“They were sceptical”: the serious Ron Howard drama unfavourably compared to Monty Python
Even though it’s the genre he cut his teeth in and the one responsible for his earliest hits, Ron Howard was at pains to explain to his inner circle that another of his pictures was a serious drama, not the latest in a long line of light and frothy comedies.
Why? The casting of one actor led them to believe that he was going to take some heavyweight subject matter and turn it into a Monty Python-esque farce. As ludicrous as that sounds in theory, those concerns weren’t completely unfounded, given the star and director’s individual and collective reputations.
You can see why that conclusion was reached: while he said he’s unlikely to ever dip his toes back into those particular waters after The Dilemma backfired horrendously, Howard spent the first decade of his directorial career dabbling almost exclusively in comedy or genre films with gags and quips in them.
Grand Theft Auto, Night Shift, Splash, Cocoon, and Gung Ho set the template before he pivoted into fantasy with Willow, and then returned to familiar ground with Parenthood. After that, he misjudged Far and Away and set everything on fire in Backdraft, before heading back to comedy again with The Paper.
Since eight of his first ten features were comedic by nature, there were some quizzical looks when Howard announced Apollo 13 as his 11th, which only intensified when he cast Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell. By the time the film was released in June 1995, he’d claimed back-to-back ‘Best Actor’ prizes at the Academy Awards, but when he was first revealed as the lead in 1993, Big was his only Oscar-nominated performance.
“When I cast him initially, it was just before Philadelphia was coming out, and Forrest Gump had not come out, so he hadn’t won the Oscars and so forth,” Howard recalled. “And I had friends of mine, serious showbusiness friends, saying, ‘Apollo 13? Tom Hanks? It’s a true story, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah.'”
Because Hanks’ most memorable turns at the time had been in the likes of Big, A League of Their Own, Splash, The ‘Burbs, and Turner & Hooch, the filmmaker’s pals couldn’t quite wrap their heads around it. “Are you doing a comedy version, or some kind of Monty Python spin on this or something?” they asked him. “I said, ‘No, no, no, he’s going to play the astronaut’. They were sceptical a little bit, until they saw it.”
When they, and everyone else, did finally see it, they witnessed the best movie of Howard’s career so far, and it’s probably still the best one he’s ever made. Ed Harris was the only cast member to be shortlisted for an Oscar, and Howard was shocked that he didn’t make the ‘Best Director’ shortlist, but any concerns that he or Hanks were ill-suited to the material instantly evaporated.
That said, we’d still love to see the alternate version of Apollo 13 where the star is mugging for the cameras, and Howard goes full Monty Python, just for shits and giggles.
