The one and only movie Ron Howard changed his directing style for: “I’ve never used it since”
What is ‘A Ron Howard Film’? Whenever that label appears in the marketing for the latest movie hailing from an established director, audiences typically know what to expect.
If it’s Quentin Tarantino, then rapid-fire dialogue, gun-toting violence, and plenty of profanity are guaranteed. If it’s Guillermo del Toro, then you’d bet your house on a combination of horror, fantasy, and tragedy. If it’s the Coen brothers, then offbeat characters and idiosyncrasies are the order of the day.
If it’s Ron Howard, though, it’ll be… a film directed by Ron Howard. Despite helming dozens of features across a half-century behind the camera, the two-time Academy Award winner has developed precisely zero identifiable signatures, whether they’re visual, narrative, or technical. Most filmmakers of his standing have at least one recognisable flourish that recurs throughout their careers, but not him.
He knows it, too, and even credits his longevity to being rather vanilla when compared to his peers. On one hand, he’s right, since the absence of any filmic signifiers has allowed him to weave between genres and budgets without ever feeling out of place. On the other hand, despite being the 13th highest-grossing director of all time, most people would struggle to pick a Howard flick out of a lineup.
The former child star did mix things up once, although it’s up for debate if anyone even noticed. If a Tarantino, del Toro, Steven Spielberg, or Martin Scorsese deviated from the norm, then viewers would catch on in an instant. When Howard did it, folks weren’t exactly replicating the Leonardo DiCaprio meme to point and their screen and wonder why he’d changed the habit of a lifetime.
You might be racking your brain to think of which movie saw Howard rip up his established rulebook and swing for the fences. Was it the space-set shenanigans of Apollo 13? The high fantasy of Willow? The revisionist western stylings of The Missing? The intimate drama of Frost/Nixon? The seafaring spectacle of In the Heart of the Sea? Nope, it was How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
“One of the things I did with this film was adopt a style I had never used, and I’ve never used it since,” he explained to Vulture. “But I went back to Don Peterman, who was my cinematographer on Splash and Cocoon, and also an Oscar nominee for Flashdance. He did Addams Family Values.”
To turn his aesthetic upside down, Howard shot the family-friendly caper with “wide and distorting” 14mm lenses, and eschewed more static camerawork in favour of “a camera on an arm that was in movement a lot,” focusing on Jim Carrey’s titular performance to embellish it with the “kind of crazed close-up that would evolve at the end of the camera move.”
In all honesty, did anyone watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas and think, ‘Wow, Ron Howard has really changed up his directing style for the first time ever?’ Probably not. He still did it, and since more than a quarter of a century has passed and he admitted that he hasn’t done it again, it may well remain a one-time thing.
