The Surprising Film Where Ron Howard Broke His Own Rules
Ron Howard, famed for his adaptable directing, once radically altered his approach for a single film—employing bold lenses and kinetic camerawork in a style he never revisited.
When a film is billed as the work of a particular director, audiences often arrive with a set of expectations. Quentin Tarantino? Expect sharp exchanges, a bit of mayhem, and a liberal dose of swearing. Guillermo del Toro? Likely a blend of the eerie and the fantastical, with a touch of heartbreak. The Coen brothers? Offbeat personalities and peculiarities galore. But when it comes to Ron Howard, the label doesn’t quite conjure a signature style. Despite a career spanning decades and a pair of Oscars to his name, Howard’s directorial fingerprint is, well, rather elusive.
He’s the sort of filmmaker who can slip between genres and budgets without ever seeming out of place, precisely because he’s never been pinned down by a particular visual or narrative hallmark. Howard himself has acknowledged this, suggesting that his lack of a distinct style has helped him endure in an industry that often favours the recognisable. It’s a double-edged sword, though. While he’s among the highest-grossing directors in history, most would be hard-pressed to pick his work out of a line-up.
One Uncharacteristic Departure
Yet, there was a moment when Howard did something out of character. If a director like Tarantino or Scorsese suddenly veered off their well-trodden path, viewers would spot it instantly. Howard, on the other hand, managed to upend his own conventions with barely a ripple. The film in question? Not the cosmic drama of Apollo 13, nor the fantasy of Willow, or even the windswept western The Missing. It was, in fact, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Reflecting on the experience, Howard admitted,
“One of the things I did with this film was adopt a style I had never used, and I’ve never used it since,”
he told Vulture. He reunited with Don Peterman, his cinematographer from earlier projects, to help him turn things on their head. Peterman, who’d worked on everything from Splash to Addams Family Values, was no stranger to visual experimentation.
Visual Experimentation in Whoville
For this festive caper, Howard ditched his usual approach. He opted for “wide and distorting” 14mm lenses, a far cry from the more restrained visuals of his previous films. The camera rarely sat still, instead swooping and gliding on an arm, always in motion. The focus was often on Jim Carrey’s outlandish Grinch, with the camera closing in for “kind of crazed close-up that would evolve at the end of the camera move.”
It was a bold move, but one that largely slipped under the radar. Few, if any, left the cinema marvelling at Howard’s stylistic reinvention. The film’s visual quirks were perhaps overshadowed by Carrey’s performance and the story’s larger-than-life world. Still, for Howard, it marked a rare foray into a more flamboyant, kinetic style—one he would never revisit.
A One-Off Experiment
More than twenty-five years have passed since Howard’s experiment in Whoville, and he’s made it clear that the experience was a one-off. He returned to his more understated, adaptable methods for every project that followed. The Grinch remains the sole outlier in a career defined by its chameleon-like quality, a brief moment when Howard allowed himself to break his own rules—if only for a single, green-furred adventure.