Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard claims JD Vance has changed as he reveals who he is voting for

Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard said that the JD Vance running for vice president is a different man than the one he knew when he helmed the adaption of the Ohio Senator's famous memoir.

Howard, an Oscar-winning director and long-time fixture of Hollywood, directed the adaptation of Vance's bestselling book, which was released to mixed reviews on Netflix in 2020.

Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival, Howard says he's 'very surprised and disappointed by much of the rhetoric that I’m reading and hearing' and believes Vance has changed.

'People do change, and I assume that’s the case. Well, it’s on record. When we spoke around the time that I knew him, he was not involved in politics or claimed to be particularly interested. So that was then.'

In a separate interview, he made it clear that his relationship with Vance aside, he's with Kamala Harris, adding that 'there’s no version of me voting for Donald Trump to be president again, whoever the vice president was'.

Howard said that when they talked about the film, his conversations with Vance did not touch on politics. 

'Well, we didn’t talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie because I was interested in his upbringing and that survival tale', he told Deadline. 

He added to Variety that he's 'concerned' by the positions Vance has espoused since he's entered politics. 

Howard said that people need to participate in the political process rather than be concerned about his old movies. 

'I think the important thing is to recognize what’s going on today and to vote. And so that’s my answer. It’s not really about a movie made five or six years ago. It is, but we need to respond to what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling now, and vote responsibly, whatever that is., We must participate. That’s my answer'. 

The Netflix film - adapted from a 2016 memoir of the same name - has been panned by critics for what they've called an insensitive depiction of poverty in rural Appalachia.

However, it still did score some raves and an Oscar nomination for Glenn Close as Vance's grandmother. 

The book Vance wrote had painted an evocative portrait of a tough upbringing in a forgotten American. He was perfectly placed to explain why those rust belt towns had turned to Trump even as he warned that the man himself was like an opioid, an 'easy escape from the pain.'

It could have made him a fixture of the chattering pundit classes, called on to explain the appeal and meteoric political rise of a loud-mouthed New York property developer that had baffled the establishment on the left and the right. 

What changed, said a friend who knew the couple at Yale, was the way prestigious institutions railed against Brett Kavanaugh - whom Vance's wife clerked for - during his confirmation and at Trump in office. 

A friend who knew Vance and his future wife at law school said it was one of the factors that pushed him towards Trump and politics, after previously being highly critical. 

'There were two things that I think were frustrating for JD' he said. 'One was seeing how Yale,  like kind of our Yale community—professors, alumni—went after Brett Kavanaugh and the rank partisanship that was shown in that.'

The other thing, he added, was the way the mainstream media, which raved about his book slated the movie when it came out in a way that felt like an attack on the America he had written about. 

Vance had always been a conservative but the partisanship, the story goes, led him to embrace Trump and his Republican movement.