Though he’s currently focused on the release of next month’s closing chapter in his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, fans are curious as to what director Christopher Nolan plans to do after hanging up the Batcape for good.  He was mentioned in connection with Warner Bros.’ The Twilight Zone reboot before Matt Reeves landed the job, but his named hasn’t been firmly connected to any other upcoming projects as of late.  He was long developing a film about Howard Hughes before Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator put Nolan’s project on hold, but last year we learned that the director might be reviving the film with an eye towards beginning production once he finished The Dark Knight Rises.

A new interview with the director now reveals that the Howard Hughes pic is essentially dead, but Nolan mentions his willingness to take on a franchise of a different sort in the future: James Bond.  Hit the jump for more.

Christopher Nolan has previously said that The Dark Knight Rises will be his last Batman film, so what comes next?  According to Vulture, Nolan will pursue a biopic about billionaire-filmmaker-engineer-nutjob Howard Hughes that he shelved when Martin Scorsese came out with The Aviator in 2004.  However, while Scorsese’s film drew heavily from Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life and focused on the first half of Hughes’ life, it didn’t really embrace how batshit-loony Hughes went in the latter half of his life.  Nolan’s film, will ride Hughes’ crazy-pants way-of-the-future and pull from Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness. Drosnin, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter, pulled from over 3,000 pages of Hughes’s own handwritten memoranda, which leaked after the billionaire’s office was burglarized in 1975.  I hope the burglars were specifically after the memoranda because as we all know, rich guy madness scribblings are worth their weight in gold.

Hit the jump for more on this exciting project.