The life-affirming moment Ron Howard’s idol praised one of his movies: “Made me feel great”
Any director is going to have those few moments where they wonder if they are in over their head or not. It takes a lot to get anything from the script to the screen, and if everything is working out exactly the way you want it to, there’s no telling whether the audience is going to embrace it with open arms or sit in the theatre confused at what they’ve just witnessed.
While it’s hard to believe that someone like Ron Howard would have that kind of problem, it’s almost comforting to know that even some of the film legends need some type of reassurance every once in a while.
But, really, Howard seemed to know the ins and outs of what people wanted to see ever since his teens. Whether you grew up watching his take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas or knew him when he was still acting on The Andy Griffith Show, Howard always knew how to get ot the heart of every story he told, but that didn’t mean that every one of his movies had to be to everyone’s taste.
There are some genuine tearjerkers in his back catalogue like Backdraft and stunning character studies in A Beautiful Mind, but there are always going to be movies like Cocoon that are either high art in the world of cinema or one of the most perplexing movies ever put to screen, depending on who you’re talking to. Even with a few successes under his belt, though, Howard knew that he was in for a gamble when making Apollo 13.
A script about astronauts getting stuck in orbit and having to abort their mission needed a set of delicate hands, and Howard knew that he was going to need everything to go absolutely right. No one needed to worry about the acting with total pros like Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon, but the idea of filming from inside zero gravity would either appear like one of the magical scenes in a drama or look like a total gimmick.
And while Howard did manage to get a great reception to the film, the only one that mattered to him was getting a thumbs-up from Gene Wilder, saying, “Look at his range. I met him. He saw me at a restaurant. He was very complimentary of Apollo 13. And he said an interesting thing. He said: ‘You know what I liked about that movie? It’s a whole film about a man who didn’t make it to the moon.’ He was sort of patting me on the back. He made me feel great.”
Then again, anyone who got the respect of Wilder in the film world was on the same level as getting knighted half the time. Wilder’s history in Hollywood is so omnipresent that years of cinema were etched in the lines of his face, and for someone taking a gamble on a movie all about a catastrophe in orbit, having a film icon celebrate your success was enough to get anyone to keep going.
But Wilder knew it wasn’t about how outlandish the story was to tell. He was more interested in the kind of emotion you could put into it, and if he could make people laugh alongside while playing with the macabre side of cinema on Young Frankenstein or defining someone’s childhood in the role of Willy Wonka, that was everything he could have asked for.
And for anyone even thinking about starting a career in the film industry, that should be the lesson that they should take first. Sure, it might be about creating magic onscreen and making sure that audiences leave stunned by the impressive visuals, but no good movie relies on the explosions or the massive scale of everything. It’s about creating characters with flesh and blood that people want to see.
