Oscar-winning filmmaker Ron Howard has been to the Cannes Film Festival numerous times going back almost 40 years: with Willow in 1988, The Da Vinci Code in 2006, and Jim Henson Idea Man two years ago, among other appearances.
He returned to the Croisette this year with Avedon, his documentary about the extraordinary photographer Richard Avedon.
“Always a fascinating experience, always kind of intense,” Howard said of Cannes as he stopped by the Deadline Studio just after his world premiere. “But the spirit around the docs is quite different than when you bring a large studio movie here with all the anticipation that it brings with it. Whereas the spirit around the doc community, the screenings, just the entire vibe, it’s really pure cinema. It’s discovery, it’s exploration, it’s conversation, and it’s fun. It’s a little more relaxed feeling.”
“Relaxed” is not a word one would use about Avedon, who remained in constant motion during his six-decade career, driven to explore human faces and beauty in portraiture, fashion spreads and more.
Photographer Richard Avedon with some of the photos from his ‘In the West’ project.
Susan Middleton
“He was busy. He stayed very, very busy,” Howard noted. “With Avedon, what we had was this breadth of time when he worked both commercially and also his more journalistic work. The archives were amazing and for the first time the [Richard Avedon] foundation and the family were willing to give a documentary group access, really full access to these archives.”
The famed, the beautiful, the compelling – all came within his focal plane: Marilyn Monroe, Twiggy, Diana Ross, the Beatles, American cowboys, U.S. military brass, politicians, three generations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family, his friend James Baldwin, a young Lew Alcindor, later to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Lew Alcindor photographed in New York May 2, 1963.
Richard Avedon Foundation
“That picture of this young man at age 18, 17, says everything about the man I know who’s not only a basketball legend, but a civic leader, cultural leader, an author, a journalist — that intelligence, it’s all there in that photo when you look at it,” Howard marveled. “I don’t know how Avedon would capture these things in a single frame, but a lot of it would be the way he would interface with people, I would say ‘direct’ them. And sometimes yes, it was, ‘Tilt your head down,’ or ‘How about try moving or jumping?’ but sometimes it was just getting to know them and getting them to trust him enough to, I don’t know, to share something. It was remarkable.”
In 2020, author Philip Gefter published What Becomes a Legend Most: Richard Avedon, a biography that also explored Avedon’s career and life, including his conflicted feelings about his sexuality. Howard’s film, based largely on archive interviews with Avedon, doesn’t delve into how Avedon viewed his sexuality because it wasn’t something the photographer ever publicly addressed.
“We chose to focus on that creative journey, which we could really define,” Howard explained. “Avedon himself never spoke openly about it. He had, certainly, relationships with women that are on the record, and we chose to stay focused on the things that we could really [document].”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
The Deadline Studio at Cannes is sponsored by SCAD.
Title: Avedon
Section: Special Screenings
Director: Ron Howard
Sales agent: Cinetic Media
Logline: Richard Avedon’s photographs shaped our image-driven world. This film explores his life and legacy through never-before-seen archives, footage, and interviews, revealing how his vision transformed 20th-century visual culture.
Panelist: Ron Howard (director)