Aviator Arte: At the end of the work, Scorsese almost retired!

Sometimes filming leaves the director so exhausted that he thinks he’s giving up on the job. It was the case of The Aviator that left Martin Scorsese so stressed that he said he was ready to turn off the camera! Explanations.

The Aviator tells the story of billionaire and adventurer Howard Hughes over 20 years. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio, this very real character has done everything in his life, from head of a film studio to producer to jet pilot ahead of his time and industrialist.

Very ambitious, this shoot suffered from excesses, for which Martin Scorsese paid out of his own pocket an amount estimated $500,000 But otherwise it goes without much problem. Except that Warner Bros. has a problem behind the scenes.

The Aviator is slated for a Christmas release, close enough to February’s Oscars to keep the film on the minds of Academy voters.

In addition, Warner’s December schedule is already jam-packed with one film a week with Blade Trinity (Dec. 8), Ocean’s Twelve (Dec. 10), Million Dollar Baby (Dec. 15), A Long Engagement Sunday (Dec. 17), and the Phantom of the Opera remake ( December 22).

That is why in April 2004Warner Bros. is turning to Miramax. It is the latter that will release the film under its own banner, which costs Warner 50% of the American income from the film. Miramax also acquired the film’s US television rights, and Warner retained the video-on-demand and physical releases.

The involvement of two different studios in the production and editing of Aviator drove Martin Scorsese to the brink of a nervous breakdown, echoing New York Times In 2020:

The last two weeks of editing and mixing The Aviator, I said to myself, “If this is how movies are supposed to be made, I’ll never make them again.” It’s like being in a bunker and being shot at from all sides. You start to realize that you don’t speak the same language anymore and you can’t make movies anymore.

Martin Scorsese would see his copy again with the next seven feature films, not including documentaries or pilots for television (Vinyl, Boardwalk Empire). However, over the years, he realizes that traditional financing is difficult, which leads him to the platform of two of them: The Irishman (Netflix) and Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple).

The latter, presented at the recent Cannes Film Festival, will hit our screens via Paramount France on October 18.