Howard Hughes fascinates DiCaprio

LOS ANGELES — Leonardo DiCaprio likes to think he and buddy Martin Scorsese share at least some of the obsessive fixations of Howard Hughes, the subject of their latest collaboration, "The Aviator":

• Living through a mammoth project when it looks like it might capsize, as DiCaprio did with "Titanic," which went on to become the biggest modern blockbuster.

• Becoming so engrossed in a story it occupies years of your life and requires a massive resurrection of another era, as Scorsese did with "Gangs of New York," which took 25 years to develop and a colossal construction job to re-create 19th century Manhattan.

"The Aviator" screenplay hooked them from the start, with an early sequence detailing Hughes' fanatical devotion to his World War I film "Hell's Angels." Using his own money, Hughes spent $4 million on the 1930 film, at the time the biggest movie budget ever, and reshot it for sound after deciding the silent era was finished.

"I think Marty and I can both relate to that; when we read the script, we both immediately read 'Hell's Angels, year three.' We were like, wow, we know what that's like, being a part of an epic that just goes on and on and on," DiCaprio said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Persevering against all the odds and trying to make the best film, being a perfectionist, trying to make the story the best it can be.

"I certainly can't imagine taking things to the level Hughes did in his life. It's too exhausting. The man led 20 different lifetimes in one life."

"The Aviator" casts DiCaprio as Hughes during his scrappy years from the late 1920s to late 1940s, when he fought the Hollywood establishment and pushed boundaries on sex and violence in film, dated parades of starlets and oversaw creation of the world's biggest and fastest planes.

Cate Blanchett co-stars as Katharine Hepburn, whom Hughes dated for three years. Kate Beckinsale plays Ava Gardner, another of his longtime companions.

The film hints at the Hughes of later years, the cloistered multimillionaire with long hair and fingernails, terrified of germs and locked in a hotel room surrounded by tissue boxes.

It's the image of the freakish recluse that DiCaprio, 30, grew up with when it came to Hughes, who died in 1976. Then about eight years ago, DiCaprio read a biography of Hughes and became fascinated with the scope of his achievements and the conflict between his public image as a playboy and daredevil, and his private life as a man increasingly paralyzed by phobias.