HUGHES' BRILLIANCE DICAPRIO STUDIED BILLIONAIRE'S OCD, DESCENT INTO MADNESS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Staff Writer

After going massively over schedule and budget on their last film together, the epic ``Gangs of New York,'' actor Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese did not choose to make anything easier for themselves.

Their second collaboration, the Howard Hughes biopic ``The Aviator,'' is arguably even more ambitious and complicated than the 1860s Manhattan epic. Focusing on a period from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, when the young Texas millionaire made his name as a maverick moviemaker, record-breaking pilot and airplane entrepreneur, celebrity ladies' man and the country's first billionaire, the project was clearly top-heavy with production challenges. And acting hurdles, too, as Hughes suffered from an undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder that turned him into a germophobic recluse during the last bizarre years of his life. ``The Aviator's'' script, credited to John Logan (``Gladiator''), charts the growing disruption the disease brought to Hughes' otherwise high-function life.

The film has been nominated for three Screen Actors Guild Awards and 11 Oscars.

``The biggest challenge for me was, what Howard Hughes did we want to portray?'' says 30-year-old DiCaprio, who has been developing the Hughes project for eight years, bringing it to Scorsese after Michael Mann declined to direct a third biopic following ``The Insider'' and ``Ali.'' ``There were so many different periods in his life that you could put up on screen. There were so many different sides of him.

``You could do older Howard, younger Howard, the playboy Howard, the aviator Howard, the producer Howard and all the different facets of the man himself,'' says DiCaprio, whose research included conversations with former Hughes business associates and with the likes of Jane Russell, star of his cleavage-centric Western ``The Outlaw,'' and actress Terry Moore, whose claim to have secretly married Hughes was eventually honored by the mogul's estate.

``The only reason I believe that this movie got made was because we had, at its center, a character that had everything in the world but throughout all of that was dealing with the onset of mental illness, as opposed to the aftermath.''

To get it right, however, DiCaprio had to delve into his own study of OCD. No stranger to madness himself - both the public kind he experienced after ``Titanic'' made him a worldwide love god and the genius kind such directors as Scorsese and James Cameron sometimes exhibit - he read every book he could on the subject.

But as with Hughes, that was just the start of DiCaprio's research.

``Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA taught me about OCD, and I got to spend three or four days with a patient. I found out what a daily routine for them was like and how you're constantly playing mind games with yourself.

``That screening-room sequence, the most frightening and daunting thing about it was that here you have this man who was, certainly, a technical genius,'' DiCaprio says of a scene in which Hughes holes up in an RKO viewing chamber for weeks. ``And he takes all that obsession and brainpower and energy and focuses it on how his soup cans are to be opened and makes memos that last for hours and hours about how his lunch is to be delivered.''

As for dealing with the kind of publicity that helped drive Hughes deeper into insanity, DiCaprio explains that he's learned reclusiveness is not the way to go. ``There was a conscious effort on my part during that period in my life to get away from my own image. But I had a rebellious attitude about it; I wasn't going to not go anywhere or not experience life or not do anything that I wanted to do because of that media attention.

``And people go through things in life that are phenomenally more traumatic than having people recognize you or take pictures of you. People often wonder how somebody who is famous deals with it. It's human nature to adapt to your environment and circumstances.''

For Scorsese, who acknowledges that his own movie madness and obsession with details have led to Hughes comparisons in the past, one of the ready-made project's most seductive elements was its classic Hollywood setting. He exulted as much in casting Hughes' on- and off-screen leading ladies - Cate Blanchett does a bravura Katharine Hepburn, Kate Beckinsale gets Ava Gardner's sexy tough love down to a kind of science, and No Doubt rocker Gwen Stefani embodies platinum princess Jean Harlow - as he did in re-creating the four-year production of Hughes' dogfight classic, ``Hell's Angels.''

There are also several key scenes set in a lavishly re-created Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a nail-biting staging of the Beverly Hills test-plane crash that almost killed Hughes, the climactic lone flight of the ``unflyable'' Spruce Goose in Long Beach Harbor, and subtle digital approximating of the bright, slightly off hues of early two-strip Technicolor and the saturated lushness of the three-strip process that replaced it.

``I really am fascinated by color,'' Scorsese, 62, says. ``When I was a kid, the movie theater was my refuge. And many of the films I saw were two- or three-strip Technicolor. Basically, I took the two-color thing all the way up to 1936, which is when three-strip Technicolor came in. To me, it was like the sense memory of that time. I imagined that world that way, especially Hollywood.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

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`Aviator' star Leonardo DiCaprio, left, has been developing the Hughes project for eight years.