- All right, y'all.
Let's move on to our first guest.
You know her from the blockbuster "Jurassic World" movies,
as well as many others that I love, like "The Village,"
she's the daughter of director Ron Howard,
and like her famous father,
she recently moved behind the camera
for a documentary on dads.
Let's welcome Bryce Dallas Howard, everybody.
- Hi! (laughs)
- Hello, I love you, and I'm very excited that you're here.
So where are you right now?
It looks very relaxing, you look chill.
- Well, I'm in New York.
- Oh.
- And there's a, I'm in Upstate New York,
and there's a backdrop, and then behind this
is just like garage. (laughing)
- Okay, I was like that's awesome.
All of us have our, this is like my living room,
and they just put a set in it, so yeah.
Everything is fake. - Oh my God.
It's like even more fake for TV, it's awesome.
Well, before I forget, congratulations.
This is really awesome.
You're officially a college graduate.
That's amazing that you went back.
Nobody does that.
- You know what I did?
I kind of never really left school.
And my teachers like when I was taking a leave of absence
to start working and to like do "The Village"
and stuff like that, I kept saying to my teachers,
I'm like, "I'm gonna come back, I'm gonna come back,
"I'm gonna come back."
And right away, I started taking classes
at an accredited university in order to transfer
to eventually graduate.
I didn't think it was gonna take me 21 years.
- Yeah, well, you've been a little busy
making huge successful movies, so yeah.
Not that they need to be huge and successful, but they are.
So that's okay.
I just think it's awesome.
My mom's a teacher, so when I told her
I wasn't going to college and I was gonna be a waitress
living on a mattress to be a singer,
it wasn't the best thing she'd ever heard.
She wasn't very excited about the notion,
so it worked out, luckily.
- Yeah.
- But how did you celebrate?
'Cause so many things, like I had my birthday in quarantine,
everybody's had like moments, anniversaries,
stuff like that happening in quarantine,
how'd you celebrate graduating?
- You know what?
It was really kind of amazing.
Like my parents got one of those things,
one of those signs that you can put in the grass
in front of your house that's like
congratulations, graduate Bryce, or whatever I like.
- Oh my gosh,
that's so Southern. - There're like parents
- that have a graduate, and I had a,
my husband sent off this thing called like Tribute
where you can just like record tributes for people,
and so he sent it to like all of my friends and family
and folks that I've known forever and ever and ever
and they all recorded videos, just you know,
being lovely and congratulating me and stuff.
You know, all of that. - That's really sweet!
- I had my daughter Katie, and she was about,
I don't know, 10 months old, something like that,
just kinda holding her over my head and I was smiling,
I have my mouth wide open and she had her mouth wide open,
and then she vomited in a forceful column,
I guess they call it projectile vomiting directly into,
like it hit my uvula.
It just went right into my throat.
And of course, your reaction is to throw this person
as far away from you as possible, but I didn't.
I held onto her, and I just spit as much of it
as I could out, and that's when I realized I was a dad.
- All right, y'all, I'm back with Bryce Dallas Howard.
That was a look at her new documentary, "Dads,"
which is out on Apple TV+ tomorrow,
so y'all gotta check it out.
But Bryce, your new movie is a different take
on being a dad.
Can you tell me a little about it and who's in it?
- Yeah.
So this is a documentary called "Dads,"
and it's a celebration of modern fathering around the globe.
So I got to interview all different kinds of dads,
comedian dads, I have this perspective that
standup comedians are our modern-day philosophers,
and I wanted to profile, I call them hero dads,
hero dads from around the world,
and that was sort of like the combination between the two,
and then during the course of making the movie,
I kept saying, "Oh, we need to profile a dad
"who's an expecting father."
Someone who hasn't had a kid yet and then becomes a father
during the course of the movie, and I kept not finding it,
and I was about halfway through shooting,
and then found out that my brother and his wife
were gonna have their first child.
And so I was like, okay, - So cool.
I got my expecting dad.
So there is an aspect of the movie that is kind of
the Howard story of sorts. - So you didn't plan that?
- To have your family be as big of a part
as they ended up playing?
- No.
No, I kind of, like early on,
I sort of mentioned the possibility to my dad,
you know, it'd be great if,
'cause my grandfather had recently passed away,
and I had filmed an interview with him several years prior,
and I was like well maybe I can go back
and watch some of that interview
and see if there's anything of value
to put in here. - How cool!
But my dad was like, "No."
(Bryce laughs) (Kelly groans)
- He honestly, he was so nervous about it,
and he just, you know, and I think his concerns were fair.
He's like if we lived for over 60 years
as a private public family,
why would we want to do that?
- That's really incredibly hard.
- Yeah.
Yeah, and we've been lucky in that regard.
Why peek behind the curtain now?
But with my brother being the expecting father,
it just, like I said, it just made sense.
And so my dad, when he finally saw the film,
he was like, "Okay, I understand."
- Well, what made him a great dad?
Because this is an awesome thing,
'cause not all of us, I'm one of them,
I didn't grow up with a great dad,
but I love hearing about how people did,
and I have my, you know, one of my best friends
is also my assistant, and she had a great dad,
and my nanny has a great dad, and I love hearing that
because it's also, you know, something for people
that didn't have fathers to kinda know how to set the bar
for what they should be expecting for a father
for their children or as a husband,
or so it, but how was your dad?
What made him a great dad?
'Cause he had to have been really busy, right?
- You know what?
He was very present.
And he figured out, my parents together figured out,
given their life situation, how to be present.
And it looks different for every single family, you know?
Like everyone has a lot of plates that they're spinning,
and it's different for every individual.
And so what that looked like in terms of my childhood
was we were just traveling,
you know, my mom would like figure it out
so that all four kids,
we could go wherever my dad was going,
and we would enroll in local schools
or get homeschooled and-- - Wow.
- It's almost like touring musicians.
It's almost like how, - Really.
'cause a lot of musicians bring their kids on the road
and families on the road.
- Yes, that's exactly, exactly it.
And it was awesome, because I loved it.
And my parents figured out pretty early
that they could really control me
by threatening that I wouldn't be allowed to go to set
if I didn't behave.
(both laughing)
- I'm not above bribery or threatening, myself.
- Yes.
- No, I think that's cool. - And so that happened.
- [Bryce] Yeah.
- Yeah!
Well, I have a little surprise for you.
- Oh, do you?
- I have a little Father's Day surprise for you.
A video-- - A Father's Day?
Yes, a video was sent to us just for you.
Here, here we go.
We're gonna play it. - Oh my God!
- Hey, Kelly.
Well, let's see, an embarrassing story about Bryce.
She was a great kid.
And she loved visiting the set.
And she was very, very helpful.
In fact, by the time she was 11 or 12,
she was actually pitching in as like a production assistant.
In fact, she was so efficient,
that she was finally given the responsibility
of having a walkie-talkie.
You know, so that the production assistants
could talk to one another and give direction and guidance,
and I mean, that was a real honor
and a show of appreciation for how mature she was.
It was great.
The first day, she was terrific.
She was on it.
The second day was good, too,
except suddenly, over the walkie-talkie,
we heard Bryce ordering the extras holding area
to be moved from one side of a building over to the other.
Now, granted, she was trying to get it out of the sun
and into the shade, and her thinking was pretty good,
but it's not quite cool to have the 12 year old
taking over the production.
So she lost her walkie-talkie that day,
but I knew that one day, she'd wanna be behind the scenes
calling the shots, and she does it really well.
- Oh my gosh, that's amazing.
- I like to take personal responsibility.
- I like, no, and you know what?
I know, but there's something to that,
even that moment as a 12 year old,
like I think there are moments for everyone
that's truly successful, there are those moments,
whatever that walkie-talkie moment is for people,
but you're truly successful 'cause at the very beginning,
even if it was one person,
they told you that you were amazing,
and you could do anything you wanted, and you believed them.
And I think that those are the moments
that you're so bold, and you're like,
well, I got this, I can do this.
Who cares that I'm 12?
Like I think that that's kind of what makes you you,
and what makes you special,
and kind of alight in what you do.
But thank you so much, Bryce,
and thanks for calling in.
Congratulations again on graduating, that's super cool.