Howard

Howard used these experiences in order to make his film much more dramatic, which is

what a good director should always do. The movie includes a scene where Nash is

receiving shock treatment while his distraught wife looks on and the background musical

score becomes even more intense. This is another example of Howard’s creativity on

display in order to create a film that will grip the audience. It is a scene where Howard

stays true to the actual experiences of Nash. Howard took advantage of these experiences

to the fullest.

Howard’s creative mind attempted to turn the story of John Nash into something

more. I once read that the goal of most directors is to create the “complete movie.�

Howard takes full advantage of Nash’s illness by elaborating upon Nash’s schizophrenia

to create an even more complete movie. Directors will often attempt to encompass

different genres in their movie so that they will attract the largest possible audience. The

end result is often a film that includes such elements as time travel, kung fu, guns, car

chases, explosions, aliens, a love story, spies, code breaking, and psychos. Thus, you’ll

have a movie that is part action, part drama, part horror, part love story, and part comedy,

and this leads to an incoherent movie just because the director tried too hard to please his

or her audience.

For example, most people who have seen Kevin Costner’s film The

Postman will agree that it wasn’t very gripping. The film ended up becoming a huge

flop. The reason why it did so poorly with audiences is because Costner tried to do too

much with the film. The movie was about a mailman in a post-apocalyptic setting who

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eventually leads a band of rebels in a war against an oppressive gang in order to save

what is left of the United States while also finding time to have a love interest. In my

opinion, Costner just tried to pack too much into his film and that ended up hurting the

film’s appeal with audiences nationwide. I believe that Howard slightly becomes a

victim to this same idea in A Beautiful Mind.

Howard tried to involve all sorts of ideas, not just mathematical ideas, in his film

so that the movie would be accepted by a greater number of people. This is what I mean

when I say that Howard used the specific illness of Nash in order to appeal to his

audience. Howard included scenes of extreme tension, such as when Nash’s wife

discovers her husband’s collection of magazine and newspaper clippings in the shack

behind their house. At this point in the movie, the viewer starts to feel that Nash might

actually be cured of his illness. However, his wife ends up discovering that Nash has

secretly been continuing his delusional work because Nash believes that he has a mission

to decode messages hidden within periodicals in order to help save the country.

Howard also manages to find a way to include guns in a movie about a Nobel

Prize winner. This is because Nash’s delusions justify the use of seemingly out of place

events in the life of a mathematician. In the film, there is a scene where Nash stands at

gunpoint of a group of Army soldiers who somehow found their way to his backyard in

the middle of the night in order to make sure that Nash continues his work breaking codes

for the government. However, the audience knows that this is just another one of Nash’s

delusions. Another example of an action-packed scene is one where Nash believes that

he is involved in a car chase where his pursuers are agents who feel that Nash knows too

much on his way to saving the country by taking the role of a spy. Howard does a very

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good job combining all these elements of car chases, code breaking, and espionage in

order to create a movie that will be appealing to an extremely broad audience. Although

I feel that Howard didn’t have to add these action elements into A Beautiful Mind, those

very same elements displayed his creativity as a film director who is aware of what

audiences want to see on the big screen.

Creativity and Madness

I have pointed out many different aspects of Howard’s creativity.

Another facet of his creativity involves how he portrayed the thought processes of the

main character of A Beautiful Mind, John Nash. It could be said that Nash was creative

because he was so driven to succeed. However, Howard believed that Nash’s passion for

success and desire to be recognized is what helped lead to his mental illness. At the

beginning of the film, there are several instances where Howard displays the significance

of recognition