Warren Beatty is attending an early screening of his new film, “Rules Don’t Apply” — definitely not a Howard Hughes biopic, he makes clear, while discussing his connection to the famously reclusive industrialist and movie mogul.
“I never met him,” Beatty says, grinning, “and I met everybody.”
Fifteen years after his last film, the man affectionately known as “The Pro” is back behind and in front of the camera.
Beatty, 79, whose exploits on and off the screen made him a Hollywood legend, has finally finished the Howard Hughes film he has contemplated intermittently for 40 years.
The focus of the drama — co-written, directed, produced by and starring Beatty — has shifted over time. Its central characters are a Marla Mabrey, a Southern Baptist actress played by Lily Collins, one of two dozen young women Hughes has put up in bungalows for either starlet or romantic consideration, and her young Methodist driver Frank Forbes, also a Methodist, played by Alden Ehrenreich.
They’re both innocent, ambitious arrivals in Los Angeles hoping their unseen benefactor will give them a break.
The year is 1958, when Beatty — a Southern Baptist from Virginia — came to Hollywood, following his sister, Shirley MacLaine. “I got kind of lucky kind of fast when I came out here,” says Beatty, who was taken under the wing of Elia Kazan and cast in the star-making romantic drama “Splendor in the Grass” (1961).
Many doubted whether Beatty, a notorious fiddler and perfectionist known for bouts of indecision, would ever make the Hughes film for which he obtained the rights in the mid ’70s.
But not only is it finished; many who have seen it say it’s a snappy, vibrant film, carried by its young stars and memorable for its portrait of Hollywood power players and their pawns. Sex plays a significant role. “Rules Don’t Apply” will be released Nov. 23.
In an interview, Beatty says, “I felt it was time to make another movie and time to make a movie about a big subject — what I would call the comical and sometimes sad consequences of American sexual puritanism.
“That attitude — I don’t think it’s expired,” he continues. “We have to admit it’s made us the laughing stock of France, for instance, where the chief of state gets into some mischief, and his numbers go up. Here the opposite is true.”
There’s something fitting about one of Hollywood’s most renowned playboys making a movie about sexual repression. Before marrying Annette Benning, Beatty was linked to everyone from Diane Keaton to Madonna. Peter Biskind’s 2010 biography, “Star,” tried to estimate the number of women he’d slept with, coming up with 12,775 — a figure Beatty disputes.
He and Benning, who has a role in the film, have four nearly grown children. Of his 180-degree turn from bachelor to family man Beatty says, “The idea of divorce appalled me and still does.”
Family has been his primary interest in the years since his last film, the disappointing “Town & Country” (2001). “They’re more interesting than any movie,” he says.
The title “Rules Don’t Apply” is also well suited to Beatty, whose distinctly unconventional films include “Bonnie and Clyde” and the communist epic “Reds.” He made “Bonnie and Clyde” at a time when it was considered arrogant for, as he puts it, “a pretty boy in the movies” to produce a film.
Beatty was also unusually outspoken politically, and unafraid to use his celebrity for political influence. “I grew up … where there were societal rules … laid down by custom or religion,” he says. “I don’t know that I’m such a courageous rule-breaker. I’ve been very lucky. The words that might sum it up are: the access that early fame and fortune can bring one, if … alert. Rules will be changed. Rules will be broken.”
Beatty has been nominated 15 times for an Academy Award nominee, and won an Irving G. Thalberg Award in 2000. He hasn’t directed since his political satire “Bulworth” (1998).
When asked about his views on Donald Trump, he says anyone reading this article would already know his opinion.
Beatty understands that the movie business has changed since then. “The public seems to want to know what it’s going to get before they leave the house,” he says. “I think that sort of applies to fast food also.” He find other changes more heartening: “I would say that the biggest change the world is going through … is the liberation of the female,” he says.
Asked how it feels for him to finally be releasing his Hughes film, Beatty smiles. “Old,” he says.
