When Ron Howard went to war with the Vatican: “Let me be a little controversial”
Thanks to his reputation as one of the industry’s nicest guys and all-around good eggs, Ron Howard should have been the one director in Hollywood who’d be voted least likely to repeatedly end up in the crosshairs of the Vatican.
At least, until he signed on to adapt Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code for the big screen, that is.
The headquarters of the Catholic church doesn’t care for movies that fly in the face of its beliefs, and a frothy mystery revolving around a conspiracy that dragged Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Grail into its blockbuster maw was never going to sit right with the organisation.
Funnily enough, the box office behemoth was denigrated by the Vatican and hit with calls for boycotts and protests, which clearly worked a treat when it earned over three-quarters of a billion dollars from cinemas to become the top-earning release of Howard’s entire career by a considerable distance.
Needless to say, the upper echelons of Christianity weren’t keen on the idea of a franchise, so they went out of their way to sabotage the former Happy Days star at every turn. Officials banned the first sequel, Angels & Demons, from shooting anywhere on its grounds, and the filmmaker accused them of sabotage after suggesting that “the Vatican had exerted some influence” in denying his film production permits.
To completely undercut them, Howard went guerrilla for the first and only time in his career, capturing footage for Tom Hanks’ second outing as Robert Langdon in places the Vatican expressly didn’t want him to go, or at least, that’s the way he told it. As one of the least controversial directors in the business, it was on-brand for Howard to believe that Catholics enjoying the movie was a controversial statement.
“Let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome,” he told The Huffington Post. “After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?”
His rebuttal came in response to a scathing op-ed from William Donohue of the Catholic League, with Howard not best pleased that he “has, in effect, smeared me by claiming I am smearing his church,” and he dismissed allegations that Angels & Demons was intentionally antagonistic to the faith by calling Donohue’s takedown a “silly and mean-spirited work of propaganda”.
All Howard wanted to do was make a couple of movies set in and around Rome that had narrative, and entirely fictional, connections to the Vatican. However, since the people in charge had been denigrating the source material since it first hit bookshelves, he found himself caught in an ongoing and repeated battle of mud-slinging.
What did they have to say about the third and final instalment, Inferno? Fuck all, since the story had nothing to do with the Vatican or the church.
