Avedon: Ron Howard Talks His Doc About the Famed Photographer
Richard Avedon in 'Avedon'
Cannes Film Festival
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At one point in Avedon, Ron Howard’s documentary about the famed photographer Richard Avedon, the claim is made that Avedon captured much of the 20th century. It’s a bold assertion, but Howard’s film, which distills a dizzying archive provided by the Richard Avedon Foundation, makes a compelling case over its 100-minute runtime.
After becoming the preeminent photographer at the height of American fashion magazines, Avedon was the inspiration behind the Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire musical comedy Funny Face. His notoriety led him to capture the most famous faces in entertainment, politics, society and culture, from James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg to Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin to the Reagans and Warhol’s Factory. In between his portraiture and commercial work (you have Avedon to thank for Brooke Shields’ seminal Calvin Klein campaign), he documented the rubble of post-War Paris, the architects of the American Civil Rights movement and the napalm victims of the Vietnam War.
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All of this, as well as the photographer’s personal life and more, is explored in Avedon, which is getting a special screening in Cannes on May 17.
Howard is no stranger to biodocs. With a focus on prolific creatives, he has directed docs about Luciano Pavarotti (2019’s Pavarotti) and Jim Henson (2024’s Jim Henson Idea Man), the latter of which also bowed at Cannes. He says of his choice of subjects, “We’re all appreciative of their work, but maybe we didn’t recognize quite what it entailed.”
Ahead of touching down in France, Howard talked to THR about the origins of Avedon, the importance of authorship in imagery and how Avedon “used his work to satisfy his own curiosity.”
When did you lock the documentary?
Just a few weeks ago.
Wow.
But it’s been years of working on this, going back to our first visits to the archives. What I so love about this period of my life, creatively moving back and forth between scripted narratives and doc films is that the tempo and the pace of the documentaries is so different. It’s just always with you, percolating, for a long stretch of time. It’s rarely that kind of flat-out sprint. Sometimes, the very last interview you do, it’s not just a few quotes you can plug into the film, it instigates a real rethink, and deepens your understanding of the subject. I really love the opportunity to explore these other worlds, and quite often with me, it’s been individual biographical work.
Why are you drawn to biographical film?
The only verité piece I did was when we followed [chef] José Andrés around. And when we did the Paradise fire film [2022’s We Feed People], we had no idea exactly where that would go. But it’s really been about the opportunities that came my way. I’m very interested in people who achieve artistic excellence. I’m interested in the life and the spark, along with the dues they had to pay and the cost to the other aspects of their life. That all goes into the stew that winds up being a career with significant output.
How did Richard Avedon come on your radar as a documentary subject?
Sara Bernstein, the president of the documentary division at [Howard’s production company] Imagine, had gotten wind that the Avedon family and the foundation were perhaps open to allowing a filmmaker to have access to the archives and be supportive of the effort of reaching out for interviews. So I went to the archive, and it happened to coincide with that [2023 retrospective] in New York. I had nothing but respect for the name Richard Avedon and the handful of images that I could ascribe to him, but no sense of the depth and reach of what he had done. You could open up every drawer and your head explodes with — who he photographed and under what circumstances. There were also these tapes that he recorded of the sessions, which weren’t really right for the movie, but I could see that he wasn’t just taking photos of human beings as symbols or reflections. He was actually drawing out their inner self and finding ways to let that inform the photo, even if it was his commercial, glossy magazine work or advertising. That was enough of a reason, to me, to talk about making the film.
And then I had no idea how much of his life he committed to social observation, to civil rights, to explori