Ron Howard

He grew up in front of the camera, most memorably as Opie in the television series The Andy Griffith Show and then as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. After getting favorable reviews for his performances in the movies American Graffiti and The Shootist, Ron Howard moved behind the camera, making his directorial debut in 1977 with the comedy Grand Theft Auto, and he went on to create some of Hollywood’s most memorable films. He has delved into a number of genres: drama, with the critically acclaimed A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon; comedy, with the hits Splash and Parenthood; science fiction, with Cocoon; fantasy, with Willow; and screen adaptations of best-selling novels, with The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons.

Howard has also executive produced a number of award-winning mini-series and series for television, from HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon to FOX’s Arrested Devel­opment. He is currently working on the series Parenthood, based on the 1989 feature film. Written by Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights), and directed by Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing), the series will air on NBC and is distributed internationally by NBC Universal International Television Distribution. Its stars include Peter Krause, Dax Shepard and Monica Potter.

With his longtime producing partner Brian Grazer, Howard cofounded Imagine Entertainment in 1986 to create independently produced feature films. The company has since produced a variety of popular movies, including such hits as American Gangster, Friday NightLights, The Nutty Professor, The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Bowfinger, The Paper and Liar, Liar. Howard and Grazer produced the recently released drama Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie.

Throughout his career, Howard has won numerous accolades, including an Academy Award for best director for A Beautiful Mind. He has worked with some of the top actors in the business, including Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. One of the most highly regarded directors in the film business, Howard talks to World Screen about the craft of making movies.

WS: What attracted you to Parenthood, first as a feature film and then as a TV series?
HOWARD: It remains the most autobiographical project that I’ve ever been involved with. It was really torn out of the pages of my own life 20 years ago. My kids are grown now. I was joyous and yet exhausted and overwhelmed by what it was to suddenly find myself with four kids, which is what happened over a period of six years. And in talking to Brian Grazer and Babaloo Mandel about it, we were all fathers and were all facing the same revelation that parenting was just a far more complex, emotionally challenging, physically exhausting undertaking than any of us would have guessed. And we thought that the truth about being parents was ironic at all times and hilariously funny every once in a while—if you stepped outside yourself and took a look at it. It really was born out of wanting to explore that job, that position in life of being a parent.

WS: Wow, four kids in six years—you have all my admiration!
HOWARD: And thank God that everybody is doing great and we even have a grandson now! It remains a rich experience and we don’t nearly feel the [intense] pressure that we used to feel. But there isn’t an hour that goes by where we don’t talk about him! Our children remain front and center!

WS: What were the elements that led you to believe that Parenthood could go from a two-hour feature film to an extended-run TV series?
HOWARD: There is a great tradition of TV shows exploring family dynamics, more so than in a movie, really, in terms of putting the members under a microscope. It always seemed logical to us. We had talked about gathering that cast together and doing a sequel. We even tried it once—a couple of years after the movie had been released—but it just was not quite the right tone and not quite the right circumstance and timing for it.

Then Jason Katims, who does the television version of Friday Night Lights, came to Brian and me about a year ago. He said that he wanted to do not a half-hour sitcom version of Parenthood—which is what we had tried before—but an hour dramedy. He wanted to apply his own tone and his own sensibility but continue to use the family dynamics that the film had framed for the audience to develop a new series. And he does such a spectacular job with Friday Night Lights. He’s a great writer, and Brian and I thought that would be pretty thrilling, and he wrote the most remarkable script.

I’m very proud of this latest iteration of this idea of ours from all those years ago. It’s not copying anything. It’s taking some inspiration from it and Jason is applying his voice. There is no imitation; it’s kind of an evolution. It’s a couple of decades later, so the sensibilities have changed. The details of the circumstances that surround a modern family are somewhat different and he acknowledges that in ways that are very interesting. And yet it still very successfully offers the audience something that rings true and is entertaining. But this is not a sitcom. It’s not tight in that way. I think it’s something that audiences are really going to connect with.

WS: Will Parenthood be one of those shows that can draw the whole family together in front of the TV?
HOWARD: Parenthood is for every generation because every generation is represented in the TV show just as it was in the movie. And as the series unfolds, every generation moves front and center at various times during each episode and certainly during the season. I think it’s going to be very relatable for younger audiences, but it’s not really for them. It’s a very broad-appeal show, but it’s not written in a middle-of-the-road way.

WS: What does a project need to have to make you and Brian interested in it?
HOWARD: He and I have a different set of emotional and intellectual buttons that need to be pushed in order to capture our attention. But ultimately, and this is why the partnership has worked, we seem to arrive at a very similar place in terms of what a story achieves and [can offer] the audience.

For me, I’ll almost entirely focus on the characters: the way in which they are being tested and what challenge they are facing. It doesn’t matter what the tone of the movie is: it can be silly, it could be fantasy or a drama inspired by real life. And the environment [the story is situated in] certainly influences that and intrigues me.

Brian sort of works the other way around. He is very interested in the larger social canvas, particularly when it relates to popular culture. And then he likes to drill down from there, while I tend to work the other way. I find a set of characters that are placed in emotional dilemmas and work my way out. But we come to a similar place, which is, we try to explore as many aspects of the story as possible.

WS: I was recently in Washington, D.C., with my children and we visited the National Air and Space Museum. My daughter was not too thrilled to be there. Then we walked through the hall with all the Apollo missions and when we got to Apollo 13, she perked up and said, “I know that one—it’s a movie!”
HOWARD: [Chuckles] Well, that’s a little bit of a solace to Jim Lovell [the commander of the Apollo 13 mission], the character Tom Hanks played, who was always a little heartbroken that he didn’t make it to the moon. Apollo 13 was nominated for best picture and lost to Braveheart. It was always thought to be a very strong contender. And James Lovell was sitting next to Brian during the Academy Awards and I was sitting on Brian’s left. And when Mel [Gibson]’s movie, Braveheart, was announced as the winner, Lovell immediately reached over to Brian and said, “It’s all right, life goes on, I didn’t make it to the moon, either.” And he always would have preferred to have had a fairly uneventful mission that achieved all of its objectives and that would have given him the chance to walk on the moon. But I think there is some solace to the fact that the mission is so well-respected and regarded and, as a flight commander, what he achieved in terms of actually getting his team home is considered now to be one of the great achievements of the era.

WS: Is space a topic that still fascinates you? Do you see yourself doing something else in that genre?
HOWARD: I haven’t done science fiction since Cocoon. I’m noodling around with a couple of ideas that would allow me to do that. So it’s something that continues to interest me. But Apollo 13 holds a unique place, along with Parenthood, frankly, and a couple of others, as my favorite life experiences. I’m not angling to try to replicate Apollo 13. I’m not sure I ever could.

WS: With the success of franchises like Harry Potter or Spider-Man, is it more difficult nowadays to break through with a movie that is based on an original idea?
HOWARD: I think it’s proving to be, yes, because it’s more competitive and audiences are looking for familiar titles, subjects that are immediately enticing. It reminds me a little bit of television in its network heyday, when they wanted these preachy, high-concept shows and a 15-second promo had to convince people to sample them. Then the first few minutes of the show had to [instantly] hook the audience because they were channel surfing and [could be easily distracted]. It reminds me of that. All that said, [the opportunities the current film business offers are] pretty encouraging to me. I know Pixar is a brand name in a way, but those movies are so original and so unusual, and Up is a fantastic example of that. I think it’s just wonderful that [the summer comedy hit] The Hangover has done so well, and that’s not a remake.

If they are good, I don’t have any fundamental opposition to sequels [as long as] they have something to offer.

WS: What are you working on now?
HOWARD: I’m developing about a half a dozen very different kinds of projects. Some very small character-driven pieces and a couple that if they work properly could actually launch a series of films. I’m working on a science-fiction idea; I’m even working on a horror idea, and a couple of very interesting character-driven stories that are inspired by real events. I’m searching for a comedy to work on again because I haven’t done a comedy in a while. I’ve had a very active three, four years, where I barely stopped to look up, particularly doing Frost/Nixon and then Angels & Demons back-to-back. So I’ve really been using this time to meet with writers, work on ideas and recharge the batteries. I don’t know what’s going to go next, but I’m pretty intrigued by some of the possibilities.

WS: Frost/Nixon assembled an impressive group of talent, from Peter Morgan’s screenplay to Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost.
HOWARD: Yeah, it was great. Peter Morgan’s writing was remarkable. I really enjoyed working on that film.

WS: What creative challenges did it present for you?
HOWARD: For me as a filmmaker, it’s fascinating to have characters like that. Neither person is like me, neither Frost nor Nixon. I don’t relate to them on any real personality level, and yet as I delved into them I began to find these connections, and some of them were rather unsettling. That’s what’s exciting about working with rich, complicated characters—you begin to find those qualities that we can all relate to and then you can develop them and try to present them in surprising and entertaining ways. It’s really creatively gratifying and fun to watch an audience respond to those kinds of characters.

WS: Many people nowadays watch content on laptops or mobile devices. Does the fact that someone is going to be watching a TV show or a movie on a two-inch screen affect your creative process in any way at all?
HOWARD: It crosses my mind, and it’s never been my wish or hope for a movie that I direct or for one of our TV shows. Every filmmaker or television producer or director hopes that their story is going to be so riveting that people just can’t help but drop everything and watch it start to finish, but that isn’t the way we live today. I do the same thing. I watch stuff on my computer. I haven’t quite taken to watching shows on my iPhone yet, but my wife has some favorite shows that she likes to watch and revisit and she has those on her iPod—and we’re not kids.

I’m not as anxious about that because I will still strive—as I know Jason [Katims, executive producer and writer on Parenthood, a series for NBC based on the 1989 feature film] will, working on the show, and I know my partner Brian Grazer feels this way—to make the stories as immersive as possible, and it’s really up to each individual to decide how they want to experience them, if they want to experience them at all.

So I’m kind of sanguine about that. In fact, if somebody isn’t going to take the time to go to the movie theater, or sit down on the couch and watch the television program start to finish in a focused way, Brian and I are not some of those people who feel, Why bother? I’d rather they did it in 90-second increments and get what they get out of it.

The power of these stories is you express yourself and you are offering your perspective and your ideas to people. But so few people actually see your film the way you intended. And that’s art, right? People take from a show, a painting, a song, what they want or need at that moment. That’s a long, roundabout way of saying I’m pretty sanguine about it. I’d rather they take away something, somehow, some way, than not at all.

WS: I’ve spoken to some directors who have said that wide panoramic shots are going to go by the wayside. Everyone will be shooting close-ups because you can’t see everything in a wide shot when you are watching it on a two-inch screen.
HOWARD: I don’t think that’s entirely true, because when I snap photos with my iPhone, I take panoramics. I just hold the camera up a little closer to me [laughs] to see the picture! But I still appreciate that kind of composition.

I used to have this argument when I was directing television early in my career, because the television executives used to say, When you’re doing TV movies you need to have lots of close-ups. And my answer was that every time I watch a John Ford movie on television I’m riveted, because it’s a great story and the compositions are strong. And so I don’t believe that. Of course, I happen to like close-ups and I use them a lot in my movies anyway, so the issue is not a big challenge that way.

WS: While making a TV series, do you ever think that it will have a life on a website?
HOWARD: I’m the opposite of frightened or discouraged by technology. It’s creating havoc with our industry on a financial level. The economics of content online are topsy-turvy. That, combined with the difficult global economy, is creating a tremendous contraction, and that’s difficult, if not tragic, for people who make a living at this.

Setting that aside, the fact that people are finding more ways to benefit from this visual medium appeals to me, and the fact that short-form entertainment is gaining some viability also interests me.

I don’t find any of it frightening. In fact, I find it kind of inspiring and a little daunting and a challenge for everybody. I’m excited about the different ways we’ll be able to tell stories, and it’s just up to the studios and other companies to figure out how to finance these new platforms and reach the audience for them.