Howard drawn to projects about real people

NEW YORK, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- Ron Howard said directing his U.S. astronaut film "Apollo 13" helped him develop a taste for making movies about real people.

Howard won an Oscar for directing "A Beautiful Mind," about mathematician John Forbes Nash. He earned acclaim for his picture, "Cinderella Man," the story of boxing great James J. Braddock.

His latest fact-inspired film, "Frost/Nixon," recounts British TV personality David Frost's historic interviews with U.S. President Richard Nixon, following Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal.

"It was an interesting journey for me, and I equate this movie with 'Apollo 13' in certain ways," Howard told reporters in New York.

"It's a famous enough story that people more or less know the outcome, and I worried about that directorally with both projects. But I found that, whatever the creative limitations of not feeling the freedom to just invent whatever you want -- even though there's always going to be supposition and creative license taken -- that truth is stranger than fiction when you really delve into it. And when you find one of those stories, often the biggest, most interesting narrative twists and turns actually really happened ... I just found those story lines to be so powerful that I've continued to work with them."