RON HOWARD

We watched him grow up from The Andy Griffith Show’s Opie and Happy Days’ Richie Cunningham to become an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. Now, as an executive producer of the miniseries Mars, premiering Nov. 14 on the National Geographic Channel, Howard, 62, invites us to visit the Red Planet and find out what living there will be like in 2033. What is Mars about? It’s about what it’s going to take for the first colonists to go to Mars and establish a base. Anything that stimulates the public’s imagination about the nobility and the importance of space exploration is something that I’m very excited to be a part of. You grew up in the golden age of NASA—is that when your fascination with space began? I was always fascinated by the space program. But like a lot of America, I started to lose track of it. Working on [the movie] Apollo 13 reawakened my respect for that period and the belief that exploration is in our blood and something that mankind needs to be pursuing. You’re the director of Inferno, in theaters now. Is it more about modern science or traditional faith? With Inferno, [author] Dan Brown created a mystery for Robert Langdon [Tom Hanks] to solve that’s contemporary. While the clue path exists in the world of Dante’s Inferno, the event is about overpopulation, so the crisis is of the moment. You also directed the documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years. What are your memories of the Fab Four? They had an impact on me: The only thing I wanted for my 10th birthday was a Beatle wig. That’s what I got.