes airplanes — each fall a balletic and elegiac tumble from the sky.

In De Niro's footsteps

It's odd to think of the Scorsese-DiCaprio partnership, which is about to extend to a third film, "The Departed," in which DiCaprio plays an undercover cop in an Irish gang in modern Boston. For decades, through such seminal films as "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," Robert De Niro was the star of Scorsese's work, a dark scabrous spirit that embodied the director's fascination with the propulsive obsession that leads to self-destruction, with the transcendence that comes through agony.

For all his acclaim, De Niro isn't the most accessible of movie stars, too psychologically wrought and internal for easy digestion at the multiplex (unless he's spoofing himself), but he was the director's alter-ego, while DiCaprio, with his easy charm, has been ours, the audience's.

De Niro is often credited with discovering DiCaprio, plucking him out of the actors auditioning for 1993's "This Boy's Life." Scorsese heard about DiCaprio from De Niro, and "[De Niro] rarely tells me 'I want you to keep an eye on someone.' I looked at everything he did: 'Basketball Diaries'; 'Total Eclipse,' which was really courageous and a strong performance; 'Gilbert Grape' — I feel that he's the lead, the potential lead actor of his generation."

Scorsese references all quirkier pre-"Titanic" films; before DiCaprio was anointed a dreamboat, the young actor was nominated for an Oscar for playing a mentally disabled boy in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape."

In today's climate, a director can't make a $100-million epic with De Niro but can with DiCaprio. It was the young star's involvement that allowed Scorsese to finally film his dream project, "Gangs of New York," the megalith about the draft riots of 1860s New York that spawned a tumultuous production, tons of Oscar nominations and no Oscars. For all its pageantry, and glorious moments, it might be Scorsese's most conventional film, if his most commercially successful. DiCaprio seemed unable to churn up his character's requisite fury.

"The Aviator" went far more smoothly. It is Scorsese's strongest work since "Casino" and DiCaprio employs his brash boyishness to good effect in playing the youthful mogul. He can evince Hughes' genial self-absorption and his vulnerability. DiCaprio is already being discussed as an Oscar contender.

Although some 30 years separate Scorsese and DiCaprio, the pair say they share the same taste in characters, movies, art and music.

"I'm the same age as his father," says the director. "He played me music. Django Reinhardt. Louis Jordon. Ella Fitzgerald. Stuff my father bought me. A lot of it is in 'Raging Bull' and 'New York, New York.' He gives me new rap songs I should listen to. I give him old songs from the '50s. He's open to an overview of cinema history, movies from the '30s and '40s as opposed to someone who's only interested in cinema that reflects the marketplace at this point in time.

"He came to tell me, 'I saw "The Third Man." It's fantastic.' " Scorsese, who's a legendary film historian as well as a director, chuckles at DiCaprio's eager naiveté. "I know, I know."

"We fundamentally just get along. He hounds me with things. I hound him with things," says DiCaprio.

"Leo loves classic moviemaking," says Miramax Co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, who released "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator." "He's intrigued by Marty and looks up to him the way he looks up to Bob De Niro. I think Leo is an icon of his own generation. For him, learning comes from hanging out with Scorsese. If you hang out with Marty, you have to watch 20 silent movies on this film."

DiCaprio and Scorsese like meticulous process — "The Aviator" began with a long rehearsal period where Scorsese, DiCaprio and screenwriter Logan went over the script line by line, action by action, analyzing each scene.

DiCaprio works relatively infrequently, only five films since 1997's "Titanic." In part it's because he dreams of immortality. "A hundred years from now, I want to be able to say, 'See that one movie, that's a movie people still want to see,' " he says, candidly, adding, "I consciously don't work that much 'cause I love to prepare."

He could have spent 10 years researching Hughes, given the amount of documentation the aviator has inspired. The actor read widely, interviewed Hughes' friends and associates, talked to doctors and people who suffer from the repetitive tendencies that are the hallmark of those with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"What I started to learn from doctors, there's no real reason behind [OCD]. It's a primal fear inherent in you and clicks on," he explains. "We all have compulsive things we do to some degree, but people with OCD are unable to listen to the other side of the brain that gives you reason and says it's unnecessary to order those pencils 50 times in a row. You get stuck in that reptilian part of the brain where you need to organize and protect the home nest."

DiCaprio understands the tendencies. As a kid growing up in L.A., DiCaprio, the son of divorced bohemian parents (with whom he's still close) would walk to school but ran back a block if "I didn't step on a crack. One day, I said, 'This is ridiculous.' People with OCD aren't able to make that distinction."

For the movie, DiCaprio decided to revert to letting his obsessions flourish. "I wanted to encourage them."

DiCaprio off-screen would ritualistically step on certain cracks and gum stains, and rubbed the grain on his carpet so the nap would flow in one direction and be perfectly even. He ritualistically tapped objects.

"My makeup artist would say, 'He's coming to set … oh not yet…. We're tapping.' It turned into a running joke. Some of it hasn't rubbed off."

For all his research, DiCaprio admits that in the end "The Aviator" offers a vision of Hughes that is essentially the filmmakers' conceit. "You can't define this guy," says DiCaprio. "In some books he's like this horrid egomaniac, power-hungry bastard; in other books he's this shy, coy, sweet millionaire that doesn't take crap from anyone."

DiCaprio seems to fall down on the sunny side of Hughes, a conclusion shaped by his talks with Hughes' associates. "Everyone I met said he had a quiet charm. He had his quirks, but they genuinely liked the man."

That his Hughes is fundamentally decent seems reassuring to DiCaprio, perhaps because it reflects his upbeat nature, or the tendency of actors to fall in unconditional love with the characters they play, or the myth of Leonardo DiCaprio.

The perennial publicist arrives and waves her arms to draw the audience to an end. DiCaprio makes one last point about himself, and Hughes.

Just because they're both famous doesn't make them both perforce egomaniacs. He's not like Hughes, whose narcissistic drive led him to race planes, build empires and seduce legions of women. DiCaprio insists he's never battled his ego to such an extent.

"Not at all, to that amount," he says, as if even posing the question makes the interlocutor slightly batty. "I'm a seasoned pro at this thing called fame by now. I've been dealing with it since I was 18 years old. I know the most fundamental thing in the world is you can never become a jerk or believe the hype."

He's sounding heated and earnest in a defense-of-Mom-and-apple-pie kind of way. This is his mantra. Still, he's so self-conscious he can't help pointing out he already served up this avowal not to succumb to bad behavior to Vanity Fair.

He may be ambitious, but he insists he has no illusions about who he is when he goes to bed at night.

"You get that onslaught of people saying things and the attention … Then the movie goes on to video, and life goes back to normal and you go, 'That's right. I'm just an actor.' "

The high fliers
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