Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard said the JD Vance running for vice president is a different man than the one he knew when he directed the adaptation of the Ohio senator’s famous memoir.
Howard, an Oscar-winning director and longtime Hollywood fixture, helmed the adaptation of Vance’s best-selling book, which was released to mixed reviews on Netflix in 2020.
Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival, Howard said he is “very surprised and disappointed by a lot of the rhetoric I’m reading and hearing” and believes Vance has changed.
“People change, and I guess that’s how it is. Well, it’s on record. When we spoke at the time I met him, he wasn’t involved in politics and he didn’t claim to be particularly interested. So that was then.”
In a separate interview, he made clear that, regardless of his relationship with Vance, he is with Kamala Harris, adding that “there is no version of me voting for Donald Trump to be president again, whoever the vice president was.”
Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard said the JD Vance running for vice president is a different man than the one he knew when he directed the adaptation of the Ohio senator’s famous memoir.
Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival, Howard says he is “very surprised and disappointed by a lot of the rhetoric I’m reading and hearing” and believes Vance has changed.
Howard said that when they discussed the film, his conversations with Vance did not touch on politics.
“Well, we didn’t talk a lot about politics when we were making the film because I was interested in his upbringing and that story of survival,” he said. Deadline.
Added to Variety that he is “concerned” by the positions Vance has taken since entering politics.
Howard said people need to engage in the political process rather than worry about their old movies.
“I think the important thing is to acknowledge what’s happening today and vote. That’s my answer. This is not a movie that was made five or six years ago. It is, but we have to respond to what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling now, and vote responsibly, whatever that is. We have to participate. That’s my answer.”
The Netflix film, adapted from a 2016 autobiography of the same name, has been panned by critics for what they have called an insensitive depiction of poverty in rural Appalachia.
However, it still received some favorable reviews and an Oscar nomination for Glenn Close as Vance’s grandmother.
The book Vance wrote had painted an evocative portrait of a hard childhood in a forgotten American. He was perfectly positioned to explain why those Rust Belt cities had turned to Trump, while warning that the man himself was like an opioid, an “easy escape from pain.”
Howard said people need to engage in the political process rather than worry about their old movies.
The Netflix film, adapted from a 2016 autobiography of the same name, has been panned by critics for what they have called an insensitive depiction of poverty in rural Appalachia.
It could have made him a fixture in the chattering classes of pundits, called upon to explain the appeal and meteoric political rise of a loudmouth New York real estate developer who had baffled the establishment on both the left and the right.
What changed, said a friend who knew the couple at Yale, was the way prestigious institutions criticized Brett Kavanaugh (for whom Vance’s wife worked) during his confirmation and with Trump in office.
A friend who met Vance and his future wife in law school said it was one of the factors that pushed him toward Trump and politics after having previously been highly critical.
“I think there were two things that were frustrating for JD,” she said. “One was watching Yale, as our Yale community — faculty, alumni — go after Brett Kavanaugh and the overt partisanship that that demonstrated.”
The other thing, he added, was the way the mainstream media, which praised his book, criticized the movie when it came out in a way that seemed like an attack on the United States he had written about.
Vance had always been a conservative, but partisanship reportedly led him to embrace Trump and his Republican movement.
