By Gill Pringle
“It’s a close family, and it still is,” Ron Howard replies when FilmInk mentions that we recently interviewed his daughter – actress, Bryce Dallas Howard – about her latest film, Pete’s Dragon. “I was over at her house last night, and she’s excited because the reaction to Pete’s Dragon has been good. She’s feeling very good about that. It’s been a huge year for her with Jurassic World too. Her husband, Seth, is working, and the kids are good, so things are alright.”
Would the busy director (whose big budget thriller, Inferno, is in cinemas this week) like to work with his daughter at some stage? “I’d like to,” Howard replies. “We’ve done some advertising stuff. We did a project with Canon [Project Imagin8ion, pictured above], where she directed a film that I was the supervisor of, and it was fun just doing publicity and things like that with her. Although, my joke about it is this. I’ve directed all kinds of temperance, all kinds of actors, at every level, every age, every personality type, and I’ve never had any of them, no matter how difficult they might be, roll their eyes at me when I give them direction…and I just have this fear that it could just be in the DNA of our relationship as a father and a daughter. But the real reality of it is that I have tried to, and she’s never available! So someday, someday…or maybe that’s when I’ll go back to acting. She’s interested in directing…she’s focusing on the acting, but she’s a good director, and I’m sure that she’ll be doing that as well.”
That’s right: Ron Howard – who started out as an actor on the much loved TV series, The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, before going on to direct hits like Splash, Cocoon, Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code, and many, many more – is not averse to getting in front of the camera again. “I would like to act again,” he says. “I would do that now. My kids are all grown, but every time that an opportunity comes along, I’m busier than ever because of the way that the industry is transforming. There are just more and more creative opportunities, so the economics are kind of crazy and theatre owners don’t know what to do, and the cable owners don’t know what to do, and the studios are struggling from a business standpoint, but creatively I get to work on a movie like Inferno, or Rush, or In The Heart Of The Sea, and then I can turn around and do things like the Jay-Z documentary [Made In America] and the Beatles documentary [Eight Days A Week]. I’m involved in Mars, a 6-hour half-documentary and half-scripted mini-series for National Geographic about going to Mars, where I found myself interviewing Elon Musk. I’m getting ready to direct the first hour of a ten-hour mini-series about Einstein [Genius], and I’m developing scripts for my next features [including The Girl Before] as well. It’s an incredibly dynamic, creatively stimulating, time. It’s really been great.”
Inferno is in cinemas now.
