They say that life imitates art, but for director Ron Howard, a traumatic event in his own life once came to inform a piece of his art instead. The result was one of his most personal movies, with the filmmaker finding it an emotional struggle to shoot certain sequences, many of which felt too close to home.
Released in 1996, Ransom saw Mel Gibson play the father of a child who is kidnapped at a science fair, causing him to team up with the FBI to get his son back. The movie was received fairly well, even earning Gibson a Golden Globe nomination, but what many viewers might be unaware of is the similarity between the film’s themes and something that actually happened to Howard and his family.
The child actor-turned-director has been in Hollywood his whole life, making his screen debut when he was just two years old, and since that time, Howard has consistently been under the spotlight. From appearing in The Andy Griffith Show during the 1960s to starring in Happy Days in the following decade before directing movies like Willow, Backdraft, and Apollo 13, Howard had become a well-known figure in Hollywood by the 1990s.
After marrying Cheryl Alley in 1975, the couple had four children, including Jurassic World star Bryce Dallas Howard, but the family’s life was disrupted at one point when kidnapping threats were made against the children. Sadly, being a public figure comes with many terrifying extras – like stalkers and, in some tragic cases, even murderers – so Howard was undoubtedly terrified by the situation he found himself in.
“It was profoundly unsettling and disturbing,” Howard told The Daily Mail. “The FBI became involved and once the people they suspected realised that we’d been tipped off, they left the state,” he added.
Howard naturally found the whole ordeal horrifying, but like many artists, he decided to channel his emotions into his work. While Ransom wasn’t directly inspired by events – the story was based on an old episode of The United States Steel Hour – it certainly shaped Howard’s approach to making the film, which you perhaps wouldn’t expect the filmmaker to feel such a strong personal connection to otherwise.
In an interview with People, Bryce Dallas Howard opened up about the kidnapping threats, revealing how “Growing up, we had some security issues. It was super scary.” She added, “And we had to leave our house, and there were, you know, incidents that were just totally, totally terrifying.”
The actor explained, “I think the scariest part for me was that I, because I was the oldest child, I was aware something was going on. And it was like, ‘Why can’t I call my friends?’ And, you know, they don’t want to explain to me because [our] frickin’ phones are tapped, trying to find where we are?”
The event was evidently traumatic, and even worse, the culprits were never caught and arrested. While Howard hadn’t really explored the crime genre before, the event spurred him to pour his feelings into the film, resulting in one of the highest-grossing movies of 1996.
