Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Now, I realize I've been inundating you guys with Ron Howard interviews over the last few months, but up to this point, I've been talking to him primarily about a movie that I hadn't seen, his latest directing effort THE DILEMMA, starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James. I've really enjoyed the amount of time I've gotten to spend chatting with Howard and watching him work with his cast and crew, but up to this point I had not real way of knowing whether the film was any good or not.
As you'll soon be finding out, THE DILEMMA is a much darker and more emotionally gripping work than any of the ads for the film might lead you to believe. Sure, there is plenty of comedy, but the heart and soul of this movie are its more serious moments, and there are plenty of those to go around. I was lucky enough to see the film last week, in advance of talking to both Howard and Vince Vaughn (I'll have that interview for you soon).
The other thing that has changed since I visited Howard and company on the set of THE DILEMMA last summer in Chicago was that Howard has announced a rather grand plan to finally get Stephen King's multi-volume THE DARK TOWER series onto both the big and little screens, with Howard directing both the first feature film as well as the first television component of the project. Casting rumors have already started surfacing, and King fans around the world are expressing both their concern and excitement that someone is even attempting this monster of an undertaking. I know this material inside and out, and after having a couple of on- and off-the-record talks with Howard about how his team is approaching it, most of my anxiety about him handling this material respectfully and properly has vanished. It's going to be a long wait until 2013, but I think it will be an endeavor worth waiting for.
Please enjoy my talk with Ron Howard on both THE DILEMMA and THE DARK TOWER. I should add that my first question to him concerns a sequence I saw shot on my first day on THE DILEMMA set that was completely taken out of the film. The night before this interview, I saw Howard at a party for the movie, and he came up to me and apologized (unnecessarily) that all of that material was gone from the film. "It was too dark, even for this," he explained. I thought it was kind of cool that I saw all of that material shot, know exactly where in the movie it would have gone, and have that added perspective that somewhat pivotal moment gave me. Anyway, here's Ron Howard…
Capone: Hello again.
Ron Howard: I’ve got an entire plate of cookies here.
Capone: I’ll take one on the way out, thanks.
RH: Okay, great. [laughs]
Capone: We talked a little bit about it last night, so tell me why the scene that I saw you guys shoot at the Bridal Shop was cut.
RH: Largely for length, but a lot of the telling of this story depended on the rhythm of the way it unfolded, and that scene was really telling us something that we already knew and didn’t need to know more. It was a cool scene with a great setting, but it was an embellishment that we just didn’t need to indulge in, and so again in the name of rhythm and flow, it hit the cutting-room floor.
Capone: You said something last night to me about it might have been too dark. You were almost apologetic last night that it was gone, and all I could think was, “I think it’s cool that I know that scene exists.”
RH: [laughs] But it’s so interesting as a filmmaker, because that night…It’s fascinating, and the post production on this without a single re-shoot was one of the most creative processes, and it wasn’t really about putting out fires, it was just about kind of defining it. A sculptor will always say, “Well, the work of art is in there, we just have to chip away and find it.”
This was a sort of interesting case, especially when we had a really strong script. It wasn’t like we went into the movie confused about what we were trying to do. It evolved from there, using the inspiration of Vince [Vaughn] and the other actors, what [cinematographer] Sal Totino and I could kind of do cinematically with the idea of a kind of serio-comic-psychological-thriller. Yet [editors] Dan [Hanley] and Mike [Hilland] and I really spent the entire post process experimenting, and it was fun. It was fun, because it wasn’t desperate, but it was really interesting to make these discoveries about what you would need and what you didn’t need, and we wound up--in the last week that we were editing--putting back in two scenes that we cut in the first week, and suddenly the movie was like five percent better, because we put back in two scenes that we were sure we didn’t need. George Lucas is fond of saying that movies are really made in the editing room, and everything else is gathering the raw materials, and this was a pretty interesting example of that.
Capone: I remember interviewing Javier Bardem for NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and he'd just shot VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, and I asked him, “So, is this one of Woody Allen's comedies or one of his dramas?” And he said, “It depends on how he edits it. It could go either way.” I thought that about this film, too. You went fairly dark in a lot of places where I didn’t think it would go this dark. I really love dramatic-mode Vince Vaughn, and it was cool to see Kevin [James] get a shot at something like that, too, and handle it so convincingly.
RH: Oh, thanks. I like that kind of work from Vince too. We did have a lot of material to work with and a lot of choices to make, and I think there are a couple of questions, and one is from the standpoint of marketing a movie commercially, the simplest thing in the world to do is to just sort of say, “Here are two of our best and most accessible comedic actors, and let’s watch them run around and do their thing,” which can be a hell of a lot of fun. But, they were drawn to this and I was drawn to it because there’s this chance to do this kind of ambitious thing--and we will see whether people think we did it or not--which is be funny enough that it doesn’t frustrate that audience and just be that much more real, that much more honest, that much darker, and let the pain really land.
Capone: There are some painful scenes here, for sure, and I will tell you, I wrote this down when I was watching it that people are acting like people in this movie, which sounds bizarre, but in a lot of comedies people don’t act like people act in the real world. If two people get into an argument, one person doesn’t run out of the room in the first 30 seconds in real life; they stay and try to communicate, even if it’s painful. There are a lot of those scenes where I thought people were going to run out of the room, and they didn’t. They stay there and it makes it more uncomfortable.
RH: Thank you. We just kept feeling that the more this could ring true for an audience, the funnier it would be at the end, because the tension would be real. So we kept mining it for that. I love movies that accomplish both of those things, when it has got big laughs, but it does ring true, it does feel honest and is ambitious for that and takes those chances. I’m glad it worked for you.
Capone: Even that intervention scene did not play out the way I thought it would.
RH: Really?
Capone: No, that’s how it would play out. You could have gone much more outrageous, but you kept it sort of very focused and honest.
RH: Both Vince and Kevin were useful in this way, because I think this is sort of what they signed on for. In a way what they hoped for from as a director, even when I could have slipped a little bit and pushed it in a little more conventional directions, they were actually saying, “But that’s not what you were talking about when you started to make the movie. Let’s trust that.”
Capone: They were keeping you honest.
RH: They were in ways, and I appreciated that, because you get anxious making a movie and you’re moving quickly and you start to question yourself, and it was great to have these guys who are these comedy giants saying, “No, let’s not play it safe. We don’t have to. This is going to be funny.” Our movie has tested well, and audiences are surprised by what it is, but, I think, pleasantly surprised.
Capone: Alright, I want to talk a little DARK TOWER, just because I’ll lose my job if I don't.
RH: [laughs] I don’t know what I can say…
Capone: First off, some casting rumors came out last week--names like Javier Bardem and Viggo Mortenson. Is any of that accurate?
RH: Here’s what I can say. I haven’t really heard any names bandied about that we haven’t all had a serious conversation about. I just can’t really talk about front-runners, and it’s too early, because Akiva [Goldsman, screenwriter] is at the outline stage. I might have a point of view right now on casting, but it could change when I start to see the script or availabilities may shift and all of that, but the names that have emerged are not crazy; they are part of the conversation.
Capone: I heard you have something on your desk that says “It’s badass, stupid.” Can you explain that?
RH: [big laugh] Well, I had had a communication with Harry right around the time that it was announced, sort of an off-the-record thing, and he said, “A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily choose you as the likely candidate for this,” and I think I emailed back “Well, if I had stuck to what people expected of me, I would probably be playing the dad on a Disney Channel sitcom right now.” So, this is a thrilling opportunity and a chance, and yeah it’s not exactly like anything else that I’ve ever done before, but I’m really thrilled for the opportunity. And he emailed back that he heard what I was saying, and basically he just said ,“I think the fans just want to make sure it doesn’t get softened, and that it’s badass.” When I saw him at Butt-Numb-a-Thon, I told him that Clinton used to have thing on his desk saying, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and I jotted down on my desk “It’s badass, stupid.”
Capone: So has the enormity of what you are attempting here really sunk in? This is the kind of thing that your legacy as a director might literally be hinge upon. Before this is was probably APOLLO 13, but this might be your new cornerstone.
RH: [laughs] Well, maybe it’s a little like having a kid, where you don’t want to think about that too much. It’s a huge undertaking and, look, even more importantly, I have a lot of respect for Stephen King, and this is a big part, a big aspect of his life’s work. It’s bold, and that’s exciting and daunting, but I think if I dwell on that too much, I would sort of pull away from it, and we're far enough away from making the movie that it’s no time to be balking. This is just the time to believe and work, and it’s really fascinating stuff to work on, because it’s so character driven. It’s also incredibly visual and, in a lot of ways, it takes no prisoners, and then, in other ways, it’s very emotional stuff, and I love that blend.
Somewhere in one of the books, he’s got, I guess it’s probably the Eddie character saying, “Why do stories have to be one thing or another?” So, in the books, he blends so many genres. I love that kind of thing and I remember, when we were taking SPLASH around trying to get it made, it got put into turn around from one company before Disney picked it up and made it the first Touchstone movie. It went to every studio, and they kept saying “Yeah, but I’m not sure what the tone is. It’s fantasy, but then it’s sort of broad and funny, and then it’s kind of romantic…” And I kept saying, “Isn’t that a good thing?” They said, “No, you need to decide.” I never believed you had to decide, I thought what you had to do is be smart about blending it all in there. I think that all kind of comes from character more than anything else. I feel really fortunate at this point to have something like this that I really am excited about and believe in, yet I don’t exactly know everything about how to make it. So, I think that’s kind of the good news for me, and we'll see how it goes. It’s a long ways from being greenlit, and there’s a lot of work to do between now and that time when a studio could even decide.
Capone: Have you cracked how you are going to get into the story yet?
RH: Yeah. That was part of our pitch to Stephen King initially. “Here’s how we think we would go about this,” and he was really excited about that, and I will also say that any people in the know who are really familiar with it who have heard our take, have reached out and given us a high-five saying we are really onto something. So, I hope we're right about it.
Capone: I can’t wait to see what you are going to do with it. I know these books inside and out, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder “Oh my God, how are they going to do this moment? How are they going to go that attack?”
RH: I'm dying to say more, and I wish we were just a little further along and I could just reveal a couple of nuggets that we just haven’t been able to talk about. They aren’t quite solid enough in our minds or confirmed enough yet to be able to drop them, but people who are close to it feel like we have some good creative ideas about working through it.
Capone: And I wish I had time to ask you about your DARK TOWER task force. Feel free when you do have time or you’re further in to let us know.
RH: Beautiful! And I’m glad you liked THE DILEMMA.
Capone: I definitely did. Thanks so much, Ron.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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