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This great Hollywood director helped Tom Hanks catch a mermaid in Splash, fought fires with Kurt Russell and Robert De Niro in Backdraft, went far and away with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, brought astronauts Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton and Tom Hanks safely back to Earth in Apollo 13, got in the ring with Russell Crowe in Cinderella Man, confronted a disgraced president in Frost/Nixon, led Tom Hanks on wild chases in both The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, and won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for A Beautiful Mind.

Hi, I'm Ron Howard.

Welcome to Hollywood's Best Film Directors.

Who's going to be on the show then?

We're doing this interview in one of our offices at Imagine Films in Beverly Hills.

These are the offices that I share with my partner Brian Grazer.

I was born in Duncan, Oklahoma, which was my mom's hometown.

And the reason that I was born in that town was because my dad was in the Air Force.

My mom didn't want to have me at the base hospital.

So I never really lived in Duncan.

But when my dad got out of the Air Force, and he was an actor before he went into it, as was my mother, he went back to work in New York.

That's where we went.

We lived in Queens for a while.

And as luck would have it, I wound up auditioning for a movie that would go to Europe.

It was called "The Journey" and it starred Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr.

And it was an opportunity for all of us to go.

And my parents thought long and hard about it.

My father was going to play a part in the movie as well.

And it just felt like, well, this may be the only chance we ever have to get to Europe.

And we'll take the money and we'll put it in this college fund.

Another thing that we may never ever be able to contribute to beyond this.

And that led me to my first job, 1958, filming in Vienna, Austria.

When we got back, we moved to California because all of television had moved from New York to California.

Soon I was doing TV shows and eventually the Andy Griffith Show and I loved it.

It's been my professional life ever since.

Around the Andy Griffith Show, it was a kind of a foregone conclusion in the grown-ups' minds that I was going to wind up being a director.

And I don't really know why, other than that I was having this early exposure to it.

For my tenth birthday, Andy Griffith and the producer Aaron Rubin gave me an 8mm camera.

I started to play with it a little bit.

My dad really encouraged me.

We went out and made some little movies and things.

But I didn't really lose myself in it.

And then I discovered movies.

And it was probably... It was probably Bonnie and Clyde that was so modern and so visceral and impactful.

And The Graduate.

The Graduate really spoke to me on some sort of generational level, even though I was ten years younger than the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie.

But even though I'd been around movies and television all my life and even thought about directing and watched my dad directing plays and was very aware of the directors who were doing the show, many of whom had actually been actors at the beginning.

But suddenly I began going on these journeys, sitting in the theater, and I realized that the directors were working with this medium in ways that would take me on that journey.

And it really opened my eyes.

And it was so different, of course, from the kind of factory, almost manufacturing process of traditional Hollywood television at that time.

And even the movies were pretty formulaic.

But there was this new sort of expressive quality to what filmmakers like Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn and Seth Ferrelli were doing that really reached me.

And I began to realize that those were filmmakers and they were making something uniquely capable of transporting people.

And I lost myself in movies.

And that's when I really began to seriously think about directing.

And I was probably around 12, 13.

We'll be going public.

My very first day of filming on Grand Theft Auto, which was the day after my 23rd birthday, I was so excited, I was completely adrenalized, and yet immediately began to struggle.

I had a big, long dialogue scene that I had to do.

It wasn't a problem for me as an actor, and I'd had a chance to rehearse it, but the filming was going slowly.

And one of the only things I'd been warned by Roger and everybody else who ever worked with him was that you really had to make your days.

If you didn't get sort of 20 to 30 setups a day completed, you know, you were gonna have a problem with Roger.

And here he was kind of sitting on the couch the first day.

He didn't say anything, but I felt like I was in quicksand and, you know, going under.

And at lunchtime, I thought, "This is it.

I'm gonna get... I'm gonna get canned at lunch on the first day of my very first opportunity, and that's gonna be it."

And I was really depressed.

And the DP, a great guy named Gary Graver, came in and sat down with me, helped me reorganize my afternoon.

And we sailed through that afternoon and really picked up momentum.

And Roger was beaming at the end of the day.

And he never came to visit the set again.

And really, from then on, I honestly just felt like I was kind of born to do this work.

Jenna, after the kiss and you're done, you can throw a little more of a glance through the camera.

Here we go, please.

Grand Theft Auto was well reviewed.

You know, I think people, I think expectations from the critics were low, but we had good reviews and an excellent box office.

The movie cost six hundred two thousand to make.

It grossed over $6,000,000.

And it also wound up being one of the first movies that Roger ever sold to network television because Happy Days was so popular at that time.

And I think it wound up being extremely profitable.

Probably one of the more profitable movies I've ever made.

Cutting.

We cut.

Got it.

Thank you.

Great.

Very good.

Action.

Got it.

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Frost Nixon was a play.

It had just opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London, a small theater.

The reviews were great.

Oh, yeah, but you know, politically, the pressure on me to let them go, it became overwhelming.

So I did it.

I had known Peter Morgan for a year or two because we had talked about working together.

And I had a chance to read the play.

I got very excited about it.

And then I found out that there was a, there was a veritable auction going on for this material.

There were a lot of really interesting film makers vying for it.

And I realized that, you know, despite Academy Awards and box office and all that, this was, if I wanted my shot of this unique material, you know, I was going to have to race for it.

And my wife Sherrill and I literally jumped on a plane and flew to London to see it.

And afterwards I said I will absolutely commit to making this movie.

I know it can be a movie.

I would do it with this cast.

Frank Langella and Michael Sheen were in it and they were fantastic.

I'd make it next.

So with all of those, you know, commitments It was scary to make that sort of a leap, but I just had, I loved the material so much and I had somehow a real sense of it.

Just watching the play of how to make it a movie and let it graduate beyond its sort of theatrical constraints.

Beautiful Mind was a project that my partner Brian Grazer had found and had been developing and it had been moving rather quickly and some other filmmakers had shown a great deal of interest in it.

But something always would go a little wrong, it would get stalled.

And at a certain point I was just finishing up The Grinch and Beautiful Mind had not yet been, you know, launched.

And Brian said, "Well, you know, I don't want to wait on it."

And it's something that the company really wants and I'm passionate about, but you should have a look at this."

And I did, and I immediately said, you know, I will direct it and I had a real point of view about it.

And in a way I had to kind of audition for my partner because it was a true labor of love for him.

And you know, there were lots of interesting filmmakers circling that screenplay by Akiva Goldsman.

And, you know, we launched it.

Commerciality is something that I don't necessarily think I have a great nose for.

And I've made commercial movies, but it's all luck.

It's instinct or something.

I am not a manufacturer.

I don't really know.

I didn't think Apollo 13 would be commercial.

I didn't think Beautiful Mind would be commercial.

I didn't think Cocoon would be commercial.

And these movies all wound up in the top 10 or 15 in the box office for their year.

Sometimes I've had other movies that I thought would be commercial that, you know, didn't do so well.

So I don't think I'm a great prognosticator.

Brian has a pretty good nose for it.

But I just fall in love with a story and a set of characters.

I just sort of see if I think I have something... something really to offer that story, some point of view... that could breathe some life into it.

Backdraft was a real challenge.

But one of the things that drew us all to the project... was the way Greg Wyden, the writer, described fire.

He really made it a character.

Action!

This was an aspect of my job that was vital, yet pretty elusive and mysterious to all of us.

We had really hoped that visual effects could take care of it.

This was the very, very earliest stages of digital effects.

I'd been involved in a shot in Willow that had been sort of the first morphing shot.

And I understood the possibilities of digital effects, yet fire was something that no one had really mastered yet.

And they made some tests and suddenly we realized that digital fire was simply not going to look realistic.

And if we were going to do all this, we had to do it physically.

And we developed a fire laboratory and our physical effects guy, Alan Hall, just began experimenting with different fuels, different behaviors, ways of controlling it, ways of making it safe, ways of making it scary, ways of making it move, spin, all kinds of things.

And 98% of what we have in the movie was physical fire, done on the day, very old school, took a lot of time, but it's just very, very visceral.

And none of it is really digital fire.

Even the visual effects shots are miniatures that ILM did.

Where, again, we were able to build up a volume of fire.

There's a little digital fire just filling in a couple of gaps and a couple of wide shots.

But it was a real physical feat.

And when we wrapped that movie, I was thrilled.

The worst we had was a couple people got their eyebrows singed.

You know, to get through that movie and not have anyone hurt.

There were some near misses.

And I really feel like that we dodged disaster while making that movie.

Cut!

Excellent.

Great.

Thank you.

The casting of Apollo 13, especially for the lead Jim Lovell, was kind of challenging.

The real Jim Lovell looked a lot like Kevin Costner.

And we kind of just kept assuming we should go for Kevin Costner.

We never really could get Kevin Costner to take it so seriously.

He was directing by then.

He was just so busy.

Richard Lovett, agent at CAA, Tom Hanks' agent, my agent, called and said, you know, Tom Hanks loves space.

He's always wanted to play an astronaut.

This is a great story.

And believe it or not, I asked him about it.

He knows all about the Apollo 13 mission.

And Tom had yet to make his big breakthrough in drama.

He was doing Philadelphia at that time.

He's a friend.

We had a great experience on Splash.

You know, we had stayed friendly.

I wanted to talk to him about it.

And eventually, Brian Grazer and I just believed, you know, he understood it, he loved it, he wanted to do it, he was a big star, let's do it.

Where was that?

Was it right here?

It's pretty easy to read.

So we stay hot.

He then got nominated for Philadelphia, which was a, you know, a nice boost.

But still, when I told friends and even the media that I'd cast Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, a lot of them were saying, "Oh, is that a comedy?

Are you turning that into a comedy?"

And I'd say, "No."

So, you know, they were all dubious, including Jim Lovell, who, you know, by then Forrest Gump had come out.

And they said, "Really?"

He said, "You want Forrest Gump to play me?"

All it took was one meeting with Tom, and he understood completely why we cast him, and loved the choice, because Tom was so dedicated about getting at the truth of that mission with total integrity.

And by the time the movie came out, people also understood, you know, what a great dramatic actor Tom was as well, and it wasn't even an issue.

By then he'd won two Oscars.

We were shooting in Princeton on "Beautiful Mind."

John Nash just decided to pay a visit.

And this is something that Russell had been kind of not so eager to do.

But I was kind of understood what Russell's point of view was.

And John just would not be held back.

And Russell wound up being incredibly gracious with him.

And John Nash turned out to be, you know, loose, relaxed about it all.

I had interviewed John a great deal and was able to impart, you know, a lot of details to Russell.

But of course it was vital that Russell create his own sense of this character organically.

And John, you know, he completely understood that.

And it wound up being one of those tense moments where it was like, "John Nash is here.

He's sitting in the chair.

Russell, I don't know what to do.

I can't."

And Russell said, "That's okay, mate."

And we wound up hosting him.

And Russell was incredibly gracious.

And action.

When we were getting ready to make Splash, we were fortunate in that the studio didn't make us get a major, major star.

They allowed us to cast really a newcomer.

Tom Hanks had had a couple of good years on Bosom Buddies.

It wasn't a huge hit, but he'd auditioned and really won the role.

I had a scene in Splash that was a comedy scene.

And it's before the audience is supposed to know, and certainly before Tom... Well, the audience knows, but Tom Hanks doesn't know that Daryl Hannah is a mermaid, that Madison is not entirely human.

And they're out on this date and the waiter puts lobster in front of her and she starts devouring it, shell and all.

And she completely freaks Tom Hanks out and it's a big joke.

Well, Daryl was so worried about it because she was a strict, strict vegetarian.

The idea of eating lobster meat, she just couldn't do it.

It was religious to her, you know.

So I respected that.

We tried to make a fake lobster shell and it was too hard.

You couldn't bite on it and break it.

And on the day, it was a real crisis.

And we put the lobster down and she said, "Okay, I'll try it."

And she picked it up and she burst into tears because just the idea of eating this meat was just devastating to her.

So I started shooting reaction shots of someone else.

We took the lobster shell, we cleaned out the meat, we showed her that we had done that, and we wound up putting hearts of palm and baked potato and stuffing it in there so that we have a little texture.

And she did it.

She picked it up.

She bit.

I showed her that you could bite right into the real shell.

You know, and it was okay.

I tested it first in the kitchen.

I showed her and she did it.

And she only had to do a couple of takes.

But you know, no more tears.

Nothing but comedy.

With Cinderella Man, I really wanted to take the time and put the camera into the position so that we could offer the audience two things.

One was a sense of what Braddock, the Russell Crowe character, was really going through.

And I also wanted to try to let the audience understand the ebb and flow of a boxing match and the little things that could be the turning points.

To do this, it was grueling.

There was a lot of takes, there was a lot of angles.

Russell Crowe had destroyed his shoulder, dislocated it, tore it up.

And this was all when he was training in Australia.

And he got a surgery and they got him back together with the physiotherapy.

But it meant that his shoulder could go at any moment.

So from that point on, every time we shot boxing, there was a real element of risk.

And I thought it was pretty courageous on Russell's part.

It was nerve-wracking as hell for me.

And of course it made me really think twice about asking for a second take ever.

But there were times when I did.

Sometimes it would be a third or fourth take.

Because, you know, I had something I was trying to do.

Russell supported it.

And I think it's what helps really draw the audience into that journey.

Great, let's move on.

As a director, I so wanted to work with Jim Carrey creating a kind of a cartoon character like that for a live action movie.

And I just thought that the challenge of that was really irresistible.

Jim had an amazing instinct about the character.

And when we were in rehearsals, it was fascinating to watch him without any makeup on.

And he was creating the Grinch.

It was really stunning.

But of course, when you put the makeup on, it went to a whole other dimension.

And Mikie learned how to work with the prosthetics.

But it really destroyed him.

I mean, emotionally, it turned out he was claustrophobic.

And by the time he put on the suit, and then the contact lenses, you know, this was, he was having a physical and physiological and emotional reaction to this experience.

And yet, he would not back away from it.

He wouldn't let us refine it.

He wanted to wear the contacts.

He wanted to create this character as fully as he possibly could.

So, again, I thought it was incredibly courageous.

But there were times when, I swear to you, Jim was literally in the Grinch costume, laying on the floor, trying to calm himself down, even hyperventilating, having to breathe into a brown paper bag in order to get through the shooting day.

And so, it was that arduous.

And yet, when the cameras would roll... Ready and action!

This coat and this hat are just the same thing.

Ho-ho!

What he could create physically was so smart, so inventive.

It was an absolute virtuoso, physical comedy performance.

It was really jaw-dropping.

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I'm really reluctant to list my favorite films in terms of the movies I'm proudest of because whenever I do that I'm always leaving off a movie that someone else, off my filmography that somebody else really loves.

So I won't do that, but as life experiences I'm willing to talk about that.

I've had a lot of great life experiences.

But I think for me the experience of directing Apollo 13 was utterly unique.

The technical challenges, the adventure of actually filming weightless, the long meetings with men who had walked on the moon and other astronauts including the inspirational Jim Lovell, the creative experience working with my friend Tom Hanks.

It was really remarkable and the success of the film.

And action!

Hey, I'm Rick Cerny!

Yeah!

I had a fantastic life experience making Far and Away.

It touched upon aspects of my own family, heritage and history.

It was filming in Billings, Montana and shooting this amazing land race and then going to Dublin.

It was amazing and I just loved the energy around that movie.

And then the other one was really Parenthood, which was a fantastic experience.

I loved the script.

It was the most autobiographical film that I've ever done.

And the actors were just impeccable.

My kids were young.

They were hanging around.

Everybody brought their kids.

We were shooting in Orlando, Florida.

So on our days off, we went to Disney World.

It was this kind of remarkable period of time on a family level and creatively as well.

For me, filmmaking is a tremendous way of life.

And I love getting out there, throwing myself into a story, and sharing what I've learned about the environments that I'm shooting in, the kinds of characters that the stories are built around, and offering that back to audiences.

Action!

I view every movie as though it is a kind of an expedition.

Whether it's a dialogue driven movie like, you know, Parenthood or Ross Nixon, a big adventure experience like making Willow, Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons.

I'm turning 57 today as we do this interview.

And I have so much energy and enthusiasm for what the medium can be.

At this moment, Clint Eastwood is directing a movie for our company starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

It's about J. Edgar Hoover.

Clint's in his early 80s and is making another fantastic film.

So, you know, it's my inspiration in a lot of ways and I'm looking forward to telling as many stories as I can, as well as I can.

And I hope you find something of interest in those stories.

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