Ron Howard's One-Time Style Experiment Nobody Noticed
The Academy Award-winning director abandoned his signature approach for just one film in his five-decade career, using radical camera techniques he never repeated again.
What defines a Ron Howard movie? Unlike directors with instantly recognizable styles, Howard has built his career on being remarkably adaptable. No signature shots. No recurring visual themes. Just solid filmmaking that shifts between genres without leaving fingerprints.
The two-time Oscar winner knows this about himself. He credits his longevity to avoiding the kind of distinctive flourishes that make other directors instantly identifiable. While Tarantino brings rapid-fire dialogue and violence, del Toro delivers gothic fantasy, and the Coen brothers craft quirky characters, Howard simply makes movies.
The Grinch Gamble
This approach served him well across 50 years behind the camera. But once, just once, Howard threw out his playbook completely. The film? How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
"One of the things I did with this film was adopt a style I had never used, and I've never used it since," Howard told Vulture. He reunited with cinematographer Don Peterman, who had shot Splash and Cocoon, plus earned an Oscar nomination for Flashdance.
Technical Revolution
Howard's experiment involved radical camera work. He used "wide and distorting" 14mm lenses throughout the production. Gone was his typically steady cinematography, replaced by "a camera on an arm that was in movement a lot."
The technique focused heavily on Jim Carrey's performance, creating what Howard described as "kind of crazed close-up that would evolve at the end of the camera move." Every shot pushed boundaries he had never crossed before or since.
The Invisible Experiment
Did audiences notice? Probably not. When Spielberg or Scorsese changes their approach, viewers catch on immediately. Howard's deviation flew under the radar completely.
More than 25 years later, he admits he never returned to that style. The Grinch remains his sole directorial experiment, a one-time departure that proved even Howard's most dramatic stylistic shift couldn't break through his reputation for being reliably unremarkable.