Key Points
Ron Howard recalled working with John Wayne on 1976 film The Shootist, where the veteran actor butted heads with director Don Siegel.
“I also learned a lot in a rather uncomfortable way because Wayne and Siegel were feuding. They did not get along,” he said on the Talking Pictures podcast about the Western film.
In 1979, three years after The Shootist was released, Wayne died at 72 from complications of cancer.
Ron Howard learned a lot from John Wayne early in his career and at the end of the Duke’s.
The director detailed working with the late Western actor, who died in 1979, while reminiscing about working with Hollywood legends such as Henry Fonda and Bette Davis on Ben Mankiewicz’s Talking Pictures podcast.
Howard appeared as Gillom Rogers alongside Wayne’s J.B. Books in the Don Siegel-directed film, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.
“It holds up well,” he began, adding that it’s “placed slowly, deliberately, but it builds beautifully.” He added that Seigel, director of Dirty Harry and later Escape from Alcatraz, was a “very strong director,” who he learned “so much from.”
“I also learned a lot in a rather uncomfortable way, because Wayne and Siegel were feuding. They did not get along. And I was getting along with both of them separately, just fine,” said Howard, who transitioned to a storied directing career himself, boasting a Best Director Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind.
John Wayne and Ron Howard in ‘The Shootist’ (1976)
Credit: Screen Archives/Getty
The former Andy Griffith Show child star, then 22 and at the height of his Happy Days acting fame, bonded with the Western’s director because he was studying at USC Cinema School to become a director, so he asked Siegel a lot of questions.
Wayne, meanwhile, liked Howard’s “professionalism.”
“And I also had the guts to say, ‘Hey, do you want to run lines?’ No one really would talk to him in between setups,” Howard revealed. “He had a couple of people: a guy he would play chess with, who was the still photographer who had worked with him on a lot of films. But it was a very closed little bubble that he was operating in.”
Added Howard, “He was perfectly friendly to me, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to run lines.’ And we had a lot of scenes together, heavy dialogue, and it was very interesting to see him take a scene and shape it into a John Wayne performance in the most positive ways.”
Howard said that he got “an earful” from Wayne, however, about “his dissatisfaction with Don Siegel and the way he was shooting it.”
“And I felt like Siegel, who told me at a certain point, he said, ‘Hey, look: After about two weeks, if you’re the director and it’s you or the star, you’re gone. They can’t afford to go back and reshoot. I don’t care how much they love what you’re doing. You’re gone,'” he recalled Siegel saying. ‘”And I like this script, and I like this movie, and I’m going to ride it out.’ And I think, you know… John Wayne felt the same way, but I also felt like Siegel didn’t do a great job of bridging the gaps. And it was pretty intense, but I remember saying, ‘There’s a better way to deal with even superstars than this.'”
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Howard added that his experience on The Shootist informed him how to handle tensions on set of a film.
“I felt that the key was that a lot of things were allowed to fester for a long period of time. The strategy that I’ve followed over the years is when there’s a difference of opinion, go right into it. You don’t have to make it a fight, but you’re there to achieve something together and talk it through,” he said. “Don’t let it become something that’s petty and emotional when, in fact, it’s a creative concern or a neurotic concern. And if you shine a bright light on a neurotic concern, most people, even the most neurotic of them, say, ‘Oh yeah, I guess I was a little insecure about that.'”
Ron Howard, Lauren Bacall and John Wayne in ‘The Shootist’
Credit: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty
Howard concluded that The Shootist had a positive outcome in Siegel making “a really good film” and learning a lot from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers director.
“On the other hand, there were some days where, [Siegel] and John Wayne were really, really at loggerheads,” he said.
Along with Howard and Wayne, Lauren Bacall, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, and Scatman Crothers also appeared in The Shootist. Wayne died three years later from complications of cancer. He was 72.
Watch Ron Howard’s full appearance on the Talking Pictures podcast below.
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