The beautiful foreign language movie Ron Howard watched “over and over again”
Ron Howard‘s career is one of the finer points in Hollywood history. The child star, turned actor then blockbuster director represents perhaps the ultimate butterfly moment for Tinseltown. Moving from a larval state into the cacoon of Happy Days before unfurling his wings as a fully-formed filmmaker is the kind of evolution that many stars wished they had partaken in.
Unlike his roles in The Andy Griffith and *Happy Days, as Opie and Richie Cunningham, respectively, Howard’s directorial palette is anything but predictable. Navigating a labyrinth of genres with near-surgical precision, Howard’s four-decade-and-counting career is one of the mountainous peaks and huge box office numbers.
Huge hits like Apollo 13 made him a household name as a director, while the whimsical charm of The Grinch provided sweet relief. But he has even gone as far as to bag some Academy Awards too, picking up the coveted ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ gongs in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind. It would appear that Howard has an uncanny understanding of cinema that can only be gleaned from decades inside the moviemaking machine.
But, like any filmmaker worth his weight in gold, much of what Howard has learned is not from being on set but by watching the movies of other directors. Inspiration and influence can strike at any time, but for those who truly dore cinema, they more than often arrive when sitting in one’s local theatre with a warm bag of popcorn in their lap. In a feature for A.Frame, Howard reflected on five movies which he believed directly contributed to his success as a director.
In the list where some of the more obvious nods, such as Jack Nicholson’s One Flew Over The cuckoo’s Nest, David lean’s magnetic The Bridge on the River Kwai and lesser-expected entry for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. But perhaps the least well-known addition was that of Jan Troell’s 1971 movie The Emigrants.
And, it would seem, it was a shock for Howard, too: “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.” For Howard, it showed the purest aspects of cinema, using moving image to convey a sense of emotion without having to rely on language as a conduit to that connection: “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 picture operates within the normality of everyday living and how, within these presets, extraordinary feelings can be shared. As Howard explains: “It dramatises 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. 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. It’s beautifully acted by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann.”
Across the decades, there have undoubtedly been hundreds of movies that have been gazed upon by the director, but this one deserved repeated viewings: “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.”
Finding humanity in the simple expression of connected emotions is what makes good cinema great. Howard tries to implement in all his work, utilising character development and precise pacing to deliver narratives that feel real to his audience. Even in the era of franchise dominance, Howard’s films remain singular, a testament to his enduring influence on the cinematic landscape, and without movies like The Emigrants there is a good chance he wouldn’t have got there.
