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Warren Beatty hasn’t directed a feature film since 1998’s Bulworth, so you could say his secretive, upcoming untitled Howard Hughes movie is being greeted with a tiny degree of anticipation. Very little is known about the pic, other than the fact that Beatty plays eccentric entrepreneur Howard Hughes and the ensemble cast is filled out by Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Alec Baldwin, and Annette Bening. Oh, and Beatty's been developing it for 40 years.

Collins previously told us that the film is essentially about “the trials and tribulations” of 1950s Hollywood, but beyond that she was tight lipped. So when Tommy sat down with Bening in anticipation of the release of her new film Danny Collins, he took the opportunity to ask the actress (and Beatty’s wife) about the Howard Hughes pic. Tommy asked if the film is coming out this year and Bening replied, “It’s coming out,” so we still don’t have a solidified time table, but the general thinking is that we’ll likely see the movie before 2015 is out.

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But Bening’s seen footage from the film, obviously, and she told us her impressions of what she’s seen thus far, and how much the film means to Beatty since he's been working on it for decades:

“It’s great… I do feel that and I get that I am biased but, what the hell, I’m biased. I think it’s great, and he has worked on this film for so long… If you know his work, that’s something he’s always done. He’s always taken great time because he cares so much, and I admire that enormously about him.”

Bening also revealed the central plot of the movie, which actually isn’t really about Howard Hughes at all:

“He made a story where there’s two young people, and it’s really a romance between them, and then he created this story around Howard Hughes. So he’s playing Howard Hughes, but there’s an entire story around Hughes that he has created. Two young people who come to Hollywood—like a lot of people do—to find their dream, and they meet Howard Hughes.”

That’s certainly an interesting angle from which to look at Hughes’ life, and it only serves to intrigue us even more about the pic. Whether the untitled film shows up at Cannes or one of the fall film festivals maybe even somewhere in 2016, fingers crossed it’ll have been worth the wait.

Additional reporting by Tommy Cook.