‘Far and Away’: The movie moment Ron Howard cherishes the most
Ron Howard has experienced many career highs. He won two Academy Awards in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind, directed a Star Wars movie, and received not one but two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Accolades and franchises aside, though, Howard has made some of the most crowd-pleasing movies of the past four decades, from the historical drama Apollo 13 to the live-action holiday classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
It’s not bad for a former child star who, at one point, seemed doomed to play a bland, freckle-faced teen in the sitcom Happy Days for the rest of his life. Howard has proven time and again that you don’t have to be a tyrant or an eccentric auteur to succeed in Hollywood, and it’s earned him legions of fans and box office receipts throughout his career. There are plenty of things he could have chosen when asked on an ‘Ask Me Anything’ Reddit thread whether he had a specific career highlight, but instead of answering diplomatically with a list of options, he was hyper-focused.
“[P]robably the filmmaking moment I will most cherish was a moment we were doing a movie Far and Away,” he said.
Released in 1992, Far and Away is a two-and-a-half-hour romantic western starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as Irish immigrants who travel to the US in hopes of settling on free land in Oklahoma. They get side-tracked in Boston, where they struggle to avoid living on the streets. They eventually separate, but in the final section of the film, they reconnect during a dramatic competition based on true events.
In the late 19th century, the US government took land from Native Americans and offered it, for free, to settlers. To win the land, the prospective owners would race to plant their flag on the property. In the final scene of Far and Away, Cruise and Kidman’s characters do just this, and reconnect romantically in the process.
Howard recalled how he and his production team had to use 13 film cameras to shoot the sequence, and, without the use of CGI, were relying on real horses and real people, many of whom were civil war and revolutionary war reenactors with wagons and costumes to match. Even his father, Rance, was in the scene.
“It was dawn,” Howard said. “[E]verybody was coming into place, our thirteen cameras were set, and I just had this moment, because the reason I had chosen that as something to build a movie around is because I had three ancestors who had ridden in it.”
None of his relatives had won land, he explained, but they had all left with a story to pass down to their ancestors. Howard’s father had told him those stories, and now here they both were, acting it out on a grand scale for a major Hollywood production.
“[T]his is as close as stepping into a time machine and going back as I could ever hope to experience,” Howard reflected. “So, I don’t know that much of anything will ever exceed that.”
Many have accused Howard’s films of being overly sentimental at times, but the melodrama of this scene can easily be excused.
