Defensive Ron Howard: ‘You Try Making A Good Movie About Fucking Hillbillies’

LOS ANGELES—In response to widespread negative reviews of his recently released film, Hillbilly Elegy, defensive director Ron Howard told his critics Monday, “You try making a good movie about fucking hillbillies.” “I’d invite anyone who didn’t like my film to try creating something with actual emotional depth about a bunch of backwards, dumbass hill people—can’t be done,” said Howard, adding that it was impossible to write, direct, edit, or even act in a movie about “some hopeless, completely unlikable Appalachian inbreds who just keep fucking up their own lives over and over again.” “Oh, you thought my movie was trite, huh? Well, what did you people expect? Their real-life struggle is the same ridiculous thing over and over again. All those holler dimwits are so drunk off their asses and strung out on heroin it’s impossible to make a coherent story about them. Ask [actors] Amy [Adams] and Glenn [Close], they’ll tell you how difficult it is to act like people who are already parodies of themselves. ‘But Ron,’ you’ll say, ‘what about J.D. Vance’s book? What about his input?’ Vance hates them just as much as I do. He told me the second he got out of there and realized he could cash a check on their fat, Walmart-fed asses, he was on cloud nine.” Howard also brushed off a few positive reviews of the film as representing a universal generational struggle, saying that wasn’t the point of the movie and that no one involved in the making of Hillbilly Elegy was “even from the same species as these toothless yokels.”