Ron Howard says Michael Keaton wanted to cut down the number of takes on a fight scene in The Paper because Glenn Close was “going full throttle.” The director recalled the exchange while talking about making his 1994 newsroom drama, which followed reporters racing to publish a controversial front-page story.
Howard said Keaton, who was in the middle of the scene’s physical give-and-take, asked him to keep the camera rolling to a minimum because Close was bringing so much force to the performance. The scene put Henry Hackett and Alicia Clark into a heated confrontation that turned into a physical altercation in the middle of the newsroom, the kind of chaos Howard wanted to capture in a film built around 24 hours inside a New York City newspaper office.
The story carried added weight because Howard was not just revisiting a single scene; he was revisiting a stretch of his career that repeatedly crossed paths with Keaton. The two worked together on Night Shift in 1982, Gung Ho in 1986, Clean and Sober in 1988 and later Inventing the Abbotts in 1997. At his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in 2025, Howard said it had been far too long since he and Keaton made a movie together.
Howard also said Close’s role in The Paper had originally been written as a male character. He said David and Stephen Koepp liked his idea of casting Close “without changing a single attitude, behavior or line,” a decision that gave the film’s newsroom an edge that fit its frantic pace. The cast also included Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid and Robert Duvall.
What makes the recollection stand out is how much it says about the movie’s working method and the people inside it. The Paper was a newsroom comedy-drama about editors and reporters racing to publish the next day’s edition, but Howard’s memory of Keaton’s request shows how hard the film leaned on performance under pressure. He has said, “I've been so lucky in this business, I've worked with so many great people,” and, about Keaton, “I have so few regrets, practically none, and one of them is just only that it's been far too long since Michael and I made a movie together, so I'm hoping to rectify that sooner rather than later.”
The clearest takeaway from Howard’s account is that the bond between the two men is still active, not archival. The director’s regret was not about the past work itself, but about the gap since their last collaboration. If that changes, it would close a 28-year stretch that began after Inventing the Abbotts and has left one of Hollywood’s most durable director-actor pairings without a new film for far too long.
