News

“Is there anyone more American than Ron Howard?”

Peter Morgan, the very British scribe best known as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Queen, is outlining the reasons he okayed the director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind to helm the feature film adaptation of his Tony Award-winning play Frost/Nixon, and being very American is evidently very good. This is what he means: “If you spend time with Ron, he has all the qualities that we traditionally think of [as American]: polite, respectful, conscientious, decent, really principled.”

Rebecca Hall, the young British actress (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and daughter of Sir Peter Hall, who therefore knows a little something about directors, says of her experience working with Howard on Frost/Nixon: “He's extremely collaborative. Even when it was stuff that didn't necessarily apply to me, he'd always be asking my opinions about things.” And also: “There's no sense of ego or grandeur. He's straight-talking and precise and wants to tell the story in the best possible way, and he's totally willing to admit that he's wrong.”

Respect, decency, modesty, deference: These are not qualities one normally associates with the place called Hollywood or its cultural output, but Ron Howard is a walking billboard for a reappraisal of the town. Born in a small Oklahoma burg, Howard entered showbiz at the age of 4 with small film parts and then a recurring role as the earnest, curious scamp Opie on The Andy Griffith Show.

Unlike many of the child actors over the ensuing five decades, he proceeded to not self-immolate in a haze of drugs or self-indulgence. No, he proved decent to the core.

Rather than elbowing his way into directing jobs, he retreated to film school, to gain an education in theory that he could marry to the practical knowledge he had picked up working in the industry. At the age of 21, he married his high-school sweetheart; the two recently celebrated their 33rd anniversary.

All-American earnestness hangs over Howard like a halo. Sitting in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park on a recent drizzly, windswept afternoon, he says of his career that he hopes he is engaged in “an ongoing creative process of exploration and discovery that's fun for me and hopefully useful to audiences.” (Yes, useful.)

And the films? Solidly built mainstream entertainments that are shot through with an all-American decency. Take Frost/Nixon, which opens in Toronto on Friday and across the country later this month. It revisits, to surprisingly thrilling effect, the 1977 TV interviews that British celebrity journalist David Frost conducted over the course of four marathon sessions with former U.S. president Richard Nixon, who was speaking at length for the first time since leaving office in disgrace. The interviews are remembered nowadays for the fact that Frost, a notorious lightweight who had begun his career as a stand-up comedian, managed to achieve what no one else had ever done: extricate from Nixon a confession (albeit a grudging one) for his abuses of power.

Frost/Nixon quietly asserts that, even in extraordinary times like the Vietnam War, there are standards of behaviour that must be upheld.

While Howard doesn't forgive Nixon, he recognizes that not everyone may have been equally appalled by the president's actions during that time. “I think we all run into a trap. I do. I felt this way watching the interviews in 1977, of feeling like: ‘Well c'mon, it's a tough job and it's complicated beyond what we can imagine. And you know, of course they've gotta bend the rules.' And there's some logic in that. But by the same token, that's a pretty slippery slope and I think it's important that the press be there in a democracy to keep askin' those questions and keep probing and sort of saying, you know, ‘Where is the truth? How far have they gone?' ”

This is Howard's second film, after the 1994 comedy The Paper, to muck around in the high ideals and sometimes low methods of journalism. He caught the journalism bug, he says, while working on the high-school paper. “I always felt like if I didn't continue in the film business, I'd either become probably a high-school basketball coach, an English teacher or go into journalism. I loved it. Loved it.”

Much is made in Frost/Nixon about the U.S. journalism establishment writing off Frost, with his background in comedy and entertainment, as incapable of stepping up and doing the job.

Peter Morgan suggested that Howard, too, was an underestimated talent. “Oh did he?” asks Howard. He sounds a little defensive at first, but then admits there might be something to his screenwriter's theory.

“You're craving that respect, and that acknowledgment,” he nods. “Look, I don't lie awake at nights worrying about it. On the whole, I feel like I've been treated very well. But it's interesting to hear Peter say that, and I do feel at times that, because I'm drawn to films that celebrate more than critique, that can be sort of misunderstood in its own way, as somehow not as creative, or not as artful.”

Howard has certainly earned the respect of the critics, the industry and moviegoers, and he has the trophies to prove it: Oscars and other awards, including nods from the Directors Guild, and a track record of numerous hundred-million-dollar-plus box-office successes. But it took a long time for him to leave behind his reputation as a comedy guy – earned with his beloved role as Richie Cunningham in the hit seventies TV show Happy Days, followed by his direction of goofy comedies like Night Shift, Splash and Parenthood – to be fully accepted as a serious director.

Even now, there is a hint of a cloud over Howard, one that Frost/Nixon should go some distance in dissipating. After winning both a best-directing and best-picture Oscar for A Beautiful Mind (he was a producer on the film), his last three pictures suffered separate indignities: Audiences and critics passed over The Missing in 2003; the Depression-era boxing drama Cinderella Man (2005) garnered appreciative notices but got knocked out at the box office; and The Da Vinci Code (2006) took in $750-million around the world but notoriously bombed with the critics. “They were definitely the toughest reviews I've had,” he grimaces of Da Vinci.

Frost/Nixon is in a different mould: Reportedly made for less than $30-million (less than half his usual budget), it is Howard's first picture in two decades without bankable stars (it boasts, rather, the fiercely talented duo of Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon). It has few special effects. And its pleasures are aimed at the moviegoing audience that can still find thrills in watching conversational pugilists battling it out for posterity.

“This is actually my 50th anniversary, this year,” Howard notes. “I'm 54, I started when I was 4, and in fact I'm very proud of Frost/Nixon, sort of as a symbol of some kind of ongoing creative growth.”

Though he got slapped around with the first Dan Brown adaptation, he will be back next year with Angels & Demons, the Da Vinci Code sequel. He's in post-production on it, and he is already suggesting it has a better filmic rhythm than the original. He admits that he hopes it will win over critics as well as audiences. “I always aim to please, on all fronts,” he says, earnestly, of course.