(Credits: Far Out / Georges Biard)
Sat 19 April 2025 16:45, UK
Unless there’s a particularly unruly A-lister on set who tries to seize control of the production, the director is always the most powerful person on set. Showing signs of weakness isn’t recommended in such a ruthless and cutthroat industry as Hollywood, but Ron Howard evidently didn’t care.
That said, it’s entirely in keeping with his reputation as one of the nicest guys in the business. One of the basic requirements of enjoying a lengthy career in film and television is thick skin and a strong backbone, so it’s not as if Howard can be called a pushover when he’s been navigating those waters for 70 years.
If anything, he deserves to be commended for the way he’s evolved from a child star into a dependable actor before morphing into an esteemed filmmaker, all without pissing anyone off or making a single enemy. People might look at Howard and think, ‘That guy’s not an auteur’, but they definitely won’t say, ‘That Ron Howard, what a dickhead’.
Throughout his lengthy stint on both sides of the camera, Howard has worked with fire, explosions, difficult actors, CGI, green screens, and virtually everything else that’s been needed to make a movie at any point between the late 1950s and today. However, despite being a close associate of Steven Spielberg, he still decided that working on water was a smart idea.
After his horrendous experience on Jaws, Spielberg has urged anyone who’ll listen that shooting on open water isn’t recommended. Kevin Costner didn’t listen and made Waterworld, while Howard headed offshore to shoot large parts of In the Heart of the Sea, one of his biggest-ever box office bombs.
It wasn’t the easiest shoot either, with a dangerous storm forcing the cast and crew to shut up shop and head for safety. It also put his ensemble cast, which included Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, and Ben Whishaw, through the physical and mental wringer, which left Howard feeling bad for them.
“I feel like out on the ocean was actually working for the actors,” he told AU Review. “At the end of the day, I would apologise to everybody and say, ‘I know this is tough’. They would just say, ‘Well, first of all, it’s just a fraction of what the real guys that we were playing went through, and we get that, and secondly, it’s good for the performances. This is what we’re trying to play.’”
A commendable response from a hardy band of thespians who were being battered around by torrential rain, baking heat, powerful winds, and the endless azure of the open ocean, even if Howard didn’t quite believe them: “I did see the life kind of draining out of these guys,” he admitted of their ordeal.
Was it worth it? Absolutely not. In the Heart of the Sea failed to recoup its production budget from cinemas and received a thoroughly disinterested response from critics and audiences, making a mockery of the early chatter that it was a potential awards season contender. Howard should have apologised for the film’s overwhelming mediocrity, not for how tough it was on his actors.
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