SUBMITTED BY Typhon24

August 11, 2003 —

From CountingDown's exclusive interview with Academy Award Winning director Ron Howard regarding his upcoming project, The Missing:

One of the things that attracted me to the story is that it works on a couple of levels, and I think that both are legitimately involving and they were compelling to me. One is a very suspenseful rescue story set in 1886 in Apache territory, and the story I think deals authentically with elements of the culture clash of that time, and real fears versus unfounded kind of paranoid fears, and a kind of hysteria that people feel in periods of that kind of cultural conflict. So that was kind of interesting that that was going on in that period because we feel that today on a broader level. So I connected with that.

It's also got unusually strong women characters, especially for a period frontier movie like that, where the women tend to, and I'm far from encyclopedic in my knowledge of films, but my sense is that women are generally, even though they can be colorful powerful characters, they're generally symbolic of a single idea; they represent civilization or they represent frontier moral decay. And it goes on and on that way. And I thought the women in this story, played by Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachael Wood, and Jenna Boyd, they were very relatable to me. I have three daughters and a wife I've been married to for 28 years, who's a really smart strong modern contemporary woman, and I related to the dynamics that were being presented. So it was the struggle of those relationships that seemed interesting to me.

And there's much more at the link below! Check it out for Howard's thoughts on the film, the editing process, winning the Oscar, and more!