RON HOWARD ON HIS TIFF FILM ‘EDEN,' VIGGO'S ‘THIRTEEN LIVES' COMMENTS, JD VANCE EVOLVING INTO TRUMP'S POLARIZING VEEP CANDIDATE, AND HOW BEING CHANGEABLE HAS SUSTAINED A 65-YEAR CAREER: Q&A
EXCLUSIVE: It doesn’t happen often, but Ron Howard is here in Toronto today to unveil at TIFF his new film Eden. What’s unusual for the Oscar winner whose films have grossed billions, is that the film is up for grabs for distribution as an acquisition title. Eden might seem a close cousin to his harrowing Thai rescue film Thirteen Lives, but this one has a sinister edge unusual for Howard. Based on a true story, Eden stars Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Bruehl, Ana de Armas, Toby Wallace and Felix Kammerer as the members of three parties who flee post-WWI civilization to start over and build paradise on the Galapagos Islands. It devolves into a Lord of the Flies battle to survive the elements, and each other. Eden‘s World Premiere is set for 5:45PM tonight at Roy Thomson Hall.
From Eden coming to TIFF as an acquisitions title, to its primal premise, the film seems a departure for you. But watching the raw geographical location and narrative thrust, I was reminded me of your last big feature Thirteen Lives. Have you become a survivalist?
Ron Howard: Starting out a while ago with Apollo 13, I’ve been gravitating toward these kinds of stories based on real events. Where characters are really pressure tested and it reveals a lot about them. I think one of the reasons people find this one a little surprising is that here, the characters are so layered and complex, that the choices they made that we play out in the film are intense and shocking. They’re utterly human. It is a lot of fun to follow the events as the conflict unfolds.
It is a thriller, and part of that suspense is wondering who’s going to survive and why. This true story was so full of that. It is based on two wildly different accounts of the same unsolved mystery. As you delve into it, it certainly falls into that category of stranger than fiction.
How did you find your way into this?
Howard: I encountered this story about 15 years ago, on a family trip to the Galapagos. It’s a place I’d always wanted to go, since first seeing pictures of the wildlife, the iguanas and the unusual birds, while flipping through a National Geographic magazine at age eight or nine. I always wanted to go, and finally did. It exceeded all my expectations. There, I encountered this story. It was so fascinating to me that I just began reading whatever I could about the three units of people who chose to try to go off the grid and reinvent their lives at a time when the world was going through tremendous turmoil. They were rejecting that as individual groups and thought they could make over their lives and start anew in the Galapagos.
And it turned out that the most dangerous factor was not Mother Nature, it was human nature. This story just unfolded in a very classical, dramatic and ultimately suspenseful way. I could not get it out of my mind, but 15 years is a long time. I believed in it. I kept reading, I kept thinking about it, but I also knew it was unusual for me. Noah Pink was one of the creators of Genius and the first season on Albert Einstein. We worked very closely, and I told him about this story. He asked if he could try taking a shot at writing it on spec because he shared my fascination. I would slip the script to friends, just, what do you think of this?
And they kept sort of saying, Ron, you’ve got to do this. It felt like the time for the story had come, that people could relate to it and even empathize with these characters, this very eccentric group of people. You’ve seen the movie. I didn’t turn my back on their eccentricities. There are places where it’s humorous, which is okay because it’s organic and coming out of the characters. But a lot of those same qualities wind up being threatening and dangerous to others, by the end of the movie. It also offered such fantastic opportunities for great performances.
I guess the comp for Eden might be Mosquito Coast and Lord of the Flies, this collision of damaged people trying to survive and get the upper hand over one another. You've got the couple played by Daniel Bruehl and Sydney Sweeney. He's got PTSD from WWI, and they try to build a family in their vision of paradise. Then you’ve got Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby, these high-minded elitists, she trying to will away her multiple sclerosis and he writing theories he believes will make him famous. And then there is this self-proclaimed baroness played by Ana de Armas, who plans to build a luxury hotel. She's accompanied by two young men who are her sexual playthings and servants, played by Toby Wallace and Felix Kammerer from All Quiet on the Western Front. These clans clash.
Howard: I’d like people to see the movie first, but you go back into the research and people will be blown away by how accurate our framing of these people actually is and the events that unfold. This is such a classic story. Everybody went for a different reason. One family may be the most relatable, and they're going because the world just doesn’t make sense to them anymore, and they can’t afford to live there, and they’re running away. It’s a pioneer story, but in the most extreme way. If you just type in ‘off the grid,' it’s one of the most visited sites on the internet or a reason. The period during and after WWI and WWII, things were just so dire around the world. Their reasons for escaping that are very relatable.
Their level of preparedness, we might question, but there are a lot of things you can question about these characters, but they did it. They did it. Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby pairing Dr. Ritter and Dora Strauch, they were philosophers trying to prove a thesis, by example. And of course, ego’s driving that as well. He wants to be the next Nietzsche, the next great philosopher. So there is arrogance to go with tremendous intellect. The Baroness played by Ana de Armas is a very modern woman. In today’s era, she might be a powerful entrepreneur. Back then, she was blocked at every turn, and I think out of desperation and anger and rage and maybe some mental instability, she decided that this was going to be her path. And she had read about Dr. Ritter, living this Robinson Crusoe life. She wasn’t interested in proving anything other than she should be a global star by launching an elite resort for millionaires. Only she believed in her mission. I think we can find them amusing. We can relate to them or not, but you can empathize with all of their agendas. It’s what happens when they get there and find they can’t run from themselves. They want to reinvent their lives, but they can’t reinvent themselves so easily, particularly in this gauntlet they’ve subjected themselves to.
This collision of personalities and lifestyles all led to this mystery of what happened when they went off the grid and half of them died, suspiciously vanished and never to be seen again. It was fascinating to piece all that together with Noah and the cast, take what is known and more or less agreed upon and surmise what else might’ve happened. And create a really interesting period thriller with contemporary sensibilities.
Law's Dr. Ritter is a contradiction. If he wanted to live this idyllic private life, why would he write everything down and put it in a mailbox on the beach? His dispatches became a sensation in European newspapers, and then he took umbrage when admirers showed up. Is he a narcissist?
Howard: Totally, he's a complete hypocrite, but again, their lives are full of paradoxes, and it's what is so strong about the story and one of the reasons it wouldn’t leave me. I love human interest stories, human behavior, and then I love finding great actors to bring it to the screen. These characters are so full, so layered and complicated, but they’re also in some instances, paradoxical, hypocritical, and misguided mental health could be a factor. Physical health certainly is. It’s this great combination, a bit like a season of Survivor, but getting voted off the island is a much more dangerous thing in our case.
One of Daniel Bruehl’s best performances came in your race car film Rush. How long have you guys been discussing doing this together?
Howard: I mentioned it to him on the press junket for Rush, that I had this story, making notes and at that time, I was even writing some of it myself. I eventually realized that I didn’t have enough time and I could do better. Thank God Noah came to the rescue with his spec script that got the movie made. I remember talking to Daniel about it. He was a little too young for the part back then, but he’s such a powerhouse actor. And 11 years later, I called him and said, remember that project we talked about? I think now is the time.
He said yes right away?
Howard: Yes. I really wouldn’t move forward without a cast. This is an indie movie, and that is about putting together a team, not just getting people to raise their hands when you hire through the studio system. I wouldn’t move forward unless I had people who were creative enough, committed enough and courageous enough to take on these characters, and were turned on by the idea. And I found such an exciting group to work with. Really, it was challenging. The schedule was tight, budget was tight. Everybody was there because they wanted to be, on a creative level. And I felt very supported as a filmmaker by these tremendously talented people throwing themselves into this project as they did. It was very exciting. But due to the intensity of the shoot, it was one of these things, Mike, where literally every day we were doing a scene that was potentially very memorable, challenging for everyone, but creatively exciting. And so that really kept us going.
It sure looked like a rough shoot, which was how I was left feeling watching Thirteen Lives. You felt the hardships and the challenges of a location with harsh climate and weather. What lessons did you learn on Thirteen Lives that made this shoot bearable for your cast and crew?
Howard: With both Thirteen Lives and now with Eden, I’m really glad I got to make them at this point in my life with all of these very arduous, challenging cinematic experiences behind me. Going all the way back to Backdraft or the weightlessness in Apollo 13 and other things like that. Those accrued experiences are valuable. They don’t provide all of the answers because each time you’re coming up with something new. On Thirteen Lives, the caves were a tremendous challenge. The challenge was met by very ambitious actors led by Vigo Mortenson and Colin Farrell, who said, we want to do all the diving ourselves. That made it so possible for me to really put the audience alongside these guys in these caves. We built them, but they were caves nonetheless, and we created them to convey as much of intensity and integrity and verisimilitude as we could. It was similar here. I had been in the actual cave where Margaret gave birth, with wild dogs around her. I’ve been there in the Galapagos. I recreated that scene. It was a different kind of challenge, but incredibly intense, emotionally and physically. For Sydney Sweeney, it was over a hundred degrees the day we shot those scenes.
And we had to deal with animals. We had snake wranglers. And hour before we shot, they came and started looking for the poisonous snakes. And they kept looking all day long and they found a lot of them. Sometimes we’d have to stop if they were too close, before they could catch them and very humanely transport them to a safe place. But we were shooting in Queensland, in areas where it’s pretty infested with poisonous insects and snakes.
Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby were so dedicated. Similar to Viggo and Colin wanting to do all the diving, they wanted to actually live where the Ritters lived, on that set. And the only problem is that when the company left, the Creatures of the Night would move in, and there was no way we could allow them to be there on their own. I had to talk them off of that one.
But the cast similarly did a lot of research in this case, tougher, because while there is all that Hancock footage…
You mean where they were visited by a man who filmed them in their wild paradise?
Howard: That was the real Allan Hancock, of Hancock Park, who visited and photographed them. He was an explorer, and he used his wealth in that way, and he chronicled them while they were there. You can find his footage online. It’s fascinating. Some of it we use at the end of the movie. We used everything we could from the different accounts. It was a big story in newspapers at the time because it was so sensational and juicy. In my mind, it still is juicy.
On Thirteen Lives, Viggo Mortenson was incensed the movie went straight to streaming and not theatrical first. I thought it was the best film I'd seen the year it was released and should have gotten the accolades. You come here to Toronto with a movie seeking distribution, which is unusual for you but part of the pivoting landscape in the way movies get made and seen. You and your Imagine partner Brian Grazer once had a home at Universal where you'd set the next blockbuster with comparative ease. How did Thirteen Lives going straight to streaming sit with you?
Howard: I love Viggo’s pride in Thirteen Lives, his passion. And sure, I saw it play on a big screen for large audiences, and it played beautifully. It was my highest testing movie ever. In another time, I would’ve loved to have seen it play as long as it possibly could on big screens. But times are changing, and I believe audiences dictate this more than studios do. I had a conversation many years ago with Martin Scorsese and he said, well, sure, things are changing. Because in the beginning, it was a Nickelodeon and everybody watched it and it cranked and you had to look through the eyepiece in order to see the movie. It’s ever evolving, and it’s still a new medium that is very technologically driven. It’s really up to audiences to demand and prove where the value is behind these stories.
So sure, I love the big screen experience. I’m excited as hell to see Eden in Toronto. I am very proud of it. It plays great on a big screen, but my way of life is built around finding stories that I am excited about, and telling them. I’ve worked all my life to be prepared so that I can cinematically and emotionally take a movie wherever it needs to go, to fulfill its potential. Whether that’s the edginess and darkness that people are surprised by in Eden, or the playfulness and fun of The Grinch or the seriousness of A Beautiful Mind. The thing I care about most is having the opportunity and the resources to go do the job well. What thrills me the most is the collaboration in front of and behind the camera that makes that possible. Both movies that you’re talking about, it’s largely because of the subject matter, but they’re both supremely memorable examples of talented artists, fully committed. So I certainly want audiences as many people as possible to see everything that I ever do, but mostly I want to get to make it and then put it out there and ask audiences to find it.
Responding to a changing marketplace and veering into documentaries has led to great content. What has the willingness to be changeable at this point in your long career awakened in you that might not have happened had you remained in that comfortable studio cocoon?
Howard: That’s really interesting, let me just think about that for a second. Yeah. Okay. So the documentaries are something that I feared getting into. I always admired documentaries, but I was intimidated by them. Brian dipped his toe in sooner than I did and had really good experiences and encouraged me to get into it. And when I did, I found it so creatively gratifying. But I also felt like this is also infusing my scripted work with another kind of understanding and both cinematic and human elements. It is shifting my perspective a little bit, and it changed the way I direct certain kinds of scenes with actors.
And yet I’ve also been able to bring much more of myself to the documentaries than I ever even realized I could, even when I’m doing them while I’m still directing a scripted narrative. I have talked to people like Spike Lee and the late Jonathan Demme and Marty Scorsese a little bit about how they do it. I’m not the first person to engage in that. They said similar things, about how it’s really exciting [to do both at the same time]. Marty says they’re all just films. They’re all just films, and they have different expectations from the audience and different cinematic rules that you can either follow or break. But it’s all filmmaking. I agree with that. The changes in the business, Mike, it’s so interesting that you mention it because the globalization of cinema is incredibly exciting and important. I think that really raises the bar for all of us.
So that’s one answer. And I think that does come along at a time where a guy like me who loves the medium I share with Brian, and one of the things we share is this curiosity about people, situations, circumstances, and stories and how they can all align for an audience. We’ve always had that in common. While I recognize that the economics of the business are under stress, technology is leaving delivery systems doubt in investors’ minds, and even in the audience’s minds, it is pushing filmmakers.
Sure, there are companies that are playing it very, very safe with their investment dollars, but there are also others responding by saying, let’s help get something surprising made. Let’s get something original made, and let’s build a business model that’s quite different, but services that creative goal and the audience drawn to those kinds of stories. It raises the bar in important ways to people who want to meet the challenge. And Brian and I fall into that category.
Francis Coppola told me that at a time he was flush with The Godfather money, his protégé George Lucas was dealing at Universal with top brass that didn't want to release American Graffiti. Francis, who was a producer, told those executives they should be on their knees kissing George's feet and if they didn't want to release American Graffiti, he would buy it off them. They changed their mind because of a test screening and the rest is history. Possible that it has always been hard, and now it's just a different set of obstacles and challenges?
Howard: I think you just said a mouthful. There are always challenges to be met, and I’ve witnessed some of those transitions. And this one is, I’d say kind of similar to the ‘70s in a way, in that it’s calling for filmmakers to find other ways to excite an audience, while some of the traditional paths still will work as well. But by the way, I know from firsthand witnesses about the Francis story, that the only thing you left out is that apparently he took his checkbook out in front of studio executives and said, I will write you a check. But otherwise you nailed that story.
Cinema is always a circumstance that requires a big investment, whether it’s hundreds of thousands or millions or hundreds of millions. It’s a huge investment of time and energy. And so it brings with it that need to provide an intersection between art and commerce. But audiences, the last answer to your question, by the way, is that audiences are ever more demanding. And sure they have certain things that they want to see. Maybe they want to see sequels and revisit a similar set of characters over and over again. That’s fine. But they also will show up for something new and exciting in ways that make sense to them. And the business has to figure out how to reach them in different ways. I’ve decided that as a storyteller, I am just glad that’s my primary job, find a story I’m passionate about for whatever reason. In this case, I just found in these characters and what they’ve put themselves through in a fairly short, intense period of time, I found connections that I thought a lot of people in an audience could relate to.
They’re not going to relate to all the characters, but there's somebody in there that they’re going to align with or relate to, whether they feel it themselves or know somebody like those characters. And I think it’s one of the reasons that this story has endured in the Galapagos. You go anywhere and start talking about it, and everybody’s got an opinion and a theory. I listened to a lot of those, and it helped inform the movie as well. So it’s been a really fascinating creative journey, and I am excited to share it with audiences at long, long last.
We mentioned American Graffiti and Coppola, who told me he wished they'd sold him that film because the winnings would have allowed him to buy MGM. You look at where that film’s success took George Lucas, and how it helped you in that awkward transition from boyhood to adulthood, and led to Happy Days and then directing. The unpredictability in Hollywood is wonderful, the idea everybody gets out of bed with a puncher's chance to change their life, even if you can never predict how and why it happens…
Howard: It’s so right. I was a kid who had grown up in the business and had a lot of experience, but all those experiences were on sound stages and back lots. And they were with a very small, highly unionized group of people. And here was this movie being made in San Francisco and Marin County with a lot of people who looked like hippies, and more women than I’d ever seen on a crew before, ever. And everyone was a movie lover. They were all coming out of film school and had an excitement for the medium. And even the way George was shooting, it was just completely revolutionary. The light levels, the use of two cameras, the improvisation he encouraged; and I will give myself credit for being thrilled by it in the moment. I could recognize this was exciting. This was another way to do the work that I’d been doing all my life, and I welcomed it.
And boy, when we were doing Happy Days, they were trying to sell the Paramount lot to the cemetery next door. I remember this, and that the movie bosses weren’t even there. They were in a building in Beverly Hills somewhere making a couple of movies a year. And then Evans turned that around and Diller came along and things really evolved. And then so did the business because of cable, VHD and then DVDs, the globalization of cinema. All of these things led to exciting periods. And now that’s shifting again. I’m grateful that there’s still a demand for cinema, whether that’s short form, super long form or the two hour movie version.
Do you have to remind yourself to remain changeable, when you've had as much success as you've had?
Howard: I want to be changeable, always. If you look at my filmography, the one thing that you could say is, well, here’s somebody who didn’t want to do the same thing over and over again. Maybe I had done that as an actor on a TV series, but for me, it’s also my nature. These filmmaking experiences, they get me out of the house. They get me into the world. I’m not necessarily a person who would be hiking, climbing, diving, going weightless, without these movies, nor would I be necessarily learning as much as I learned by making them. And again, also this extension into the documentaries, which I found I really, really love.
A question about Hillbilly Elegy. You made an underdog story about a poor young man from a dysfunctional family with a grandmother who would not let him fail. That is JD Vance, who is Trump's vice presidential choice in the upcoming election. He has evolved from that young man into a polarizing, volatile conservative. I'm sure people have said to you, ‘Ron, what have you unleashed?' How do you process that?
Howard: Well, we didn’t talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie because I was interested in his upbringing and that survival tale. That’s what we mostly focused on. However, based on the conversations that we had during that time, I just have to say I’m very surprised and disappointed by much of the rhetoric that I’m reading and hearing. People do change, and I assume that’s the case. Well, it’s on record. When we spoke around the time that I knew him, he was not involved in politics or claimed to be particularly interested. So that was then. I think the important thing is to recognize what’s going on today and to vote. And so that’s my answer. It’s not really about a movie made five or six years ago. It is, but we need to respond to what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling now, and vote responsibly, whatever that is., We must participate. That's my answer.
I just made the rounds in LA with reps and studio execs. I’ve never felt such a level of bleakness as now, this hangover from the double strikes that essentially shut down the business for a year. It has hurt everybody, made jobs scarce and prompted contraction and cutbacks. I see you as an optimist. What gets you excited in this difficult moment, and what do you see as light at the end of this dark tunnel?
Howard: Yeah. Well, creatively, technology is advancing in ways that open up possibilities for filmmakers. It has been that way for decade, but it has accelerated. And there may be some efficiencies that come with that. My optimism lies in the fact that that people love stories. And anything cinematic, short form or long form or anything in between, is a great way to grab people’s attention and hold it. Those of us who dedicate our lives to facilitating that, I think we will always find ways to make a living.
Who knows what the economics will be? It is all going global. And while I don’t live in California and I’m not involved in the politics there, I’m encouraging the state to compete in terms of inducements and support. I don’t think Hollywood can just ride on the fact that it remains the real creative epicenter. It is losing that pudding. And there are a lot of people struggling who can bear witness to that. It’s difficult to see happen. And I know a lot of those folks, so I don’t have a quick answer but I do encourage Californians to push for these competitive inducements to compete with London and Atlanta and Australia and Toronto and Spain. And other countries and regions that are really doing everything they can to attract production.
Well, I’m sort of sensing the through-line of your career counts on the face there will always be an insatiable appetite for stories well told. And as long as you can find those stories, and even if you have to shoo away poisonous snakes, you’re going to be okay.
Howard: Characterize me that way, as optimistic. And yeah, I’ll sign off on that.