Ron Howard on the Art of Movie Trailers and the Inspiration He Finds on YouTube

In between putting the final touches on his upcoming ocean disaster epic In the Heart of the Sea and producing Fox’s new soapy music series Empire, Ron Howard will be watching the intimate details of your life.

Don’t worry, that’s not as creepy as it sounds.

The Oscar-winning director is once again helming Canon’s Project Imagination, which in its first two iterations, gave camera-wielding fans the opportunity to get their photos turned into short films. This year, the contest will take the concept a step further, soliciting contestants to make short trailers out of footage from their everyday lives. One winner’s entry will be used to inspire a full-fledged Hollywood production (with a director to be announced in February).

Howard spoke with Yahoo Movies about the growing importance of trailers, what he learned from Roger Corman, and what David Fincher taught him about YouTube. Read the interview below the exclusive trailer for Project Imagination:

How much more important have trailers become?
Well they’ve always been vitally important. And then for a while, when the Internet took hold, people began to wonder if theatrical [trailers] were still as important. And it turns out they’re more important than ever. I think there are far more eyeballs on a trailer, whether that’s for a TV show or a movie, than there ever has been. It’s always been its own particular art form.

Do you shoot scenes of the movie with the trailer in mind?
I joke about that, and once in a while I’m right, but more often, the people that actually sit with the footage and sort of put it through their filter wind up surprising me every time.

Marvel just released a trailer that was literally ant-sized for Ant-Man. Now there are teaser trailers, teasers to the teasers to the trailers. What do you think of the movement of chopping up trailers to be even smaller?
I love it. Again, I think each time, it reflects another side of the story. As a director, I’ve got a couple of trailers out there right now for In The Heart of the Sea and our new show Empire, which has ten or twelve TV spots that are running. I just think it’s fantastic for the storytellers, for the companies to be able to suggest various aspects of a story to the public, so that people can understand that there are a number of reasons to consider sampling a show or a movie. And it does stimulate creativity. A lot of great filmmakers came out of the world of making trailers.

Related: Watch the trailer for Ron Howard’s Next Film ‘In The Heart of the Sea’

These days, do movies get made because they’d be a good trailer?
Well, they’ve always been. The first movie I made in 1977 was for Roger Corman and even then, he said “Back in the ‘50s, we learned that you needed the materials to make a great poster and a great trailer, and once you had that, then your job was to figure out the rest of the movie.”

It’s not that he’d shoot the trailer first, but he would definitely plot it. That’s an idea that’s been around for 50 or 60 years. And if you look at some of the old trailers, they were so simplistic compared to what we have today. I love what we have today. I love that it’s its own little medium and art form.

How much should trailers give away?
I think it’s kind of seasoned to taste. Some marketing people believe that the audience really needs to understand everything about a story, and others do want to go with a mystery. One of the biggest surprise successes that I ever had with a movie goes back to the mid ’80s and it goes back to Cocoon, which wound up being a top 10 movie that year. The people making the trailer kept making it simpler and simpler and simpler, and actually revealing less and less and less. And a little bit like In The Heart of the Sea, just tantalizing people into wanting to go on the experience without a lot of details.

The Oscar nominations are coming up; what are your favorite movies of 2014?
I think this year we have a handful of movies that will stand the test of time, and I think that’s how you measure any year. And i’m really excited for my old buddy Michael Keaton to have a career highlight performance like he gives in Birdman.

I believe that the Internet, social media, [and] people contributing to that is really freshening up the aesthetic and broadening everybody’s sense of what might make an interesting movie. And it’s allowing people to be more experimental. Certainly the big tentpole comic book movies — they’re not very experimental — but a lot of movies are, like Birdman and like Whiplash. These are movies that, you look at them, and you can imagine some of these moments coming from YouTube. Some of these scenes look like they came to us from the Project Imagination.

How has YouTube impacted the aesthetic of yours and other movies?
I constantly was dragging people in during pre-production and looking at footage on YouTube of people on the ocean, at sea, in storms, in races, out cruising. I was trying to draw from that aesthetic for this movie that takes place in 1820, because I want this to be a very personal, immediate, contemporary cinematic experience for people.

Because people are sharing and experimenting and delving, and because the cameras have become so good and so much smaller and so much more durable, people are taking cameras to amazing places and capturing images and sharing them. And sometimes it’s the way they piece them together, sometimes it’s the music they put with them, sometimes it’s the subject matter.

David Fincher was the director/colleague who first told me this a few years ago. He said, “If you’re thinking of a visual challenge or question, just type that term into YouTube. Whether it’s dreams, fires, whales, or storms, whatever it might be, type it into YouTube, and somebody out there has something to share that’s interesting, and it’s worth taking some inspiration from that.”