The movie Ron Howard started planning as a child: “I was six, maybe seven, years old”
It sounds preposterous on paper for any filmmaker to say they’ve been planning a future project since the earliest years of their childhood, but not when it comes from Ron Howard.
After all, the actor and future director already had three feature film appearances under his belt by the age of six years old, and he’d be a veteran of screens big and small well before he entered his 20s. By extension, it’s entirely believable for someone who’s spent virtually their entire life in the industry to state their intentions to tell a particular story so early, even if it was another 30 years before it came to fruition.
Making a sincere plan to begin a movie career is, by and large, an insane move to make. Who can imagine trying to articulate their way tino become a part of one of the most difficult industries in the world. However, thanks to his leg up in the world, Howard was always looking straight at the movies ashis only career path.
So, in many ways, his decision to start being in the pictures was perhaps always going to happen. But it’s another huge leap to decide at the tender age of six to make a movie and, what’s more, base it on perhaps one of the strangest conversations and propositions we’ve heard in a while.
1992’s historical romance Far and Away hoovered up plenty of headlines ahead of its release due to the fact Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had been married shortly before the start of production after meeting on the set of Days of Thunder. For Howard, he described the film as “kind of their honeymoon project,” which played into the star-crossed tale he wanted to tell.
Cruise’s Joseph and Kidman’s Shannon make the arduous journey from Ireland to America in 1892, carrying nothing with them but hopes, dreams, and a pair of the most atrocious accents ever committed to celluloid. Getting waylaid in Boston, he squanders all of their finances, plunging them into poverty as cracks in their doe-eyed relationship begin to show.
As well as the infectious enthusiasm of the newlyweds being a “great adventure” and creating an exuberant feeling that “kind of permeated the movie”, Howard explained to Yahoo just how long he’d been toying with the idea that would eventually become Far and Away.
“Far and Away really began probably when I was six years old, maybe seven, and I visited my great-grandmother in Kansas,” he said. “And she pulled out of her drawer this newspaper, and it was from the 1890s. And it was a photo for the Oklahoma land rush starting line. And she thought that her future husband was in the lead on a horse.”
It was a seed that only continued to germinate as Howard carved out a successful career in front of the camera before deciding that he needed to take the plunge and dedicate all of his energies to directing. That came in 1977 when he helmed the Roger Corman-produced Grand Theft Auto, with Far and Away taking a decade and a half to attain pride of place amongst his burgeoning filmography.
It may have been his ninth feature – by which point he was already well-established through Splash, Cocoon, Willow, and Backdraft – but it was evidently the one he’d by far harboured ambitions of making the longest. It’s hardly his best effort from behind the camera, but Howard still had a vested personal attachment to the story.
