The movies Ron Howard hated making: “There could be friction”
The established career of Ron Howard is packed full of laughs. Whether it is his first role as Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, his boy next door charm as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days or even his brief, humorous cameo in Only Murders in the Building in front of the camera, Howard produced a lot more jovial moments than he did pathos-drenched scenes. However, when he got behind the camera, things shifted.
It’s not entirely unexpected. To be in charge of a whole production is to be constantly in demand, moving from set to set, scene to scene, making decisions that aren’t always well-received and doing so with only one focus in mind: get the movie in the can. It’s not an MO that allows for much fun outside of the task at hand. It’s meant that, over the years, not all of Howard’s pictures have been enjoyable experiences.
When trying to recruit Michael Keaton for his comedy caper Gung Ho, Howard attempted to employ a personal tactic and appeal to the actor’s desire to enjoy his time on set. Howard, who had already worked with Keaton on The Night Shift, took a shot and laid out just how fun it would be to work together again. However, in doing so, he also revealed two movies that he found particularly difficult.
“I said, ‘The last couple of movies— Splash and Cocoon — have been good experiences, but they weren’t always fun because they were so hard to do,’ ” Howard recalled explaining to Keaton, “‘I’d really like to do this movie, and I’d like to do it with you because I think we’d have a lot of laughs. If it means anything to you, I’d appreciate it.’” Keaton would join Howard for the picture and add a new string to the director’s growing bow.
However, it’s perhaps more interesting to peer into why those two movies, two films many would consider among Howard’s best, were so difficult to work on. Firstly, it should be noted that in later years, Howard has recognised how pivotal the two pictures were in his career. He told the Harvard Business Review initially discussing The Night Shift: “Splash was Brian’s idea too. There was something about the two of us—Baby Boomers, me in my late 20s, him 30, very different guys but with similar sensibilities creatively and tonally—that clicked. The business was at a tipping point generationally; people were asking, ‘Who’s gonna tell us what this new audience wants?’ And we had just enough credits, experience, and chutzpah to push ourselves to the front of the line. Those first two successes were undeniably meaningful.”
“Then I did Cocoon, not with Brian but with the very established producing team behind Jaws and The Sting. It wound up being nominated for some Oscars and Golden Globes and was, like Splash, a top-ten-grossing movie without known movie stars. People thought I knew something, and I had to pretend I agreed with them.”
It points at the real reason Howard found the directing of both pictures so difficult — inexperience. The two movies put Howard out into the big bad world of directing and did so with a brutal dose of reality. Splash may have been a success, but it was also scoffed at by a large group of actors who were offered the lead role. “If you were a big-name guy and got an offer for a movie directed by Mayberry’s Opie Taylor for Walt Disney, you weren’t going to leap at it,” noted lead Tom Hanks after suggesting why he got the call for his first starring role.
Cocoon may have come later in the director’s fledgling career, but he was still wildly inexperienced and now dealing with even bigger stars, “I was suddenly working with people who’d had decades of success, though most of them weren’t household names,” Howard explained. It was this balance of managing the cast that would prove the most difficult for the director. However, a term or two spent coaching kids basketball would give him the tools he needed to get the job done.
Noting how he would push the skillsets of certain players to achieve certain goals, Howard continued: “Maybe one who couldn’t dribble still had the footwork and coordination to be a defensive specialist and build confidence there. I would do the same thing with actors around their character, their scene. It wasn’t perfect. There could be friction.”
The wealth of experience was a tough nut to crack for Howard, who shared: “Wilford Brimley was tough on me, for example. I had to deal with him very differently than I dealt with anybody else, and it was sometimes unpleasant. But as a great improvisational actor, he also elevated the tone and brought a naturalism and an honesty to Cocoon.” Like any good director, he adapted: “I recognised that was tricky but also exactly what that sci-fi, seriocomic movie needed, and I made it my business to navigate that and not let him make the set too toxic for the others to flourish.”
They may not have been the most fun to endure, but there is no doubt that working on the sets of Splash and Cocoon helped to shape Howard into the director he is today: a well-respected, box-office-busting Academy Award winner.
