The 1992 movie scene Ron Howard called his career’s finest hour: “I just had this moment”
If you asked most people to name the best movie Ron Howard has ever made, they’d probably say Apollo 13. If you asked Ron Howard exactly the same question, he’d definitely say Apollo 13.
The spacefaring biopic might be the two-time Academy Award winner’s consensus pick for his finest hour as a filmmaker, but it wasn’t responsible for the moment that he cherished the most. Instead, that accolade belongs to a picture that might not even be worthy of cracking Howard’s all-time top ten.
He’s helmed over two dozen features in a behind-the-camera career that’s rapidly approaching its 50th anniversary, but decide for yourself whether it’s a positive or a negative that the former child star remains convinced that he hasn’t made anything worthy of troubling his personal top spot since 1995.
Admittedly, his consistency has been all over the shop throughout the 21st century. While he’s pointed to Thirteen Lives as the pinnacle of the modern era, the odd Frost/Nixon aside, titles like The Dilemma, Eden, and Hillbilly Elegy can’t hold a candle to his creatively fertile Splash, Willow, Cocoon, and even Backdraft period.
However, despite hardly blowing anyone away, although it did do a decent turn at the box office, which might have had more to do with having Hollywood’s freshly appointed A-list power couple in the leading roles, the Happy Days alum can’t see past Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s Far and Away as containing the most memorable scene of his career.
Literally calling it “the filmmaking moment I will most cherish,” the director reflected on the climactic scene, which sees Cruise’s Joseph Donnelly take part in the Land Run of 1893, which allowed him to secure a happy ending in Oklahoma. Far and Away was Howard’s first passion project, and everything about the sequence’s conception and execution has stuck with him ever since.
“We were re-enacting this moment, and this was pre-digital technology,” he recalled. “So it was 13 cameras dug in, all real horses, real people on foot, reenactors, civil war reenactors, revolutionary war reenactors, pioneer reenactors who would all gather with their wagons, horses, and wardrobe to recreate this moment, including my father Rance, who is an actor, and he was in the scene.”
Right when he was preparing to roll the cameras, “I just had this moment,” the director marvelled, “Because the reason I had chosen that as something to build a movie around is because I had three ancestors who had ridden in it.” That feeling hit him like a ton of bricks, and as a result, “I don’t know that much of anything will ever exceed that.”
It was the perfect storm of personal and professional satisfaction, and being on that set at that moment was something Howard will never forget. More than 30 years on from Far and Away‘s release, it still hasn’t been bettered as the one scene that he cherishes most of all.
