It's a lot like The Searchers except for character, theme and
plotline... 
A veteran of TV's Happy Days and a ton of movies made when he was just a nipper, Ron Howard has been kicking around Hollywood for years. With last year's Oscar for A Beautiful Mind the Academy confirmed his status as one of the world's best directors. His latest film The Missing, starring Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, is western/thriller hybrid.
The western would seem to be a genre you have a special affection for...
I do, yeah. I'm a fan. Like in any genre there are good and bad ones, of course, but for so many years it was the pulpy action movie of its time. The difficulty is that it all bumps up against history, but is actually a complete distortion. So now when you make a movie, you say "I don't want this to be the mythic west - let's do a historic drama set in that period."
You had been set to direct The Alamo, but then you picked upon The Missing. Why the switch?
It wasn't a trade. I chose not to do the Alamo, but I was a real big proponent of John Lee Hancock coming in to direct that film. Because he's a Texan! As I was working on the film, I'd talk to him, I'd ask him to read some of our early drafts and just discuss it with me. When I decided to move away from it I really felt that he was a strong candidate. He already had a strong relationship with Disney so that was a good fit.
And then I didn't know what I was going to do. I was reading a lot of
different projects. I knew I was going to make Cinderella Man with Russell
at some point - didn't quite know when - and I just read The Missing script. It was a spec adaptation of a novel, and I responded to it. I read it again the next day and I liked it even more.
Which films did you look to for inspiration?
It wasn't for the formal structure, but Unforgiven was the film that I kept looking at for tone. I liked that it was character-driven, and I felt that it was real.
You didn't have The Searchers in mind?
I really didn't. Of course I recognised - having seen The Searchers - that there was a similarity here, in terms of the inciting incident, but the themes and the characters are so different. I knew that people would draw a comparison - John Sayles asked me about it: "It sounds a little like The Searchers," he said when I told him what I was working on. And I said, "Yeah, it's a lot like The Searchers except for character, theme and plotline..."
Was Cate Blanchett your first choice to star in the film?
Yes. One week I decided to do the movie. The next week I started getting calls from agents saying that their clients had read the script and really loved it. So I was kind of blessed with an exciting set of options. Scheduling knocked out some of the possibilities right away but I met Cate and I just felt that her strength, her intelligence and her expressiveness was going to allow us to create a character that was not flashy - was rather quiet in certain ways, but was very dynamic and moving. It's interesting to watch her in action, but you also understand that she's not an action figure. She's a human being stuck in the midst of a horrible struggle.
Was there any friction between you, given that you disagreed over some aspects of the script?
Not friction, but she had some good ideas early on that I agreed with, and a couple, of things that I talked her out of. The things I agree with I thought were quite courageous. She really wanted to depict the woman as repressed and racially antagonistic. She wanted the woman to be a bigot. She felt that this was a journey of enlightenment for her and that we needed to depict it. If we were fuzzy about how she felt in the beginning, we wouldn't see the growth. I thought she was right and that was there in the original script.
The Missing is released in UK cinemas on Friday 27th February 2004.
