Ron Howard’s only attempt at guerrilla filmmaking: “Their policy was not to cooperate”
Having spent most of his career working comfortably inside the studio system after finishing his apprenticeship with Roger Corman, Ron Howard probably isn’t anybody’s idea of a guerrilla filmmaker.
It’s a term typically associated with low-budget independent productions with barely a penny to scrape together budget-wise, who make the most of whatever resources they have available to cobble together a movie to capture footage on location without having to wade through the red tape of securing filming permits and the other busywork that’s required for any production to set up shop.
Obviously, Howard doesn’t make those kind of movies. Even when he does dip his toes into drama, he’s usually backed by the might of a major studio and the cache of his own wildly successful company. He’s not the guy who’ll be sneaking around a densely populated metropolis trying to catch the perfect shot on the sly, apart from the one time he was exactly that.
It sounds ludicrous to imagine an escapist blockbuster based on a bestselling novel that was directed by an Academy Award winner and starred global superstar Tom Hanks in the lead role alongside Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgård would need to resort to subterfuge, but that’s exactly what happened when Howard started working on The Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons.
The first entry in the series was subjected to widespread backlash and controversy from several religious groups, most notably the Vatican itself. Unfortunately, the second chapter’s story is largely set in Rome, forcing Howard to deploy some guerrilla tactics.
He went incognito by disguising himself to pay his own money and attend tourist tours of the Vatican, and didn’t even bother asking for permission to shoot in and outside of the city’s streets, buildings, and churches, having been told the first time around that the central hub of Catholicism had no interest in lending him an assist.
“Their policy was not to cooperate, and we just hoped that when we got to Rome, they wouldn’t actively impede us,” he told The Telegraph. “It was suggested to us that the cooperation at those locations was going to be more difficult. It was put to us that the Vatican had requested we be kept away from those locations.”
It wasn’t something Howard was used to, even though he was fully expecting the Vatican to pose difficulties, leaving him to admit that “it was a real feat, and logistically, it was incredibly challenging, but we managed to get our work done.” It was a frosty relationship between the director and the Vatican, which he managed to navigate by harking back to his Corman-era roots and getting the footage he needed regardless of the pushback.
No audience member would have watched Angels & Demons and mistaken it for a guerrilla flick, but in its own unusual way, it was.
