RON HOWARD HAS earned a holiday. Over the last few years, the actor-turned-Oscar-winning-director has quietly been, arguably, the hardest-working man in movies, switching nimbly between a late-in-life sideline in directing fine documentaries like Rebuilding Paradise and We Feed People, and the narrative features that made his name. And, just a couple of hours after he finishes speaking to Empire, the 68-year-old and his wife, Cheryl, will be off on a much-needed break. “Last year was pretty remarkable,” he says. “I was on deadline on three things, and in an ongoing process on a couple of others, and my brother [Clint Howard] and I finished a book called The Boys. So last year [a holiday] didn’t quite happen. This year, we’re looking forward to it.”
The main object of Howard’s focus was Thirteen Lives, his acutely observed recounting of the astonishing rescue operation that saw an international alliance of cave-divers save the lives of a young Thai football team, and their coach, after they found themselves trapped in a vast subterranean network, with water levels making salvation virtually impossible. It was a story that captured the imagination of virtually the entire globe when it happened in 2018. One of the people watching it unfold was Howard, who eventually became the director to document it, using his experience of movies like Backdraft and Apollo 13 to craft a simple, but gripping, yarn of smart guys (led by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell as Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, the British divers who spearheaded the rescue) overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s the latest unpredictable turn in the directorial career of Howard, who left a successful acting gig on Happy Days in 1980, having directed comedy Grand Theft Auto in 1977, before becoming a successful mainstream filmmaker in the ’80s, and then phasing into serious drama in the ’90s and beyond. And when Empire called him on Zoom, all of the above was on our mind…