Ron Howard names the one movie that “surprised the hell out of me”
Traversing the paths of actor, director and producer, Ron Howard has contributed more than anyone could ever hope to in the film world. Beginning as a child actor in the likes of The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, Howard eventually stopped performing in front of the camera to seek out a career behind it.
It was a move that more than paid off as Howard has handled some of the most significant movies of the last four decades or so, including classics such as Cocoon, Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, the latter of which earned the American filmmaker the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’.
While Howard’s cinematic achievements reach far and wide, and his contributions to the medium of film are undoubted, he’s never stopped short of offering his personal praise where he feels it’s warranted. During a feature with A-Frame, the director pointed out the films that have inspired his own movies, and he noted one in particular that stirred something deep within him.
Discussing Jan Troell’s The Emigrants, Howard noted, “That one surprised the hell out of me. When I saw Jan Troell’s Emigrants, and then later, The New Land — the two go hand in hand — it just transported me back into history on the most human level. It demonstrated to me that a movie didn’t have to be in English for me to be engrossed, that I could lose myself in a movie despite the subtitles.”
The Emigrants was released in 1971 and stars Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Allan Edwall and many others. Based on Vilhelm Moberg’s novels of the same name, the film tells of a group of poor Swedes who move from Smaland in the Scandinavian country to make a new life and home in Minnesota in the United States.
“It dramatizes the workaday struggle to survive under these difficult circumstances that were not just physical but emotional, being isolated out there on the prairie, but also being in a new land that isn’t their culture,” Howard continued, expressing his praise for Troell’s film. “It’s beautifully shot in what was then ultra-naturalism, with lots of long lenses and handheld work that really felt unlike staged Hollywood scenes that were brightly lit and carefully choreographed.”
The director signed off on The Emigrants, “It’s beautifully acted by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. I just loved it, and I saw it over and over again. And it tuned my antenna to another way of staging scenes, and using sets, and that the subtlety of performances could pack the same kind of wallop that more theatrical, more histrionic moments often yielded.”
Check out the trailer for The Emigrants below.
