The “last time” Ron Howard made a movie for someone else’s benefit: “There was a lesson in that”
Since he isn’t really a writer, and he definitely isn’t an auteur, it’s not even a back-handed compliment to say that Ron Howard has a decent shot at being named the single most successful director-for-hire in modern Hollywood history.
That’s not intended to be completely disparaging, since he makes movies that he’s personally invested in, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. After all, over a 50-year career as a filmmaker, his debut feature, 1977’s Grand Theft Auto, remains the one and only time he’s been credited as a screenwriter.
The two-time Academy Award winner has story credits on Parenthood, Far and Away, and Eden, but that’s the sum of his contributions as a scribe. That hasn’t prevented him from becoming one of the highest-grossing directors of all time, but it also places him a rung below other big earners like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Tim Burton, and Robert Zemeckis in terms of originality and creativity.
Of course, no self-respecting director will make a movie that they don’t believe in 100%, but Howard discovered while shooting one of his pictures that, even though it wasn’t intentional, the person peeping over his shoulder from the second he was hired was having an adverse effect on his sensibilities.
Since he hatched the premise, hand-picked Howard to step behind the camera, was heavily involved during production and post-production, and was footing the entire $35 million bill himself through his production company, it was inevitable that George Lucas would be shadowing his protégé every step of the way on 1988’s Willow.
The Apollo 13 architect has called it the single hardest film he’s ever had to make, but that wasn’t the plaid enthusiast and Star Wars creator’s fault. Instead, Howard’s issues were internal, after he realised that, no matter how good the big-budget fantasy turned out, he wasn’t making it for his own benefit.
“This was George’s story, it was really George’s vision, I was trying to facilitate that,” he explained to Bafta. “He was certainly inviting me to bring everything I had to offer to the project, in fact, he’s the first one that officially gave me final cut. So he gave me a lot of freedom, but I felt a tremendous responsibility because he was financing the movie himself.”
Howard appreciates that Willow has become an enduring cult favourite, even if Disney axed the sequel series after a single season before removing it entirely from the company’s streaming service, but he told himself, “That’s the last time that I’m going to take on somebody else’s story, I think I’m going to fall in love with it myself, and do it.”
“It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it,” he sought to clear up. “But I think I felt a kind of a pressure, and too often I was thinking, ‘I wonder, at the end of the day, what George is looking for here?'” Since then, he’s never made anything to please anyone other than himself, saying “there was a little lesson in that,” one that he’s hasn’t forgotten in the last four decades.
