He's still awaiting an Oscar for Best Director, but Martin Scorsese is back in the running thanks to The Aviator. Steve Pratt reports on the man who made a biopic about flying and Howard Hughes... even though he hates air travel.

HE'S often called the greatest living film-maker, but one who's never received his due with an Oscar for best director. That may change at next month's Academy Awards. The coveted gold-plated statuette may finally be handed over to Martin Scorsese for The Aviator, the story of aviation pioneer and Hollywood maverick Howard Hughes. That the director of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, Casino and Gangs Of New York hasn't won before is regarded by many as a crime.

Yet making The Aviator wasn't all plane sailing. The film came his way after Michael Mann, who'd been developing the project, decided that after Ali and The Insider, he didn't want to direct another bio-pic. There was a problem - Scorsese hates flying. It's said that the title page was removed when The Aviator script was sent to him in case it deterred him from reading it.

He readily admits he's not a comfortable flyer. "I'm very phobic about it, but I'm also drawn to it," he says. "I love the look of the planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel. While I still may not like it, the more I learn about airworthiness and that sort of thing."

Ask Scorsese a question and the answer resembles a lecture as he speaks rapidly and at length. The idea of tackling the Howard Hughes movie was daunting as there are so many facets to his story, stretching over 76 years. He was mainly aware of him through pictures, such as His Kind Of Woman and Susan Slept Here.

"So I knew his name and I knew him as a recluse, something to do with Vegas and ultimately an eccentric of some sort with strange stories coming out of many different places," he says.

"My father was an avid moviegoer, a working class guy in the garment district in the 1920s and 30s, and he loved Hell's Angels and Scarface. He'd taken me to see Public Enemy, which was my favourite gangster film.

What I'm saying is that I had a sense of Howard Hughes as a film-maker, but the two films my father kept talking about were hidden."

Scorsese had heard talk of a Hughes biopic since arriving in Hollywood in the early 1970s. Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma were among those linked to the idea. It wasn't until The Aviator script was given to him that Scorsese took any interest. He was hooked by the opening scene, depicting Hughes spending nearly $4 million and several years of his life shooting the First World War flying drama Hell's Angels. Clearly it appealed to the director in him. Scorsese liked the way the script didn't try to deal with his entire life, stopping before his inner self-destruction led to him retreating from the spotlight.

He could identify with Hughes' obsession with perfection in film-making. Hughes, left a family fortune through his father's oil drill bit business as a teenager, had all the money he needed to pour into his films.

Scorsese has had to struggle more, saying there's only one or two films where he's had all the financial support he needed.

"All the rest - particularly Mean Streets - I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days. Or The Last Temptation Of Christ, where we had a very low budget. It sounds a lot, but I think it was $6 million all-in in 1987. It would've been nice to have another million. I'm not asking for 20 or 26, but another million or so. I could have shot a few extra days.

"You do feel that, that it would've been nice, but I think it balances out. Having restrictions as a film-maker really does help you. I certainly would've like another ten million or so for Gangs Of New York. I could've shot more of that, that would've been nice."

Published: 06/01/2005