“I tried very hard”: how two failed movies and a 30-year odyssey led Ron Howard into a disaster
Passion projects can be a tricky thing, because there are no guarantees that an audience will give a shit about something a filmmaker has been nurturing for years, if not decades, with Ron Howard finding out what can happen when you end up being haunted by the ghost you’ve refused to give up.
It wasn’t a specific passion project, though, but more of a passion genre. Since the late 1970s, Howard had dreamed of mounting a particular kind of production, and two previous attempts had gone up in smoke, but the third time did not mark the charm when he finally got his wish.
Shortly after making his directorial debut on Roger Corman’s Grand Theft Auto, and while he was still being beamed into millions of homes as Happy Days‘ Richie Cunningham, the actor-turned-director tried his hardest to hit the open seas and make a film about the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship that campaigned against whaling and nuclear issues.
“I’ve been fascinated by the drama of the sea, and the way it tests people for a long time,” he admitted, only to fall short at the first hurdle. “I tried very hard to get that movie off the ground, and I wasn’t able to do that.” Not to be deterred, he bided his time, became one of Hollywood’s most recognisable filmmakers, and decided to give it another go.
Howard’s second planned effort, which would have been the ninth feature-length adaptation of Jack London’s novel, The Sea-Wolf, had Jurassic Park‘s David Koepp on scripting duties and Nicolas Cage circling the lead role, but that didn’t come to fruition, either, sending him back to square one.
“I took a serious period of time to prepare and budget and strategize around making Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf,” the two-time Academy Award winner admitted. “But that was too expensive, and the cast didn’t come together in a way that I felt was right for the movie. So that project was also abandoned.”
In a case of being careful what you wish for, Howard finally hit the water when he adapted Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, only for the warning signs to emerge during production when the shoot was briefly shut down by a fatal storm, an ominous and foreboding omen if ever there was one.
Three and a half decades after he’d first thrown his signature hat into the ring to make a movie set on the open water, Howard had managed to tick it off his bucket list. He would have been proud of that, but less so of the period-set epic bombing at the box office, failing to recoup its $100 million budget, and losing the studio a small fortune.
When he first went to space, the former child star helmed the best movie of his career with Apollo 13. When he first went to the ocean, more than 30 years later than he’d liked, all he had to show for it was a critical bust and a commercial disaster, so he’d be better off keeping his feet on dry land.
