The unlikely Ron Howard movie inspired by ‘Citizen Kane’: “I loved the emotional tone”
He might be one of the highest-grossing directors of all time and a pair of Hollywood’s steadiest and most reliable hands, but there can’t be many people who’ve made an abundance of comparisons between Ron Howard and Orson Welles.
They both started directing in their 20s… and that’s about it. Welles had already taken the media world by storm through his daring stage productions and panic-inducing radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, before his feature-length debut, Citizen Kane, premiered less than a week before he turned 26.
Howard was younger when Grand Theft Auto hit cinemas in June 1977, but a 23-year-old former child actor helming a cheap and cheerful B-movie under the guidance of Roger Corman isn’t quite the same thing as an instant masterpiece and one of the greatest films of all time.
Still, that doesn’t mean one can’t learn from the other, with Howard channelling Citizen Kane under the most unlikely circumstances. While the versatile filmmaker has helmed plenty of powerhouse dramas during his six-decade career behind the camera, the shadow of Welles’ influential classic loomed largest over a far-flung fantasy that saw Jim Carrey buried under a mountain of furry green prosthetics.
What do Citizen Kane and How the Grinch Stole Christmas have in common? At first glance, absolutely nothing. However, production designer Michael Corenblith would vehemently disagree after explaining to SyFy that Welles’ monolithic motion picture directly inspired the titular grump’s hideout.
Corenblith looked towards “a dejected Kane being alone in the grand interiors of Xanadu, a small and lonely presence in a big room” to inspire the design of the Grinch’s lair: “In addition to the scale, I loved the emotional tone that the exalted black and white cinematography of Gregg Toland brought to those scenes and proposed that, unlike the optimistically polychromatic world of the Whos, the palette for the Grinch’s lair would be both simple and dark.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone watching Carrey parading around his character’s cavernous abode and immediately recognising the fingerprints of Citizen Kane, but if a movie wants to replicate the atmosphere and aesthetic of another film, why not use one of the best ever as the blueprint?
Howard’s filmography boasts several chamber pieces and character explorations, such as Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, The Missing, and Thirteen Lives, to name just a few, but it was only How the Grinch Stole Christmas that looked towards Welles’ staggering first flick as a touchstone.
He’s never been the most predictable filmmaker in terms of which genres he’ll dive into and when, but still, Citizen Kane hardly jumps out as an obvious reference point for a whimsical family-friendly movie that saw its leading man trained how to withstand torture by CIA operatives so that he could turn up on the set every day as the Grinch without losing his mind.
