Ron Howard names his most difficult movies: “There was an element of danger”
In Hollywood, there are two old adages that many actors and directors swear by: never work with children or animals. Ron Howard, though, could add another couple of variables to that list, as they made two of his films incredibly perilous to shoot.
The first time Howard was met with a production that was logistically nightmarish and physically dangerous, he was lucky that he hired a leading man hellbent on throwing himself wholeheartedly into that jeopardy. The movie was 1991’s firefighter thriller Backdraft, and the star was Kurt Russell, a man who generally thinks actors are cissies and was therefore A-OK with plunging headlong into real blazes. His relentless enthusiasm was likely what helped convince his co-stars like William Baldwin and Scott Glenn to follow him into the inferno, much to Howard’s skyrocketing blood pressure.
“Everything was real world, real fire,” Howard told Entertainment Weekly in 2015 of filming Backdraft all those years earlier. “There was an element of danger, and discomfort, and the mechanics of the filmmaking were complicated.”
The choice to shoot with real fire, as much as possible, lent Backdraft a visceral quality because the audience immediately recognised the reality of the flames licking around the cast’s heads. Russell and company got up close and personal with the fire, too, with the Escape From New York star admitting, “All of us were getting burned every day. Your hair would burn…Billy got set on fire twice. I got set on fire three times. Scott got fried once.”
Indeed, these close calls came about despite Howard and his team doing everything in their power to make the firefighting scenes as safe as possible. For instance, every actor wore a special gel on their skin to keep it from burning, but because fire is obviously a goddamn variable you can’t predict 100% of the time, they’d still be burned by tiny bits of ash that stuck to the gel on their faces. Despite this, Russell loved making Backdraft because he felt like he’d truly put himself to the test. Howard, on the other hand, was just stressed to the hilt at all times, admitting, “What Kurt did during those fires scared the crap out of me.”
So, with Backdraft, Howard learned that working with fire was, at best, fraught with peril, and at worst, bowel-looseningly terrifying. More than two decades later, though, he found out the hard way that working with fire’s natural opposite is just as hazardous.
Over the years, Howard tried to put together a movie set on the open ocean on two separate occasions, before his third attempt, In the Heart of the Sea, finally came together in 2013. He’d worked with water before on Cocoon, but recognised that this movie would be a different kettle of fish altogether. After all, the story of the real-life sailors whose 1820 encounter with an enormous fucking sperm whale inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick was ideal for shooting on the open water. Still, it was a big ask and would require incredible commitment, bravery, and adaptability from Howard’s cast and crew.
Amazingly, Howard subjected himself to the draining, unpredictable task of shooting on the water despite one minor issue: he’s afraid of the ocean. “I don’t vacation on the water,” he told EW with a weak smile. “I’m a pale-skinned redhead; I get sunburned out there. I’m a little frightened of the ocean, in fact.”
However, just as with Backdraft, he knew the searing reality of plunging the actors into the elements would lead to incredible drama, even if the shoot would be exhausting, emotionally and physically. After all, Mother Nature can’t be anticipated, bought, or reasoned with, and if things were going to go wrong, they had the potential to go very wrong.
“You could never take nature for granted, never take the water for granted, never take the stunts that we had to execute too lightly,” Howard concluded. “It was a real logistical challenge, and we had real safety concerns that factored into every day.”
