The one director who hates Ron Howard with a passion: “A terrible filmmaker”
Is it even possible to hate Ron Howard? Yes, you can hate his movies all you want, and some of them are deserving of as much scorn as anyone can muster, but what has Ron Howard, the man and filmmaker, ever done to upset anyone?
It’s been seven decades since he made his screen debut, and five since he made his feature-length directorial debut, and you’d have to travel far and wide to find anyone in the industry who has anything even remotely negative to say about him.
Does that make him immune to criticism? Absolutely not, since he’s got over two dozen films under his belt from behind the camera and hasn’t developed a style of his own, and to make matters worse, he doesn’t even want to. Obviously, a big-name director doesn’t necessarily need to be an auteur, and his billions in box office takings reflect that, but a little pizzazz can go a long way.
He retired as a full-time actor in the 1980s with two massively successful TV shows to his name, starred with some of cinema’s greatest legends, won two Academy Awards, oversees a prolific production company, and even showed that he’s not above sending himself up, as The Studio recently showed.
Howard is about the most inoffensive and vanilla mogul in Hollywood, and even in his 70s, he hasn’t lost that ‘aw shucks’ persona that’s defined him since his Andy Griffith Show days. That begs the question, then: who, in their right mind, would hold a grudge against such a relentlessly bland fellow?
The answer, naturally, is Lars Von Trier. If there was a cinematic Wario to Howard’s Mario, then you could do worse than the Danish provocateur. They exist at opposite ends of the spectrum as an unfiltered, controversial, and taboo-busting maniac and a studio-approved safe pair of hands, respectively, which could explain why he felt the need to share his disdain with the Apollo 13 helmer’s daughter.
After being cast in Manderlay, Bryce Dallas Howard knew to expect the unexpected, but even at that, Von Trier’s greeting came out of the blue. “He started insulting me,” she recalled. “‘Your father’s a terrible filmmaker’. I went, ‘Lars, what are you trying to see?’ And he said, ‘Your angry face. I don’t know what it looks like.'”
In a classic Von Trier move, but not exactly in a good way, he then threw a glass of water in her face. Knowing his idiosyncrasies, it’s worth contemplating if he only hired Howard for the role so that he could tell her how much she despised her old man’s body of work, since it’s hard to imagine Lars and Ron ever ending up in the same room, such are their disparate approaches to their chosen profession.
Howard may not be the most exciting or dynamic filmmaker in the business, but “terrible” seems like a stretch. There’s no point questioning Von Trier at this point, though, since he won’t be doing anything other than marching to the beat of his own drum.
