Ron Howard talks upcoming Tom Hank’s thriller Inferno, his work as a director and being one of Hollywood’s busiest film-makers
New film Inferno may be based on a novel, but it's the real world that fires up the actor turned film-maker
Ron Howard must be one of mainstream Hollywood’s busiest film-makers. Since he quit acting full-time in 1980 to focus on directing, the 62 year old has made no fewer than 25 movies, including this month’s big conspiracy thriller Inferno.
And that’s not counting Grand Theft Auto – the movie he directed while he was still appearing as all-American kid Richie Cunningham in TV sitcom Happy Days. Yet, he’s never allowed anyone to pin him down to a single genre.
He’s worked on comedies (Splash and Parenthood), dramas (A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon), kids’ fantasies (Willow, How The Grinch Stole Christmas), sci-fi (Cocoon), an historical epic (Far And Away) and a Western (The Missing).
“I love all kinds of stories and movies,” he says. “And I did work hard to get through to the creative community and studio executives that I could work in a number of different genres and tones.”
But while Howard recognises there are advantages to having audiences associate you with one genre — think Judd Apatow and comedy or James Cameron and sci-fi — that wasn’t how he wanted to pursue his career.
“I’d rather risk confusion and stay creatively fresh and stimulated,” he says. “I feel like I’m growing and challenging myself all the time.”
Take Inferno. Yes, it is the third in the Robert Langdon series, each directed by Howard, based on a popular thriller novel by Dan Brown, and starring Tom Hanks as
the mystery-cracking symbologist who first appeared in The Da Vinci Code.
But, opening with Langdon suffering from a gunshot wound to the head that gives him both amnesia and terrifying visions, Inferno is arguably Howard’s first-ever horror movie.
“There are elements of horror,” he agrees, but explains this is down to Brown finding his inspiration in medieval Italian poet Dante’s influential masterpiece The Divine Comedy.
But that wasn’t the only reason Howard wanted to make his third Langdon story. He also loved the fact the book fuelled its plot engine with the very modern problem of human overpopulation, making it a “much more contemporary, edgier kind of thriller.”
I’d rather risk confusion and stay creatively fresh and stimulated. I feel like I’m growing and challenging myself all the time.
Ron on staying creative
It also meant he got to work with Hanks for the fifth time since they first collaborated 22 years ago on Splash. There is, says Howard, “a mutual trust and a friendship” between them, “and I’d be lying if I said I’m not always looking for something we could do together cos I always feel it’s time well spent on every level.”
Over the years, Howard has not seen Hanks change. “He’s always been grounded, centred, funny, smart and talented, but also someone who has a reasonable sense of the world and his place in it.”
Yet as an actor, Howard has watched the two-time Oscar winner evolve significantly.
“He’s kind of entered a Zen-master phase, where it seems like a little less work for him. He’s still entirely dedicated, fully prepared,and in fact he may work harder.
"He’s also, of course, a fine writer, award-winning producer and a strong director, so he’s a fantastic collaborator to have on a movie. Yet, when he’s acting he loves handing all that over to the powers that be, and in this case I think there’s a level of trust given the amount of times we’ve worked together and the success we’ve had.”
The high point of their joint career has to be Apollo 13, the 1995 true-life NASA disaster drama, which received nine Oscar nominations, winning Best Sound and Best Film Editing. However, while Howard is uncomfortable singling out which of his movies is his favourite (“I’ve given them all everything I’ve got”), he does cite Apollo 13 as the major turning point.
“It was really my first full-on drama,” he recalls. “And it was my first film based on real events. I was terrified going into it. But I found the facts – and the limitations they present – are not limitations at all. In fact, they stimulate your creativity.”
Ever since, Howard has returned again and again to stories rooted in reality, whether it’s the rivalry between Formula 1 drivers in the 1970s (Rush), David Frost’s interview with disgraced US President Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon), or the real 19th-century maritime disaster that inspired Moby Dick (In The Heart of The Sea).
“I often choose movies inspired by real events as those events are so extraordinary. I realised you can push the boundaries of the human experience a little more freely in them because people know it really happened.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Howard has also recently made a documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years (in cinemas now), which compiles new footage of the Fab Four touring between 1963 and 1966.
I often choose movies inspired by real events as those events are so extraordinary. I realised you can push the boundaries of the human experience a little more freely in them because people know it really happened.
Ron on what inspires him
He says: “I thought it was a great idea for a kind of adventure/rival story that would allow millennials to maybe understand what the intensity of that period was really all about.”
And next, he reveals, he’s directing the first in a 10-part mini-series about the life of Albert Einstein, plus a “half-scripted, half-documentary about what it would be like to colonise Mars,” both for the National Geographic channel.
He may have never committed himself to a single film genre, but these days it seems Ron Howard just can’t get enough of real life itself.
Inferno (12A) is out on October 14.