“I wasn’t ideal with it”: the R-rated 2013 movie that made Ron Howard uncomfortable
While he looks like an ageing, ginger-haired cherub and gives off the air of a man who’d apologise if you punched him in the side of the head, Ron Howard isn’t unfamiliar with wading into R-rated waters.
He almost dipped his toes into an X-rated ocean, too, with the two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker confessing that in order to help fund his dreams of switching a life in front of the camera for one behind it, he seriously contemplated trading on his residual TV fame to star in a porno.
In a moment that humanity will forever be thankful for, Howard decided against whipping his kit off and going at it on camera, but as a director, R ratings have been few and far between. Night Shift got one, as you’d expect when it’s full of gratuitous toplessness, but that would be his first and last for years.
It would definitely be PG-13 if it were released today, but Backdraft was an R-rated flick, too, with The Missing and his most recent venture, Eden, among the few other entries in Howard’s back catalogue that were withheld from younger audiences. He’s not against pushing those boundaries when he has to, but for the most part, he’d rather not.
However, Howard didn’t have a choice when he made what he called the sexiest film of his entire career, which was obviously the one about racing car drivers. Not sexy in the conventional sense, but it was sexy to him, dammit, and that’s all that really mattered, even if he wasn’t too comfortable with it.
A period piece set in and around Europe, with an Australian and a German in the leading roles, meant that Rush didn’t look like a nailed-on success in the United States from the outside looking in. Howard thought that might be the case, and he was right, since less than a third of its earning came from the American box office.
“This movie isn’t tailored for the American audience, particularly,” he acknowledged. “And it’ll be a marketing challenge. All of our test screenings have been great! It’s one of the things that has been surprising for the movie. It’s been satisfying as a director, but it’s worrisome for a producer, will they give it a chance? It’s hard to know in the US whether people will take the risk.”
Retrospectively, you can say that not many people in his homeland took the risk, and the R-rating didn’t help. When asked if he could have made it PG-13, Howard seemed caught in two minds. “There was just no way,” he offered, although it didn’t sound like he was overly enthused about the R: “I wasn’t ideal with it, honestly.”
Rush is one of his most underrated and overlooked pictures, largely because it was shunned by the American audience, who he thought might shun it. If it hadn’t been R-rated, would it have fared any better? Maybe, but as uncomfortable as it made him, it was a compromise he was unwilling to make.
