Ron Howard: When I began directing I was very young. If there was an area where I had some expertise, it was in light comedy. This is something that I’d been acting in — a tone I’d been involved with — for 20 years already. It was easier for me to convince people that I could actually take the responsibility and do the job of directing a film working in that tone. My first movie was a car chase comedy — young people on the run — called Grand Theft Auto. And made for $602,000, but the film made a terrific profit and it got me started. I wrote it with my father, and I had to star in it in order to get to direct it. But that’s the last time that I acted in anything that I directed. Well, I actually had to do a scene in the next film that I directed, but I didn’t like it and I cut the scene out. And the executives in charge of the project, fortunately, liked the movie well enough that they accepted the fact that I cut myself out of the movie. That was the last time that I acted in anything that I’ve directed. Since then, I’ve graduated to more and more ambitious projects, gained the industry’s trust, gained the trust of creative collaborators: great actors, writers, other producers. Slowly but surely, I’ve tried to broaden the range and scope of what I could do as a director.