Ron Howard’s Eden Premiere at TIFF Interrupted Midway Due to Audience Member’s ‘Medical Emergency’.Linh

The world premiere of Ron Howard‘s new movie, Eden, at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival was briefly interrupted due to emergency in the audience.

The screening was stopped for roughly 10 minutes on Saturday, Sept. 7, and resumed after an audience member was carried out of the Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. When Howard, 70, took the stage following the premiere for a Q&A session, moderator and festival CEO Cameron Bailey confirmed that the person had a “medical emergency.”

“One of the audience members had something that had to be tended to right away. So we apologize for that interruption, but we’re glad that you stayed,” Bailey told the audience.

“Can you send some results?” Howard asked, prompting Bailey to reveal that the person in question “will be okay.”

Eden marks Howard’s second feature film of 2024, following the May release of the documentary Jim Henson Idea Man on Disney+. The new film, which stars Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas and Daniel Brühl, follows a German couple (Law, 51, and Kirby, 36) in the early 20th century who live on the uninhabited Galápagos island Floreana before their oasis is upended when more European settlers settle on the island and disrupt their way of life.

“I’m fascinated by stories based on the real events. But there’s no question that in this circumstance, the kinds of choices that the characters feel compelled to make or are forced to make are much more complex than anything that I’ve ever dealt with in a film,” the director said of his latest movie.

Howard continued, “And yet, to the extent that we can both understand it and fairly easily surmise what could have happened. This is what these people lived through. I found it fascinating, and I found it utterly human and surprisingly relatable to human existence today with all of its foibles, all its quirks, and all the pain and danger as well.”

As Howard said at the festival, Eden is based on real stories of the first people to settle the then-deserted island in the 1920s and 1930s. The two-time Academy Award winner told Vanity Fair in an interview published on Sept. 4 that he has been fascinated by tales about the people who first settled Floreana for some 15 years.

“Honestly, it was exciting as hell every day because every day, by the way, you saw the tone of the movie, it’s shifting,” he said on Saturday, during the festival’s Q&A. “Sometimes it’s weirdly funny, and other times it’s just deathly serious. Well, with the schedule, they were doing both. They were covering all that ground every day. And it was a remarkable thing to see. And it was exciting for me.”