professional life spent orchestrating moving parts could trigger a fascination with planes. In Hughes, it was pathological. Robert Zemeckis, who helped create two of the queasiest plane crashes in cinema with both Cast Away and Flight, is less troubled. Asked in 2012 if he had any advice for nervous flyers, he replied: “Take some flying lessons.”

Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Photograph: AP/Miramax Films

But after spending half my life interviewing directors, I’ve lost count of the number who dislike flying. Lars von Trier is famously phobic, the stuntishness of once arriving at the Cannes festival in a camper van a response to a genuine problem. I met Wes Anderson in 1999 on his first press trip to Europe – a journey he had tomake on the QE2. And Scorsese? A persistently bad flyer, who based the scenes of addled mayhem in The Wolf of Wall Street on the time he took the Quaaludes prescribed to help him get on a plane.

Directing films is about control, and the more control the director likes – von Trier, Anderson and Scorsese, precision instruments all – the greater the unease with delegated judgement, made worse by an urge to storify each mid-air creak. The young Stanley Kubrick got his pilot’s licence, but later quit all forms of flying, darkly citing “compromised safety margins in commercial aviation”.

During my own exile from air travel, I met a woman whose husband could fly only with his eyes shut tight and on the condition no one spoke to him.