Hollywood director Ron Howard talks Jay Z, the American dream - and how the BBC influenced US TV culture

The schools are off for Easter and Film4 is screening How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Viewers have taken to Twitter wondering why the fuzzy green Scrooge is making an unseasonal appearance. In LA, the film’s director Ron Howard has slipped out of the editing suite to talk to The Big Issue. “It’s an odd time of the year to play The Grinch but I’m glad it’s trending!”

Over the past three decades the actor turned director has made some perfect popcorn-accompanying films – Splash, Willow, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon – and two enormously popular adaptations of Dan Brown’s pulp-fiction puzzlers, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons.

“Getting to direct Jim Carrey in a physical comedy was something I’ll always be happy I did,” says Howard. “That’s what I look for in a project – a unique creative experience or collaboration that I can grow from and enjoy.”

A unique collaboration attracted Howard to his latest film and first documentary, Made In America, with the balding ginger auteur forming an unlikely partnership with hip hop heavyweight Jay-Z.

“Jay-Z was curious about how I would apply story-telling instincts to a documentary about his festival,” Howard explains. The film records a Jay-Z-organised showcase of American music staged in Philadelphia in 2012. But apart from capturing performances from artists including Pearl Jam, Janelle Monáe and the surviving duo of Run-DMC, Howard gives the festival’s food vendors, stewards and roadies equal screen time, finding they are all living their own versions of the American Dream, whether they want to or not.

“I was shocked by how pervasive that belief in the American Dream was around the festival,” he says. “It wasn’t just the artists, it really was the woman with the food truck and the security guards. There was frustration expressed too but tough times are encouraging an entrepreneurship in people.

The American Dream is a very imperfect system and promise. But it does exist"It’s creative. It may not always be art but people are finding a way to make a living. The American Dream is a very imperfect system and promise. But it does exist.”

Trust Howard on this one. His father Rance was an Oklahoma farmer who left his ranch to pursue an acting career in New York. Little Ronnie Howard, as he was known, made his film debut aged two and grew up on US television, embodying the wholesome, bright-eyed American youth. He spent most of the 1960s in The Andy Griffith Show before a six-year stay at the Cunningham household in Happy Days, where you could imagine they ate apple pie after every meal.

In the late ’70s, Howard swapped rockin’ and rollin’ all week long for calling the shots behind the camera. He struck a deal with B-movie mogul Roger Corman, agreeing that he’d star in one of his films if he could direct the next. Grand Theft Auto (1977), co-written and co-produced by Howard’s father Rance, was made for $600,000 and took more than $16m at the box office.

Corman’s strategy of churning out lots of films quickly and cheaply, hoping one would become a hit, is a philosophy Howard finds the industry replicating today as most of the big studios’ cash is piled into crash bang wallop blockbusters. Even though Howard is an Oscar-winning director with a proven track record, he finds it difficult to get a film made.

“It’s a real challenge,” he says, “especially if you’re not making a sequel, a movie from a comic book or a title that’s a massive bestseller. There was a period of time where if you were established, your name and the cast you could pull together could make a package that was very easy to find funding for. But it’s definitely a more challenging time.

"In an odd way I think it’s benefitting the audience. Film-makers have to work harder and run a real gauntlet to get a movie they care about made. But when movies do get made they reflect an extra measure of passion.”

Cinema’s chief rival in recent years has been the competition from high-quality TV series. Shows such as Breaking Bad and True Detective are bigger and bolder than their Hollywood relations, while costing less and being available in the comfort of your own home, and Howard traces this small-screen revolution to the influence of the BBC.

“There’s a direct correlation in my mind. The BBC will do eight episodes of a show then wait a while, collect up the scripts and then do another series if audiences want it and the people involved want to do it.

“Television was always much more of a manufacturing exercise in the US. When I was young on TV in the ’60s you would do 39 episodes in a year. That shrank to the low 20s, which is still where it is for network shows, but when cable networks started mimicking what the BBC was doing, short runs with great talent, more creative freedom and edgier, more complex subjects, the medium blossomed and it turned out there was a huge audience.”

Howard hopes a large audience could be drawn back to cinemas if ambition and creativity is encouraged. He is currently editing his next film, In The Heart of the Sea, starring Chris Hemsworth, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and a great big whale. It is based on the events that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick, when the crew of the Essex were cast adrift in lifeboats after their ship was attacked by a sperm whale in 1820. It’s a survival tale like Apollo 13 but with more cannibalism.

It’s not about studios or distribution systems, it is really about us, the consumers“Here’s the real challenge for movies,” Howard continues. “It’s not about studios or distribution systems, it is really about us, the consumers. We’ve gotten so busy entertaining ourselves in so many different ways that there’s not as much room as there was.

“But there are actually as many movies being made and getting seen. They just don’t get seen in ways that are fairly monetised so the investors who took the risk get the return.

"Right now there’s a gap, which makes film a riskier investment than ever. But there’s a market there. Audiences will keep going, films will keep getting made and the economics will find their way as economic issues tend to resolve themselves.

“You don’t need to lay awake nights worrying about me and my ilk. I love what I’m doing and I’m staying plenty busy.”

Happy days.

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