Warren Beatty Confirms Return to Movies With 'Rules Don't Apply,' a Love Story in Which He'll Play Howard Hughes
Warren Beatty attends CinemaCon in Las Vegas on April 13, 2016 (Photo: Gabe Ginsberg/WireImage)
Hollywood legend Warren Beatty hasn’t acted in a feature film since 2001’s Town & Country, and he hasn’t directed one since 1998’s Bulworth—so it’s welcome news that the star has finally confirmed the persistent buzz that he’s written, directed, and co-starring in a new historical comedy/drama/romance revolving around eccentric 20th century tycoon Howard Hughes.
Speaking exclusively to EW’s Chris Nashawaty, Beatty reveals the film will be called Rules Don’t Apply, and that he’ll play Hughes. Unlike Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s big 2004 Hughes biopic The Aviator, the mogul is a supporting player in Beatty’s movie, a love story set in the late ‘50s about a devout small-town actress (Lily Collins) who comes under Hughes’ wing, even as she breaks her new benefactor’s rule–contract actresses don’t date his employees–by falling for her driver (Alden Ehrenreich, recently cast as the young Han Solo).
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“I’ve had the idea of making a movie about Howard Hughes in mind for a long time,” Beatty tells EW. “We never met, but I sometimes feel like I knew everybody who knew Howard and I never lost my curiosity about him. It’s just that I don’t run around doing movies all the time.”
Having spent the past 15-plus years focusing on his family, Beatty returns to a new digital world of moviemaking. Nonetheless, co-star Collins—who likens the experience of making the movie, which included a long rehearsal period with Ehrenreich at Beatty’s house, to “summer camp”—claims that the cinema icon had no trouble making the necessary adjustments: “When you’re as smart and creative as he is, it doesn’t matter how times have changed,” she says. “Great storytelling hasn’t changed.”
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Co-starring Beatty’s wife Annette Bening alongside Alec Baldwin, Haley Bennett, Candice Bergen, Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Steve Coogan, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Megan Hilty, Oliver Platt, and Martin Sheen, Rules Don’t Apply is scheduled to arrive in theaters on Nov. 11.
To read the full interview with Beatty, go to EW.com.
Warren Beatty flashback: Watch a scene opposite Faye Dunaway from 1967′s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’:
