Ron Howard & Brian Grazer

Ron Howard and Brian Grazer met in the early ’80s. Howard had already had a successful acting career, which started when he was a child. He came to prominence when he was cast as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and then as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. Grazer was a producer at Paramount. They became friends and worked together on the film Night Shift, followed by their first big hit, Splash, which Howard directed. They then founded Imagine Entertainment and formed a professional partnership. They share a penchant for stories about individuals overcoming obstacles and leveraging their limits to achieve success. Together they have made some of the most memorable, beloved and critically acclaimed feature films of our time: Cocoon, Backdraft, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind (which won Academy Awards for best picture and best director, among others), The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon and many more.

Their love of storytelling led them to pursue TV projects as well, most notably 24, Friday Night Lights, Arrested Development, Parenthood and Empire, among others.

Recently, they ventured into the documentary space and joined forces with National Geographic Channel to produce Breakthrough. The six-part series—renewed for a second season—focused on scientific explorers working on cutting-edge projects in fields such as energy, aging, the brain, pandemics, genetic engineering and the world’s water shortage.

Howard and Grazer are also collaborating with National Geographic on the six-part miniseries MARS, an ambitious TV adventure that combines scripted drama and documentary footage. The drama tells the story of a group of scientists who reach Mars and colonize it. This story is intercut with interviews with leading scientists and experts involved in the quest to reach the Red Planet, including Neil deGrasse Tyson as well as Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has been designing, manufacturing and launching spacecraft and servicing the International Space Station with the ultimate goal of making it possible for people to live on other planets.

Beyond a like-minded approach to storytelling, Grazer and Howard share an inquisitive spirit and an ongoing desire to learn. Grazer, in fact, released a book in 2015 titled A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. In it, he tells of his ongoing passion for meeting people from all walks of life and sitting down with them to have what he calls “curiosity conversations.” Over the course of nearly four decades, he has tracked down and talked to Jonas Salk, Henry Kissinger, Carlos Slim, Condoleezza Rice, Steve Jobs, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Carl Sagan and dozens of others, including Elon Musk.

Howard and Grazer talk to World Screen about MARS, their relationship with National Geographic, the creative freedom they have found working in television and what it takes to make movies today.

WS: How did you become involved in MARS? Was it perhaps the result of a “curiosity conversation” with Elon Musk?
GRAZER: It was one of these things that sort of happened in 24 hours. I had met Elon Musk years and years ago in one of these curiosity conversations. Then Justin Wilkes, [the president of entertainment] at RadicalMedia, which is a company Ron and I worked with many times because they are really good at executing high-quality material, came to us and said, Would you be interested in doing six hours on Mars? He said they’d talked to Elon Musk. I thought, Well, I know Elon Musk! I then tell Ron. Ron goes, Mars, that’s interesting! Ron gets excited about things, but it’s infrequent! But he got excited about Mars and the idea of Elon Musk being a validator of the subject. This all happened on a Thursday, and that Friday I was having lunch with Peter Rice, the chairman and CEO of Fox Networks Group. We’re friends and I never pitch things to him, but I thought, why not? This could be something he loves. So I say, “We have the opportunity to do a limited series that could be pretty awesome about Mars. Elon’s involved and so is Ron. What do you think?” And he goes, I love it! I want to do it. And I go, OK, we’ll do it with you. It just came down like that.

WS: Was that the easiest pitch you ever had?
GRAZER: I cannot remember a pitch that was easier than that!
HOWARD: Then there were a couple of critical creative steps that came out of the initial conversations because Elon, who is very supportive, was saying, I don’t want this to focus on me or even on SpaceX, although clearly, our mandate is that we want to go to Mars. It was set up that I would have a conversation with Elon to give him some more specifics. Before we did that, a couple of really important ideas came to the forefront. One was that we wouldn’t just do the story of going to Mars; that’s a journey that audiences are familiar with. But instead we would go further—and this is also based on reading Stephen Petranek’s book How We’ll Live on Mars and talking with Steve—and the idea became, Let’s understand what it would be like to get to Mars. Let’s understand what it would be to colonize it. And that can be [done with] scripted material. We’re going to research heavily, understand what the experts today believe it will take to go to Mars and colonize it. Let’s break that down and dramatize that and intercut that with this deep dive into not only Elon Musk and SpaceX but also a number of other groups, many through NASA, that are dedicating themselves to this notion that the time has come, and we feel there is a tipping point right now.

So I went back to Elon and I said, Of course we’d like SpaceX’s cooperation, we’d love to interview you. I told him we were going to interview a number of other experts in the area. We talked about Steve Petranek’s book, which he knew, of course. But I said this was not going to be a [series that asks whether] it’s possible to go to Mars. It presumes that we went and shows what was going on to make that possible, and what it might look like for those first intrepid pioneers. Elon loved it. And then SpaceX’s cooperation and his involvement became more cemented, but he loved the creative approach, as do I. It’s proven to be a really exciting project, and the National Geographic people have been brilliant in their support and their creative ambition for it.
GRAZER: This is a bit of a digression, but Ron happened to not be in L.A. for a couple of weeks, and I was able to go to one of the SpaceX launches with Elon. We got to T-minus seven [seconds] and they had to call it off because there was a lightning storm in the sky. But it was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had. When you’re at SpaceX and there’s a launch, there’s a sort of mission control room encapsulated in the building where all of the workers work. So you’ve got the entire food chain of about 1,000 people who are making and engineering these rockets, and they all have their faces and hands on the glass of mission control, watching what’s going on. I was there, and it’s so emotional because it’s the unification of everything that’s going on. It’s amazing, a group of people that are dedicated and care. And their emotions are magnetized to the control room where Elon is sitting, and it’s powerful. When you are in the crowd, they start saying stuff in a language that you don’t even understand! I’m going, What are you guys talking about? It’s English, but what is it? It’s a profound experience.

WS: That reminds me of the excitement of all the Apollo missions, which of course you have offered in various filmed forms. But I will never forget when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module on the moon.
HOWARD: Oh yeah, I remember that vividly. It remains a highlight of my life. I had nothing to do with it, but just the fact that human beings could achieve that is something that has stayed with me forever. It’s been great to delve deeper into that space exploration, which I continue to believe in and support.

WS: Was there anything from Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon or Breakthrough about dealing with scientific topics that you were able to apply to MARS?
HOWARD: Absolutely.
GRAZER: Apollo 13 was the hardest movie you could imagine to get done, but Ron had figured out a way to create an architecture that was a progenitor of an architecture that could work for something like MARS. Ron should speak to it, but he was able to isolate three arenas so that [the viewer] didn’t feel complete claustrophobia being only in a space capsule. He was able to create a sense of humanity, as well as a thriller dimension and a sense of suspense that you wouldn’t imagine could happen.
HOWARD: In trying to understand the facts and delve into the excitement and the adventure of the Apollo mission, I began to realize that there was this very human story, this yearning to go and to explore, but also a support system [behind everything]. In the space program, what you have are the astronauts who are out there risking their lives, but you also have people with this huge emotional investment in the achievement. And then, of course, you have the loved ones and the family members. And all of these adventure stories we certainly have applied to the scripted components of the MARS story.

But it’s not even just Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon, which deal directly with space. It’s also A Beautiful Mind, it’s Rush, it’s American Gangster, which are based on real characters and real events. So we have come to appreciate the way that truth can be depicted and dramatized and the way these themes can come to the forefront. So I think Apollo 13 was the beginning of Brian and me beginning to appreciate and understand how to find that human connection so that a story can entertain and reach you on a thematic and emotional level, but also intellectually be true to the subject matter and be informative. It’s been fun to work on all these projects, and at a documentary level, we did apply that to Breakthrough.

WS: In the episode of Breakthrough, “The Age of Aging,” that you directed, I was so taken by the little old lady who was facing surgery and then decided not to have it because it was too risky. She pulled me in and made the scientific part, which wasn’t too complicated to understand, all the more relatable because I saw it through her experience.
HOWARD: Well, thank you, and again, in a documentary you can’t script these things, you have to go out searching. But one of the things we were looking for was that human connection. In some of the Breakthrough episodes, it’s easier to find than in others, because you are limited by where your cameras go and what you can capture. But that idea exists in many of the other episodes, and we continue to encourage it for the second season. It’s all about the heroism, the commitment and the human experience at the epicenter of those acts of creation and scientific discovery, which take a lot of courage and can be emotionally powerful.

WS: Will viewers also be able to have an emotional connection in MARS? Is it through the twin girls’ eyes that we will see the story?
HOWARD: It’s part documentary and part dramatization, but yes, these twin girls are central. Both are scientists and engineers; one is an astronaut who goes to Mars, and one’s a mission controller and a flight director. But all of the characters are fleshed out and developed enough that you’ll have an emotional investment in their commitments, their journeys and the adventures that they experience. All of them will reflect details, concepts and ideas that are being explored and tested today. So we are going to see both sides: what the experts anticipate today, and what it may well be like for those first pioneers.

WS: You are also both involved in the upcoming series Genius, which will be the first scripted series for National Geographic Channel.
GRAZER: We had a script on Albert Einstein that was submitted to our company to be conceived as a feature movie.
HOWARD: And it was based on Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.
GRAZER: Make sure to say that, he likes that! Walter wrote this very dense book that goes through the life of Albert Einstein when he was in Germany, when he had to flee Germany and when he came to America and [faced] this intense pressure. [Most] people don’t know that about Albert Einstein. We all essentially just grasp the iconic images of Einstein at an older age, and, of course, the profound revelatory things he did in science. But this [book] actually gives you a sense of who he was, what he was like, how he lived and what it was like getting out of Germany and getting into America—what the feeling of that was in every possible way. Ron and I gravitated toward that immediately, but we thought because we do television, it made much more sense to do it as a ten-part limited series. We were able to tell our partners that that was the way we wanted to approach it. Then we thought it should be under the umbrella of a bigger subject—genius itself. That is such a powerful lightning rod, in a sense, because it’s the perfect series for National Geographic. We are all fascinated with the superpower of genius. And we are all fascinated by what constitutes genius, and Einstein is the perfect kickoff subject for that. That’s how it evolved.
HOWARD: Courteney Monroe [CEO of National Geographic Global Networks] has been working toward creating more scripted content.
GRAZER: We’re doing Breakthrough and MARS with Courteney. We’re doing Genius, and we are in talks about doing a show on the Shuttle missions, too. Peter Rice gave that to us, and we’re finding a way of synthesizing those missions into the more meaningful ones and composite characters to do what we did with From the Earth to the Moon for the Shuttle. Courteney is really good. She’s extremely decisive, and she has a unique skill as an executive for knowing what subjects pop, what things will work for the National Geographic audience but also are in our culture today. Being able to connect those two dots is her brilliance.

WS: You’ve been involved in numerous scripted TV series, including 24, 24: Legacy, Empire, Arrested Development and Parenthood. There is a lot of feature-film talent that is moving to television. What creative opportunities does TV offer that are different from what film offers?
HOWARD: Television is broadening the possibilities of narrative storytelling. It’s about developing characters. Television is becoming more novelistic in a deep, profound way. So great writers, great actors, great directors and pure storytelling are gravitating toward the medium, and audiences are proving that they love it. It’s another incredibly exciting outlet. Over the years I’ve looked at a number of scripts for features on Albert Einstein, and none of them felt like they belonged in that format. But it’s fantastic the way we are able to explore his life in the ten hours that we’re going to have with National Geographic. It’s a revolution. It’s an evolution of the medium that is exciting for everybody.

WS: I imagine it’s always been difficult to get a feature film made. Is it more so today because of the tendency toward sequels and remakes, or if you have a great idea, can a movie still get made?
GRAZER: Movies get made purely out of forces of physics itself: just energy and focus. So you can always get something made. What studios don’t want to do is make the movies in the middle—character-driven, purposeful dramas like Apollo 13, or even The King’s Speech, which we didn’t do. There are an endless number of amazing Oscar-winning movies that the studios don’t really push for. The science of their economic paradigms have somehow [convinced the studios] that they should just make either big tentpole movies that are $120- or $150-million movies, or $20-million movies that are just high-concept comedies.

But there are a lot of great filmmakers who want to make the movies in the middle, the tour-de-force movies that have meaning and also often tell stories of redemption and triumph. And when they get made, they work as well as any other movie, but the studios are not passionate about them right now. The filmmakers that make those kinds of movies have the sensibility of the great filmmakers of the late ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s, the Billy Friedkins, the Hal Ashbys, the Francis Ford Coppolas. That sensibility has now gone to television. And that’s why you get these great TV shows that are driven by characters and not driven by concepts. Movies are driven more by concepts and brands today.

WS: Are there any upcoming movies of yours that you would like to mention?
GRAZER: We do have three really good movies that are coming out. One is a movie that Ron directed called Inferno, with Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones. That is amazing, super stylistic. I think Ron applied a cinematic and filmmaking style that he applied to Rush, and it lives inside the body of this movie Inferno. It’s really cool—I can say it, he can’t! And then we just finished a movie with Tom Cruise that we love a lot called American Made. It’s a true story. It’s a gangster genre story that takes place in America in Mena, Arkansas, and in Colombia, South America, pre-Iran Contra. Doug Liman directed it. And then we have one other one that we just finished. It’s amazingly cool, [based on] a Stephen King series of books called The Dark Tower. It [stars] Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. It takes place in Cape Town, South Africa, and in New York City, and it’s very smart and stylistic.
HOWARD: And we are hoping that will wind up evolving into not only more movies but multiple-platform television as well.