An influential icon: the director Ron Howard has “always loved”
Once he decided to abandon his on-screen pursuits in favour of focusing full-time on directing, it was almost inevitable that Ron Howard was going to enjoy a lengthy and stellar career behind the camera, if only for the legends that he learned from on his way up the ladder.
Although he was already a well-known star of film and television by the time he was in his 20s after getting his start in the business while still a child, Howard had the rare distinction of picking a number of iconic brains who helped shape him as a performer, person, and filmmaker.
Of course, the Academy Award winner is just one of many to have spent time under the tutelage of the inimitable Roger Corman, who gave Howard his big break when he handpicked him for 1977’s Grand Theft Auto, which marked his feature-length directorial debut.
There aren’t many aspiring auteurs who can say they were given sage words of advice by both John Wayne and Henry Fonda in addition to Corman, which was a crash course in mastering the art of cinema that Howard was all too happy to take. He may have never crossed paths with one of his favourite directors, but they still have a direct connection thanks to a timeless icon they’d both worked with.
Howard played a major role in Wayne’s final film The Shootist, and ‘The Duke’ was the most famous creative collaborator of John Ford, so the full six degrees of separation were hardly needed. When the time came for the director to make a western of his own in 2003’s The Missing, there was always going to be one influence that cast a greater shadow than the rest.
As Howard admitted to the Directors Guild of America, “I’ve always loved John Ford.” Still, he knew that the ongoing evolution of the genre meant he couldn’t lift directly from that particular playbook, which meant he wasn’t going to dive into his own frontier-set tale with the intention of emulating one of the western genre’s most famous purveyors.
“Even though the American West was photographed and the history isn’t so distant, sensibilities have shifted so much that you almost have to adopt another mindset when you’re doing a western now,” Howard explained, although he did concede how he’d “always wanted to make a pure western” in a style as close to the medium’s classicist heyday as possible.
Virtually every filmmaker who has made a mainstream western in the last half-century is more than likely going to have Ford in the back of their mind, considering his titanic contributions to the genre. However, despite his past affiliations with ‘The Duke’, Howard tried to maintain a more modern mindset when he set about crafting his own Old West period piece.
