The only time Ron Howard admitted to phoning it in as a director: “That’s not being creatively ambitious”
Ron Howard has done the impossible – survived child stardom to become a high-functioning, Oscar-winning, seemingly untroubled filmmaker. After rocketing to fame as a toddler on the Andy Griffith Show, Howard acted through his teen years in movies and the television series Happy Days, all the while knowing that what he really wanted to do was direct.
He finally got his chance when producer Roger Corman asked him to make a movie called Grand Theft Auto. It was a modest success, and the young filmmaker got to pick his projects from then on. He’s made crowd-pleasing hits since then, including Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Rush. Through it all, he’s maintained a certain philosophy about filmmaking, believing that every project should be creatively ambitious.
He isn’t delusional. He knows better than anyone that a film’s success or failure hinges on a myriad of factors rather than on a simple calculus of good intentions. But he does believe that, as often as possible, directors should seek work that is challenging and creatively fulfilling, even if it doesn’t ultimately lead to rave reviews. Although this is always his goal, he has admitted to one instance in which he wasn’t quite able to follow his own artistic compass.
“Certain projects can become products, and it’s about then executing a thing that’s marketable,” he said in an interview on The Great Creators with Guy Raz podcast in 2024, adding, “The only time I’ve ever done that was really with the Da Vinci Code series. You know, by the third movie, it was more about, ‘Is this the way a Robert Langdon mystery is supposed to unfold?’ You know, ‘I don’t want anyone else to do it, so I’m going to do it.'”
He was quick to clarify that everyone worked hard on those movies and that a lot of people enjoyed them, but that ultimately, it wasn’t fulfilling his mission statement as a director. “That’s not being creatively ambitious,” he concluded. “That’s not taking a risk.”
Ironically, the Da Vinci Code movies, which consisted of 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, 2009’s Angels and Demons, and 2016’s Inferno, were box office smashes, becoming Howard’s first, second, and eighth highest-grossing films, respectively. The first film drew a staggering $768 million to become the fourth highest-grossing film of the year ahead of Superman Returns.
All of the films in the series, however, were disasters as far as critics were concerned, and didn’t come close to pretty much any of Howard’s other movies in terms of character development. Interminably long and effortful in their plot machinations, they didn’t even reach the level of Dan Brown’s original novels, which were of questionable quality, to say the least.
“The cliché is ‘You phoned it in,'” Howard acknowledged. “Well, you know, I would never want to feel that as a director I was phoning something in.”
To his credit, the Da Vinci Code series was certainly the low point in Howard’s career. Even when he took on the Star Wars franchise with 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, he managed to inject some of the warmth and heart that pervade much of his filmography.
