The real reason Ron Howard’s directorial style is hard to identify: “I got typecast”
Ron Howard is one of the most versatile directors who has ever plied his trade in Hollywood. In nearly five decades as a filmmaker, he has tried his hand at virtually every genre under the sun: comedy, action, thriller, historical epic, romance, science fiction, and even a few kids’ movies. Realistically, the only genre Howard has yet to tackle is horror, but it wouldn’t be surprising if he finally gave it a go in his 70s. Over the years, this versatility has led some critics to claim Howard is merely a Hollywood hack with no discernable style of his own – but he claims to have a very good reason for refusing to stick to one style.
Ever since auteur theory was defined by the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and then popularised in America by the critic Andrew Sarris, it has tended to be the lens through which most movie directors are viewed. The theory posits that the director is the primary creative force behind a film, and therefore, their personal style and voice shape everything about the movie, especially from narrative and aesthetic perspectives.
In its simplest terms, if a director is an “auteur,” something about their work should be immediately identifiable to an audience. In modern terms, the likes of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and Wes Anderson are often labelled auteurs, and it is true that each one of those filmmakers has stylistic and thematic qualities that repeat throughout their filmographies.
On the other hand, Ron Howard would never be mistaken for an auteur. There are very few stylistic and thematic links between the likes of Night Shift, Willow, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Solo: A Star Wars Story. It would be highly unlikely that anyone could ever sit down to watch a double bill of Splash and Ransom and immediately be able to say, “The same guy directed those movies.”
However, while Howard has come in for criticism in this regard, is it necessarily a bad thing that he makes many different kinds of movies? If someone can apply themselves to wildly varying material and adjust accordingly to deliver a top-quality film, is that not simply a job well done? In truth, there are more directors out there who are jacks of all trades, like Howard, than there are Tarantinos or Nolans whose fingerprints can be immediately identified.
Regardless of whether you believe the only good director is an auteur or you feel Howard’s adaptability marks him as an exceptional talent, the man himself has always been comfortable with his status as the safest pair of hands in Hollywood. In fact, he wanted his career to take this shape – and it’s all because he felt constrained in his earlier days as an actor.
“It’s probably the only aspect of my work as a director that I’d categorise as strategically defined,” Howard told The Independent in 2019. “As an actor, I had great experiences. I enjoyed it. But I was limited as an actor, and I got typecast. I didn’t want to fall into that pattern as a storyteller. I always had a curiosity about the way the world works: human interactions, the way we rise to challenges, how we define ourselves at work, what matters most in our personal lives.”
So, Howard’s relentless desire to do different things as a director is directly tied to his struggle to move past the world seeing him only as the sweet-natured Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. This typecasting aggravated him, so he retired from acting the year the sitcom ended and immediately embarked upon a directing career that would show Hollywood the true length and breadth of his talents.
