Chris Columbus on Harry Potter, Home Alone and The Thursday Murder Club

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Richard, I've got a little game for you.

We are doing a special on the weird and wonderful world of charity singles.

Now, can you and I, batting back and forth, name all the people in the original Band Aid?

Do they know it's Christmas?

Let's not try and name all of them.

Let's try and beat each other.

Sting.

We won't do all of them because I think it wasn't like the bassist from Cool and they're getting it.

Don't buy yourself time with this.

Sting.

Sting.

Bonno.

Boy George.

Marilyn.

George Michael.

Paul Young, Banana Rama, Tony Hadley.

You could have had all three members of Banana Rama there.

You could have struggled.

I know them all.

Sarah Dallin, Kieran Woodward, and who was in

the

Siobhan at the time.

Who was she replaced by in the band?

Can you name her?

Jackie

Sullivan.

Thank you.

Anyway, I'm so sorry.

What will we do?

All right.

Okay.

Heaven 17.

Who was in Heaven 17?

Glenn Gregory.

Yeah.

Midieu.

Bob Geldof.

Oh, yeah.

John Keble from Spando Ballet.

Oh, okay.

Alison Moyer.

Simon LeBon.

Oh, God, you're going to beat me.

Have I already failed at this?

There's a clue in Simon LeBonne.

Oh, yeah, John Taylor's in it.

Yeah, you go.

Okay.

Jodie Watley.

Oh, my God.

Hang on a second.

Let me just think it through.

No.

You've got me.

You've absolutely got me.

You could have had Gary Kemp.

Oh, fuck.

Because

I could have done all this band outs.

Nick Rhodes.

Yeah, I could have.

Just naming all the people in all the bands.

Francis Rossi.

Paul Weller, I think, isn't it?

That's just a fun game, but the serious business of charity singles, we're doing a special

this Friday.

Bowie did a spoken message on the B side.

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Hello, everybody.

It is Richard Osmond here.

I know Marina normally introduces these shows, but she is...

What's the best word for it?

Lazy.

She's not with us today.

She is abroad.

This is a Q ⁇ A special, and I'm very, very happy to be joined by the wonderful Chris Columbus.

Hello, Chris.

Hello, Richard.

How are you?

I'm very, very well.

All the better for seeing you.

Now, Chris, one of the greatest directors in Hollywood history.

Over $4 billion in box office, Chris.

That's a good question.

And absolutely.

I think none of it.

Director of Home Alone, Mrs.

Doubtfire, The Harry Potters, the Thursday Murder Club, which I'm sure we'll get on to at the end of this.

As a writer, goonies, gremlins, as a producer, you've done everything from Knight at the Museum to Nosferatu.

So you are steeped in Hollywood lore and Hollywood legend.

We put out a call a couple of weeks ago to our listeners to ask if they had any questions for you.

And boy, did they.

I'm just going to ask you some of these as jumping off points.

We'll have a little chat.

Perfect.

I think Marina might even be ringing in with a question of her own.

Excellent.

At some point.

She's gutted to be missing you.

Oh, well, I'm gutted to be missing her.

As I say, she is very much the better half of this podcast.

Should we go sort of chronologically?

Sure.

Chris, is that all right?

Yeah, but we could listen, if we find some highway or byway that we want to go down, we should just do that.

Definitely, definitely.

I'm going to start with gremlins.

This is sort of where it started for you.

Written the script for gremlins.

Spielberg found it, and we'll get into all of that.

But Annie Costa, thank you, Annie, says, your original script for gremlins, Chris, was far darker than the movie that was eventually made.

Brackets, I seem to recall, a severed mum's head bouncing down the stairs.

How do you rationalise the compromises you have to make from your original vision to actually getting a movie made?

I think I initially was right

because I was living in a loft in Manhattan at the time and it wasn't it's not a romantic sort of Soho loft.

It was a loft on 26th Street between 6th and 7th.

It was an actual loft.

It was an actual loft with rats and mice and the rent was about $104 per person.

There were three of us there and at night literally there were mice running around on the floor and one of them brushed by my hand in the middle of the night and they would wake me up occasionally.

And I got this idea from watching, I started to watch a lot of Universal Horror films, and I got an idea about small creatures being very frightening.

And that's sort of where it started.

And I wrote the script probably in six weeks.

How old were you at this stage?

I was 22, maybe 23.

There'll be an awful lot of people listening to this who are at that stage of their career.

They're just starting out to thinking, where's my break?

But that's where you were.

You were thinking,

were you ever thinking, I'm going to make it in this business?

Well, ironically, there was a, I did have an agent at that time who was sort of visiting NYU when I was a sophomore at NYU and read 20 pages of a script I was writing about my experience in high school American football,

not soccer as we call it, but American football when I played football and I was terrible.

And I wrote a script about it, and the agent took me on as a client.

So that script was purchased, so I had a little bit of money to sort of keep going.

And I had the opportunity to write gremlins on spec, which means no one's paying you for it.

So I wrote it thinking it was sort of a lark.

I wanted to write a horror film.

And I wrote a very sort of disturbing, dark horror film.

And it went to about 50 producers, if I recall, 45 to 50 producers who all rejected it.

So for me, that was sort of the end of it.

I would give up after 45 to 50, I think.

I was my agent who was sending it out.

So I just moved on.

Do you know what?

That's the only good thing about agents is

because as a writer or a director, anything, if you get three rejections, that's it.

You'd burn something, right?

Yes.

And an an agent isn't telling you so afterwards, oh my God, everyone said no to that.

Yes.

And so we knew that it was sort of a hopeless thing.

And I guess Steven Spielberg was leaving his office on a Friday.

Part of this is luck.

Gremlins was at the top of his assistant's pile on her desk.

He was walking out.

He paused.

He saw the title, picked up the script, took it home with him, read it.

And I got a call at my loft in the middle of the week, the following week.

These are the days of landlines, Chris.

These are the days of landlines.

I was just painting a picture.

Yes.

And my roommate answered the phone and said, Steven Spielberg's on the phone.

And I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke.

And I got on the phone and I recognized the voice.

Stephen was very famous at the time.

And he asked me to come out to Hollywood and meet with him.

And that sort of started the ball rolling.

Now, Gremlins was very violent.

And we didn't have to, ironically, did not have to cut much.

We cut two scenes.

We cut the scene of the, as mentioned, the scene of the mother's head rolling down the stairs.

We cut a scene where the gremlins went into McDonald's and ate the people, but didn't eat the food.

And then we, Stephen's major contribution, which was brilliant at the time, all of the Magwai, the little cute creatures, turned into gremlins.

Stephen suggested keeping one of those cute throughout the film so the audience had someone to relate to.

Also good for merch.

Good for merch.

Gizmo was his name.

And then Gizmo stayed sort of cute throughout the film.

And that's sort of the story of gremlins.

And it wasn't really a lot of cut.

I had to cut two or three scenes, and that was it.

But that's incredibly early to have a big break and to have such a huge break.

Did it give you a kind of unreasonable expectations of what the business was because you're suddenly thinking, hold on, I've just got this hit movie with Spielberg.

Must have been an incredible time.

It was a situation where I was sort of putting this sort of pressure on myself at the time.

Both my parents were factory workers.

So for me,

the only way sort of out was the film business because that's the only thing I really knew how to do.

So I sort of patterned, ironically, patterned my career after Steven because Stephen was, for all of us, the youngest director to have sort of made it at the time.

I think Stephen directed Jaws when he was 30, maybe under, maybe 28.

So for all of us in film school, we always talked about that, that we wanted to be directing a film by the time we were 30.

So for me,

those expectations weren't unreal.

They were very real.

It sounds odd now, but I thought, okay, this is about the time this is supposed to happen, and I need to be directing before I'm 30.

That was the unrealistic sort of naive expectations.

But it's funny your career happens to you.

It's only looking back, you just go, oh my God, that was lucky.

I fast forward 30 years down the road,

I was meeting with Paul Newman before he passed away about a project to reunite Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

But I remember Paul Newman saying to me, half of this business is talent and half of it is luck.

And I've taken that to heart over the years.

And as I look back on it, there were a lot of lucky moments, a lot of moments that really sort of paved the way.

Had I made a left turn instead of a right turn, I don't know if I'd be here right now.

And then it's taking advantage of that luck.

It is taking advantage of that luck.

Some people get luck.

immediately think they're enormously talented and get cocky.

Whereas the key thing, I think, isn't it, if you get a bit of luck, you think that's when the work begins.

I mean, I'm being honest with you.

I never thought I was enormously talented.

I just thought that

if it was really a working-class attitude in a sense, that if you keep working, put your head down and keep working while others are out.

You know, there were many nights I sacrificed staying home and writing when I could have been out at either a baseball game or or with my friends at the pub, and I decided I can't, I cannot go back to that factory life.

I cannot go back.

It really was hanging over my head.

What was it do you think, by the way, that Spielberg saw in that?

Like a sensibility?

Because I'll talk a bit about your sensibility as we go on.

Whatever it is you're trying to do, whether it's you think you're trying to do horror or something,

you have such a crowd-pleasing sensibility.

He must have seen that somewhere.

He's not buying something that's kind of a pure horror script.

He must have seen something there.

I mean, I look at it now, and people ask me to sort of define some of the work I've done in terms of tone.

Tonally, everything I've really done is you can't define looking back on it because even with something like Gremlins or if you move to something like Home Alone, the tonal shift in those films is abrupt, to say the least.

So it's something that I think just was part of my DNA that I could never, when I had studio executives ask me, for years, they still asked me, what's the tone?

I can't tell you.

The tone is really what I do, which is a combination of naturalistic performances combined with something that might feel over the top or big.

That's the thing, again, to anyone in the business who wants to break into the business.

People will always tell you what you are.

They'll tell you what your tone is.

And it's not your tone, is the thing that you wake up in the morning, that's your tone.

And it's staying true to that, isn't it?

And not being told who you are.

Should we get on to Home Alone?

Sure.

So you'd always wanted to be a director.

That'd have been thinking about.

And listen, Home Alone.

It's almost impossible to have a bigger hit than Home Alone.

I have a question here from Kaicos and Kaikos asks, what do you think makes a movie endure?

Why do people still talk about Home Alone?

35 years now, the anniversary.

It's going to be here forever, that movie.

As you say, it has a certain sensibility, which I'd be fascinated to talk to you about.

But what is it that makes a movie endure?

It was interesting.

You can't really predict.

I still can't predict that.

I do know that there was a mantra that I had with the crew,

because it was the third film that that I directed, and it was the feeling about Home Alone was that it had to feel timeless, even when we were making it.

By that, I mean, I did not want it to feel like a product of 1990.

In other words, we tried to avoid anything that would connect it to 1990, with the exception of certain technology, which we were stuck with.

We had no idea where the technology was going.

But at the same time, there was that quest to make it feel timeless.

Now, the mantra I said to the crew, which is, if when this is playing on television in 10 years, I want to feel as if it was just made yesterday.

And that's sort of the films that I've done that have been successful, as opposed to the ones that have not been successful, were really with that mantra in mind.

And I don't know if that's the reason that the film has endured.

You really need that.

You need 35 years down the road to actually be able to look back and try to figure out why.

I think part of it is that.

I think part of it is, ironically, the technology we used to shoot the film at the time was technology that was used in the 30s and 40s for color film photography, which were old arc lights, which

you're a proper cinema geek as well, aren't you, sir?

Proper cinema geek, but those arc lights, which have never been used since, were something that they used in Singin' in the Rain.

But it created a color palette that gives a warm, inviting color palette to the film that still exists when you see it today.

So those kinds of things all mixed together.

And add to that, Macaulay Calkin, who truly was

every kid, I call him.

You know, he was not a Disney kid, which I always avoided hiring.

Someone who has so much experience that they don't feel fresh on film.

Macaulay was this kid who was just interesting.

His ear was a little bent.

He felt real.

He felt like someone you knew.

But he was incredibly funny and charming.

So he's a real movie star.

I have a question actually from, I think Marina's question is about Macaulay Culkin.

We recently spoke to the director of The Incredible Adolescents, who said that it was an almost immediate realization that their lead actor, Owen Cooper, was perfect for the role.

When did you know that Macaulay Colkin was a star?

I felt that when I was doing Home Alone, it was my third film.

The film I had done prior to Home Alone was a box office disaster, critical disaster, and it closed.

It was out of theaters three days after it opened.

It was called Heartbreak Hotel.

And Elvis Presley filmed.

Not Adventures and Babysissing, it was a great babysitting.

It was successful.

So they gave me a second film, which was about the kidnapping of Elvis Presley.

Good luck trying to find that anywhere.

But if you do, it's got some fun.

that.

It'd be easier to find Elvis.

It actually would.

So, anyway, so we did, Home Alone for me was

my last sort of shot at becoming a director.

If I failed with Home Alone, I knew I'd be writing for the rest of my life.

So I had to do my directorial sort of

responsibility, which was finding the perfect kid for this movie.

Now, Macaulay Culkin had been in a supporting role in John Hughes' Uncle Buck.

And she had a scene-stealing role with John Candy, which is fantastic.

However, John Hughes, being a great producer, said to me, Well, you should, if you really feel that you should find the perfect kid, look for him.

We spent months, 400, 500 auditions trying to find the perfect kid.

I met all of these kids, saw at-home tapes and self-tapes, and kids came in.

And finally, the last person I met was Macaulay Culkin.

And he was actually perfect.

I would have saved myself months of work.

But I felt I had to.

It's exactly like Will Young one X Factor over here.

He was the last person to audition.

Is that true?

Same story.

He's the Macaulay Culkin of the Macaulay.

Well, anyway, Macaulay was perfect for the role, and that was the point when I hired him.

So it really did, I did feel I had to do that work.

If someone had said to you on that set, one of these child actors is going to win an Oscar, would you have thought it was going to be Kieran Colkin?

No, not at the time.

How could I ever predict that?

It's a great performance, though.

It's a great performance.

It's a small performance, but it's a great performance.

This is a question for me because people often ask, when you're doing something, do you know if it's going to be a hit or do you know if it's going to be a flop?

and my answer is always almost always no

and has that been your experience for the i mean most of the time yes there have been times when you

there have been several times actually when i've started a film and i'm two or three weeks into it and i know we have a disaster on our hands and there's no way out and it's happened to me a couple of times and it's it's a horrifying feeling because you can't quit looking back it would have probably been more responsible for me to quit although there were there were two or three situations where I knew immediately and i you start to try to figure out a way to fix it so you spend the rest of the shoot i'm literally trying to stop this this train that is uh you know that is moving forward and you there's nothing to do but try is try some sort of damage control every day and is that usually because the stakeholders in a project director producer writer actors have different opinions as to what it is going to be or studio thinks you're making a certain film you're aware with the people and the script that you can't make that film is it is it something to do with people's different expectations i think it is i think it part of it is part of it is certainly actor driven if actors are producers on the film and suddenly you've been you've been put into a situation where you thought you were getting into one type of film and you realize that you and the actor slash producer are making a completely different film.

So every day you're butting heads with that particular actor or producer.

And

you've got to direct them.

Yeah.

Or if you've cast an actor who is probably not right for the role and suddenly it's a big movie star and you realize, oh my God, I'm in a situation where I've completely miscast this

because the actor was attached beforehand.

So what do you do?

How do you work around that?

So you start rewriting, you start trying to fix the inherent problem.

But unfortunately, film just exposes every actor who's in front of the camera.

That those flaws are just magnified.

a hundredfold.

Now I won't ask you to name names, but everyone at home is now going through IMDb, looking at your

very small amount of unsuccessful films you've had, and then looking at the lead actors and going, I wonder.

I wonder if that's.

I'll move on to a question from Loanne Barnett.

We've got lots of questions about Harry Potter.

She says, How much pressure did you feel when directing the first Harry Potter?

It was such a beloved and successful series of books, even before the films were released.

The job was something that I had to, you know, my daughter Eleanor, who I'm now running Maiden Voyage Films, was one of the producers on Thursday Murdercliffe.

One of the producers, and probably the reason we formed Maiden Voyage, because back then she was 10 years old and she kept telling me to read this book, Harry Potter, in the States.

And I said, that's not the sort of genre I'm interested in.

She kept telling me to read it and telling me to read it.

And I finally read it and I fell in love with it.

I read it and became a rabid fan, much like we'll talk about later with Thursday Murder Club.

But I became obsessed with the book, read the following two, but there were only two other books in the series at the time, and called my agent and said, I'd really love to direct this movie.

And she said, well, you and 25 other directors.

So I said, what's the process?

She said, Warner Brothers is they called it a bake-off, basically,

which is a really disgusting term, but that's basically what they called it.

If it had been a literal bake-off, that would have been okay.

I would have been fine.

There's a few pastries I could have could have brought to the Warner Brothers studio a lot.

She said they're interviewing directors.

So I had an idea, and I said, Make sure I'm the last director to be interviewed.

She had no idea.

Like Macaulay Culkin and Will Young.

Like Macaulay Culkin and Will Young.

But I had eight days prior to my interview, they sent me the Harry Potter script written by Steve Clovis, which was a very, very good script.

And it was on red paper.

I remember this because I couldn't copy it.

Because if it's on red, you cannot copy it.

That's clever.

So

I basically stayed up till three or four every morning rewriting the script and rewriting it not because of any flaws in Steve's material, but because I wanted to put camera directions, lighting directions.

I wanted them to see I was going to make the film.

So I walked into that meeting at Warner Brothers and basically put the script on the table.

I said, I've rewritten this for you for free.

No one does anything for free in Hollywood.

That was my opening line.

And then I spent an hour and a half discussing how I would make the film.

And I said, it's all there.

And it was a very good meeting.

And it took them about six weeks to make a decision.

They eventually made the decision because they felt I could cast the film

because I had what they called a talent for casting young people.

I didn't realize until I was on a plane to Heathrow and I was going to take a train to Scotland that I didn't really have the job until I met with J.K.

Rowling, two and a half hours with her in Scotland, and explained, basically talked the entire time and explained to her how I saw the film.

And she said, that's exactly the same way I saw the film.

So I knew at that point that I had the job.

However, that put me into a situation where I realized we had the eyes of the world on us in terms of this book.

And I couldn't,

I really needed to make the film work in order because they were already discussing a franchise, the fact that they were going to make the first three books.

I think they knew there were going to be seven books and we knew they were going to be progressively darker.

So we set out and planned exactly how the first three films were going to go.

And as a result, there was a tremendous amount of pressure making the first film because I thought if I screw this up, there are no other films.

It must have been insane.

I mean, I mean, it's like huge.

And the actors you're working with, so you've got three young kids who haven't really done anything before.

Then you've got the absolute cream of British acting talent.

And those two groups of people,

actually, they need similar things which is always to be looked after but they they need different things as well meanwhile you've got this vision you've got a presumably extraordinary kind of production budget and the you know the production design it it must have been just it must have taken over your whole life for such a long time you know the first film we shot it took 160 days to shoot the first film and we did the first two back-to-back I honestly thought I'd be here on all seven films but doing 160 days, then doing another 160 days, Thursday Murder Club was 60 days.

So just put that in perspective,

I would have another 100 days to go.

After I'd finished those two, it was physically impossible for me to direct a third.

But the point of it is the first film, once I got through that and we realized that the audiences were responding to it in previews, there was tremendous sort of weight lifted off my shoulders.

So I had much more fun and much more freedom directing the second film.

So that was really the issue.

The biggest sort of seal of approval came after opening weekend, when the film opened and it did well enough to warrant second a third and a fourth that's the whole business isn't it that you just want to do well enough that they let you do another one exactly exactly in whatever you do what's your relationship like with when you've worked with someone like macaulay or daniel ratcliffe and emma watson seeing them now as adults and seeing what they make of their lives and remembering them as kids and what you sort of launch them towards something that must be quite a rewarding thing well we had a set we had a difficult situation in home alone and I was younger.

It was 10 years prior to Harry Potter.

So I was in a situation where I just was a little naive about the business.

So I cast Macaulay Kalkin because he was the best person for the role, which makes sense.

However, there were some family issues and some personal issues going on at the time that I wasn't aware of until I started shooting the film.

So when David Heyman and I got into the process of casting Potter, we agreed that we would cast the family as well as the kids,

which meant that the kids needed to be supported by a solid campaign.

Do you think the family knew that as the process was going on I'm sure they knew it I mean certainly Daniel Radcliffe's family were not initially interested in having him in the movie because they knew what eventually happened.

But they were such wonderful people, all of the parents, that they protected their kids from the eventual reality of fame.

You know, what would happen when this movie came out.

Suddenly these kids went from, you know, a few photographs in the newspapers before we started shooting.

It didn't mean anything.

It really, the kids could go about living their life.

But the moment the film was released in the UK and then across the world, suddenly they couldn't go out in public anymore.

So everything changed for them.

And the parents had to prepare them for that.

And that's what I meant by casting the parents as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, you can see the three of them seem very smart and together,

which is lovely.

That's testament to, you know, you can put your kids on the stage, but

you've got to be surrounded by smart people.

Can I ask one question about the Harry Potter thing as well?

Rick Mayle filmed some scenes in the first Harry Potter that haven't seen the light of day.

Do you remember working with Rick?

Yeah, yeah, I do because the situation was...

I was obsessed when I started Potter, funnily enough, with this character Peeves, who was this sort of mischievous ghost who was about two feet tall, who haunted the hallways of Hogwarts.

And Rick Mayo came in and did an amazing sort of reading as Peeves.

And we filmed the Peeves scenes, but we could never digitally, it was a CGI character, and we could never get it right.

We never were able to design the character to any of our liking.

So the Peeves scenes were cut from the film.

Rick Mayo's performance was lost,

and that's the thing I'm probably most excited about in terms of the HBO series.

I want to see how they do peeves, because we could never, we had designs for peeves, and they never were appealing.

They were kind of, I don't want to say grotesque, but we just would have turned the audience off.

So we decided not to shoot Peeves.

But Rick Mayo's performance was fantastic.

He would have been a great Peeves.

In fact, Izzy Wintered and asked, is there any chance we might ever see that performance?

But you're saying it doesn't, it no longer works.

We would have to go back to the initial film, find the negative, go back and actually digitally put Peeves into those scenes.

So, Izzy, I think what Chris is saying, there is no.

How do you feel?

It's because of the HBO thing that there's really no chance.

I mean, they'll do Peeves and it'll be fine.

I don't know who's going to voice Peeves, but.

So you had to cut down the first two Harry Potter books into shorter films.

When you look at people making these big HBO series who can sort of cover every piece of dialogue on every page, are you jealous of that or do you think that's less fun?

Oh, I've not, no.

Jella?

No, I'm sort of like, I'm so beyond it.

I did it.

My feeling is, okay, I've done that.

It's time to move on.

I've always had issues with the idea of franchise.

Franchise, when we did Gremlins and Goonies and those films, people were like, that's why I never did the second Gremlins film.

I said, my attitude then was, I've done it.

It's time to move on and do something different.

Same with Potter.

I feel like I've done it.

I'm really proud of those films, the first three that I was involved with,

and I'm moving on.

So now it's interesting, as of yesterday, I think I looked

online and there were photographs of Nick Frost as Hagrid, along with the new Harry Potter.

Now, that's not Nick Frost.

That presumably is still Martin.

I don't remember his last name, a rugby player who played it.

Martin Bayfield.

Yes, who played Hagrid with a giant sort of fake rubber Hagrid head that

we sometimes replaced with CGI.

So I'm seeing these photographs of now it looks like Martin, I could be wrong, wearing a Nick Frost head walking down the streets of London.

And I'm thinking, and he's wearing the exact same costume that we designed for Hagrid.

Part of me was like, what's the point?

Part of me is like, okay, great.

You're doing...

I thought it was going to be...

I thought the costumes were good.

I thought everything was going to be different.

But it's more of the same.

It's going to be the same.

Which is interesting.

It's very flattering for me because I'm like, that's exactly the Hagrid costume that we designed.

So part of it is really exciting.

So I'm excited to see what they're going to do with it.

Part of it is sort of deja vu all over again.

So lots of people talking of franchises have asked about Gremlins 3, though, which I know you weren't involved in Gremlins 2, but maybe you might be involved in Gremlins 3.

Well, now that the franchise train exists in Hollywood,

might as well jump on.

So we might as well jump on in terms of it's it's a much more complicated answer than that because as we see with what's going on at cinema, in cinemas, that most of the films that are successful are either based on IP or successful sort of reboots of other franchises.

Yeah, we talk about it a lot.

And there is the Beetlejuice film was gigantic, and it was, I guess, part nostalgia, part people want to pay to see that.

So, what will people pay to see?

Very few original films.

That's why I champion films like Sinners, which is a big original movie, and I love that.

But again, that's a rarity.

So, I'd be foolish not to entertain the idea of a Gremlins 3 or a Goonies 2.

And we are working on those scripts, but we've been working on it for 40 years, let's be honest.

I mean, we have not, you know, I stopped, decided not to do Gremlins 2.

Goonies 2 came about, interestingly enough, let's go back to Home Alone.

Home Alone was in a situation with a studio, and the studio did not, decided to shut the film down because the budget was $18 million.

So they shut it down on a Friday.

That Friday, when I had to go around and basically say to all the heads of the department, I'm sorry, but we're shut down and you don't have a job.

I go back to my office.

It's about five in the afternoon in Chicago.

So it's about two o'clock in Los Angeles.

I get a call, or three o'clock in Los Angeles, I get a call from Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner.

And they said, we have an idea for Goonies too.

And I said, really?

What is it?

Want you to fly out to Hollywood and we'll talk about it.

We'd love you to write it and direct it.

And at that point, I had just shut down Home Alone.

And I was definitely open to entertaining a franchise.

And I said, because I needed a job.

And I said, okay, let's see what happens.

I should be free next week.

They've just shut my movie down.

We sent the script to 20th Century Fox.

Joe Roth at Fox agreed to make the movie for $19.

It was a million-dollar difference.

So basically, everyone had their jobs back by Sunday night.

So Monday, we reported to the set.

Goonies 2 never happened.

Throughout the years, I've been meeting with Spielberg and Donner, and we discuss it, and no one really could agree on a story.

And we still are working on a story.

So it's basically what we've been doing for 30 plus years, 40 years, however long it is.

And we're working on

Gremlins 3 and Goonies 2, but who knows?

We're not going to do those films.

We're not going to make them if they're anything less than great.

It's not just a cash grab.

We're not interested in that.

Would it be fun to go to a cinema and see Gremlins 3?

Of course,

it would be great, but it has to be great.

The movie has to be great lots more questions but uh let's go for a little break first

this episode is brought to you by sky home of atomic the new sky original series max a free-spirited drug smuggler is forced into an unlikely partnership with jJ an enigmatic fugitive seemingly allergic to eye contact they're involuntarily trafficking life-threatening uranium if it ends up in the wrong hands the fallout will be nuclear they're being tracked by covault operatives led by Cassie, a highly skilled scientist and undercover CIA officer who will do everything in her power to stop a potential Armageddon.

Thanks, Cassie.

Conspiracies, car chases, and morally grey zones.

Atomic stars Alf Yalen, Shahzad Latif, and Samira Wiley.

It's high stakes, offbeat, and somehow still full of heart, like Thelma and Louise, if they were carrying uranium and everyone has sand in their eyes.

Watch Atomic, brand new episodes every Thursday on Sky.

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This episode includes a custom segment in partnership with The Long Walk, only in cinemas from the 12th of September.

Adapted from the first novel Stephen King ever wrote, the film is a gripping thriller about endurance, discipline, and the cost of survival.

Now, Stephen King published this under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979.

That's the identity he used when he wanted to cut the sentiment from his writing and explore darker, more merciless ideas.

And he certainly does in this.

Set in an America stripped of time and context, the rules are simple.

50 boys keep walking at the set pace, no rest, no finish line, fall behind, and you're executed on the spot.

The last boy standing can claim whatever he wants.

Do you think there's ever been a writer who's had better TV and film adaptations than Stephen King?

What a run of form.

It is unbelievable.

There are so many and you think, oh my gosh, that's his as well.

His name often sort of you think of spectacle and horror and Carrie or The Shining, but it's interesting, I think.

So many of his most enduring films are things that are quieter and much more human.

So Shawshank Redemption.

Stuff about people he writes about people misery incredibly i genuinely think that possibly three of my top ten movies of all time would be stephen king adaptations i think shawshank redemption for sure misery for sure also stand by me

which is a short story from the same collection as shawshank redemption i mean that's pretty impressive and then you haven't even talked about you know it or the shining or any of that kind of stuff it's really

Sometimes you hear about writers having their work put on screen and actually there's something about the writing that doesn't quite work cinematically.

and the thing with Stephen King is he's collaborated with lots of different people and some of these things he's had nothing to do with some of these things he has but they seem to work time and time and time and again that's what's so interesting something about the writing something about twists and turns but always always always based on character all of Stephen King's work this is always kind of an everyman or an everywhere somewhere in there.

There's always somebody who you're rooting for.

And, you know, if you write great plots and you have great characters, then it's quite hard to mess that up.

Yeah, the long walk is a sort of bridge between those two types of things.

It is horrifying and terrifying, but it's also very human and character-led.

I think something quite interesting has happened to dystopia.

That in the past, often we thought of dystopia, these huge kind of big-budget things, really over-the-top spectacle, villains, big tech.

But now, lots of these things have become about tension and endurance, and I suppose death games.

Yes, there's a lot of death games.

There's a lot of death games.

I don't know what that says about this particular cultural moment, but it's The Long Walk isn't showy in those particular ways.

It's much more realistic.

It's set in a sort of rural, weathered America.

People-based, human-based.

People-based, human-based.

And who is in The Long Walk?

It's got a fantastic cast.

It's got David Johnson, who's from industry.

Oh, I love him.

He's also in Rye Lane.

And Rye Lane.

One of my favourite movies of the last 10 years.

He got the BAFTA Rising Star Award.

Cooper Hoffman, who they're sort of joint leads, but he's Philip Seymour Hoffman's son.

Oh, he's from Licorice Pizza.

Yeah.

He was in Lizzie.

And Licorice Pizza.

There's a very interesting piece of casting for the evil antagonist in the movie as well.

The evil antagonist is played by none other than Mark Hamill, who plays it as this kind of absolute grim, grotesque, militaristic kind of fascist leader.

I bet he looked, you know what?

That's lovely.

If everyone knows you're as Luke Skywalker, that's a nice thing to get your teeth into.

From Stephen King and director Francis Lawrence, the filmmaker behind several Hunger Games films, and starring David Johnson, Cooper Hoffman, and Mark Hamill, The Long Walk is exclusively in cinemas from the 12th of September.

Book tickets now at thelongwalkmovie.co.uk.

Welcome back, everybody.

It's my great pleasure to be asking your questions to Chris Columbus, one of the all-time great directors, currently directing the Thursday Murder Club movie as well.

I'm going to ask a question now from Ben Boyce, which I think is an interesting Mrs.

Doubtfire question, which is, and leads us up to talking about Robin Williams as well.

Ben asks, who would you cast as Mrs.

Doubtfire if you were filming it today?

No one.

There's no one.

I don't know him.

The reality is, it's not just because I was friends with Robin Williams.

Working with Robin Williams, you realize that there was some sort of odd spiritual intervention in that performance.

There is no one I've worked with since.

Prior to Robin, maybe John Candy had a bit of this, which was a sense of improvisation.

Even Robin couldn't define it.

So Robin and I had this deal, three scripted takes.

So we would do three scripted takes.

So by the time we did those three takes, we had the scripted version of Mrs.

Doddfire.

So you need to.

It's in the canon.

It's in the canon.

And then Robin would say, now let's play.

By playing, he meant, let's go to 15 takes, maybe 20.

I think the most we had done was 26 on certain scenes.

And Robin would start to improvise.

But we had no idea what to expect.

At that point, I realized as I was shooting, I had to put three cameras on.

I had to put two cameras on the other actors and one on Robin.

And Robin, but what I meant by divine intervention is Robin would do his performance and suddenly I'd call cut and then he'd say, What did it, boss?

He'd always call me, boss or Capo.

Capo, what did I do?

What just happened?

Like, he didn't remember what he just did.

And this poor script supervisor, every take was

a different dialogue, and she was handwriting it.

So he would then say to her, What did I just do?

And she's still writing down what he did.

It was paragraphs.

So he never did the same thing twice.

Couldn't, if he tried to duplicate it, it wouldn't be the same.

So we basically had cameras on Pierce Brazin and Sally Field for their reactions.

And as a result of that, I realized as we finished Mrs.

Dauphin and we put the film together that there really

could be no one else who could do this.

There's no one I've met who is capable

of that sort of divine intervention.

And he had it.

If you look at his films, I see Robin as this sort of that golden age of improvisation when it was really Good Morning Vietnam was the moment I took notice of it.

That performance still flies off the screen.

Fisher King has a lot of it going on, and then Mrs.

Doubtfire.

That's sort of where that madness really has been committed to screen.

And

that's sort of the magical time of that.

How is the edit on something like that, though?

Because you've got so much choice.

Over a million, almost two million feet of film.

I think that the edit was the first time we did electronic editing, which is standard today.

So we had choices, and I've said it in the past.

We did have an R-rated version of the film, an NC-17 version, because Robin just went blue and said whatever he wanted, and it didn't matter.

We weren't

necessarily going to put it in the film.

And so as a result of that, we're in the process of doing a documentary at this point

about the making of Mrs.

Delphire, only because we want to show the audience sort of his process, which was so unique.

Oh, that sounds amazing.

And there is a

footage.

All the original negative is in some sort of underground vault in Nevada.

So we have to, you know, the studio is paying for the excavation of the material.

We bring that back, digitize all of that.

I hope this is part of the documentary, the excavation of the takes.

Yes, I want to film myself walking into

the vault

with a shovel, an archaeological expedition.

And I truly am really excited about it because I don't remember.

It's, you know, it's 1993, so I don't really remember all of the takes we didn't use.

I only remember, and I barely remember what exists in the film.

It's not like I watch it all the time.

It's not as if we're cutting a different version of Mrs.

Dauphire.

I just want the audience to sort of see his process.

But it'd be like your version of Get Back.

Exactly, yes.

Now, that was that first time you'd worked with Piers Brosnan.

And again, I think we were at an event last night, which was a lot of fun, but you were saying actually that's the time when you really realized what a great comic actor Piers Brosnam was because he would stand toe-to-toe with Robin Williams and he could give it back when he was taking it as well.

So we'll move on to Thursday Murder Club.

Nicole asked this question.

He said, Although it is getting a small cinema release in the UK, most people will watch the Thursday Murder Club on Netflix.

Do you make considerations on style and pacing knowing you are making it for a streamer as opposed to the cinema?

I never even take the streamer into account, and that's because I've spent most of my career making films for the cinema.

So for me, that's all I think about.

I think about cinematic experience.

It's amazingly cinematic.

It's a film.

Yeah, and it's meant as a cinematic experience.

Whether it exists in the cinemas for a week or two weeks, it is meant to be seen in the theater.

And if I'm a layperson listening to this,

as a director, can you give us a couple of concrete examples of how you would make something differently for a small screen than you would for a big screen?

Imagine someone knows nothing, which most of us do.

It's so boring to get into, but I'll try to not be boring about it, which is if you're doing something.

I've known you a long time.

I've never known you to be boring.

Well, thank you.

But if you look at something like The Bear, which is a show that's very popular, I don't know if it's popular.

Yeah, it sort of is.

Is it a comedy?

We get annoyed that it gets nominated for comedy Emmys.

Oh, yes.

Well,

I think it's a brilliantly acted show, performance-wise.

But if you look at The Bear, which is a perfect example of television, everything is done in very, very close, we call them chokers, which means intense close-ups.

So most of the scenes you see in in the bear are very, very close.

When you're doing something for a giant screen, you don't have to get that close to the actors.

So in Thursday Murder Club, I want to see the performance from, you know, I want to see the body, the body, the performance of Piers Brosnan and Ben Kingsley and Celia Emery and Helen Muir, and I want to see how they move.

I framed most of the film not in intense close-ups, in medium shots, in wide screen.

So when you're seeing it in a cinema, you see five people on screen and you see how they interact with each other.

That was the first thing.

The photography was intentionally not super bright.

The photography in many scenes is darker.

And

that was really...

an effort by myself and the cinematographer Don Burgess to make sure that it felt like film.

Even though we didn't shoot on film, we wanted the look of it to feel like it was shot on film.

I think you've just been working on Nostratu.

Which is shot on film.

And again, you said whenever you work with anyone,

you're always picking up little things and little little kind of tips and anything.

So it'd be immediately apparent to people the similarities between Nosferatu and Thursday Murder Club.

But can you tell us if there are any?

The similarities would really be my desire to do certain scenes in one shot.

Now, I haven't, it's not like adolescence where you're doing the entire film in one shot.

But I decided on this film, watching what we did on Nosferatu, to let some of the scenes play in one shot as much as I could.

I still fell back onto my own style of filmmaking, filmmaking, but there are probably less cuts in this film than in most of my films.

Nevertheless, when you're dealing with four of the Thursday Murder Club in one scene, and then you've got

the policeman, Daniel Mays, and Naomi Aki, and you've got six people in one scene, you can't fit them all into one shot.

We tried, and we were successful in a few situations.

I can't fit them all into one chapter, and that's difficult.

That's difficult enough.

I'll get to like book four, and I've got so many characters now.

Because apart from the ones who got murdered, I want them all to stick around.

So I apologise for films two two and three.

Chris, there's an awful lot more characters.

I'm looking forward to it.

It was one of the reasons, though, that our sets were bigger than most film sets because we had to accommodate so many actors.

I thought you were going to say you have to accommodate me.

No, no, no, I'm not.

Wow, this ceiling is high.

But we did.

We had to accommodate in Elizabeth's flat.

We had to accommodate six characters and in Joyce's flat at the same time.

And it's in Elizabeth's flat, by the way.

Forget about it, more than six characters.

There were like 10 people in the flat by the end of the day.

Oh, yeah, towards the end there are, aren't there?

Yeah.

But how do you feel about making stuff for Netflix?

I mean, you love making stuff for the cinemas, but where are we going with cinema?

To you, is that a different industry making films for streamers than making films for cinemas?

What is it about the experience of going to the cinema that you love and you love making films for?

And how do we protect that over the years to come?

I think if you have the accessibility to cinemas, it's always great to be able to screen the film in a cinema.

The great thing about what Netflix has done for Thursday Murder Club is there were other studios interested, obviously, in making this film, but they wanted to cut about 40% of the budget.

So because of the nature of the film, because it's, even though it's based on an extraordinarily successful book, because it's not a superhero film, because it's not relying on visual effects, it is basically a performance piece.

And those types of films don't warrant the kind of budget that most studios will give you.

So as a result of the other studios getting involved, they said, yeah, we will give you this amount of money to make the film, which means I wouldn't have had my cast, which means

I couldn't have afforded to pay any of our cast members.

Netflix, on the other hand, a wonderful budget to make this film the way it needed to be made.

And that, you can't discount that.

So they are willing to pay for bigger films that wouldn't necessarily get made anywhere else.

And that's important.

That's important to remember about Netflix, is you will see a film like Thursday Murder Club.

That you would not have seen in that way.

Yeah, you you would see that film in the cinema in the 90s or the nots but the odds but not now that's what's wonderful about it to actually get and to go to be able to have a week's theatrical release is wonderful but that's the you just listen that's where art meets commerce and that you must have come across that so many times during your career if I if I if I could find a way to sort of sum you up it would be you are an incredible artist and you love the art of cinema and you love the art of screenwriting and all those things but you also absolutely understand the business.

You understand how to get a film made.

You understand how to work with actors.

You understand that everyone has to get paid at the end of the day and you understand that at the end of it all there is an audience who must be entertained.

Do you think somewhere between the two hemispheres of your brain, the great sort of Sineaston artist and this sort of person who genuinely understands what the job is and what needs to be done, do you think those two maybe give you that sensibility we talked about at the beginning?

I think the sensibility really exists in the idea that all of the films I fell in love with, the films that actually propelled me to want to have a career in this business, were films that were entertaining for an audience.

And that's just part of my DNA.

I'm never thinking about,

will this be entertaining for an audience?

I honestly, and that's the way I've worked for 35 years, will it be entertaining to me?

I have to trust myself.

And I realize the types of films I love, going back to whether it's A Hard Day's Night or Dog Day Afternoon or Serpico or any of the

All the President's Men, those are films that are all based on performance.

A Hard Day's Night I reference a lot because of the sheer charm of that film.

That film is all about charm, enthusiasm, and humor.

And I love the fact that it's still, it's a film from 1964, but it still feels as if it were made yesterday.

That's the beauty of cinema, though, isn't it?

This stuff is going to last, if it's lasted 30, 40, 50, 60 years, it's probably going to last four or five hundred years.

We would hope.

We have no idea what people will be watching in 400 years.

Well, we talked a while.

I'd love your view on this just very quickly.

This is a question from me.

The idea now that AI is becoming so prevalent in lots of the creative industries, it means that everything made pre-AI, so everything made, let's say, 2020 and beforehand, becomes a sort of canon.

There's a lot of talk about AI,

people embracing AI and filmmakers embrace, let's use AI.

I love that for about three days because the problem with AI is that it's moving at such a fast rate, such a fast rate, that it's remarkable the difference between what happened two weeks ago and what's going on now.

Don't necessarily know if I agree with you that in 200 years time we're going to be able to tell the difference.

I'm concerned that in two weeks time we may not be able to tell the difference.

But the thing about something pre-2020 is you know.

We do know by the year.

Yeah, exactly.

But will you know when you're seeing a George Clooney movie that's been made in 2096,

that it's, will people have the ability to decipher what was made prior to AI?

I'm concerned that they won't.

I'm concerned that AI is going to get so good that it might be better.

And that's what people don't want to admit, that it

actually can tap in to the creative instincts that we all have, but do it better.

And that's frightening.

That, in other words, suddenly turns every filmmaker into Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese.

or Steven Spielberg.

Is that possible?

I'm afraid that it is.

And I'm not the old guy

yelling at clouds.

I'm concerned that it is.

I don't know.

From the most recent episode of South Park, where Donald Trump is running around naked in the desert, that's all AI.

So that is, and that's pretty well done.

So I don't know what happens a year from now.

And I'm worried about the thing I worry most about is I have children and their friends who are all wanting to break into the industry either as writers or directors.

And they're feeling it.

They're feeling it.

And they're not afraid of it, but they can feel that it's coming.

Chris, I'm I'm going to finish with a couple of more random questions.

This is a question I always think I'm always fascinated because there's always stories.

Were there any projects you turned down that someone else picked up and turned into a huge hit?

Goodwill Hunting is the first one that comes to mind.

Oh, really?

I mean, of course, it's going to happen, right?

Well, Goodwill Hunting was a situation that the studio at the time and my agent were pushing me to do this film.

I read the script and I stupidly said,

Who's starring in it?

And they said, these two young kids who wrote the script.

And I said, well, I want to be, as a director, I want to be able to cast it.

What a moron I am.

Who would have thought it would be Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?

And I think at the same time,

these guys were such visionaries in terms of being

in terms of screenwriters and artists that they said, why would we want the Mrs.

Doubtfire Home Alone guy to direct Goodwill Hunting?

So

on both sides, there was, I know that there is some book somewhere that

documents Damon and Affleck's conversation with Harvey Weinstein about not hiring me.

And there is my conversation that I remember having in my New York apartment with my agent who was reading me Robin Williams' speech in the middle, you know, toward the end of the film and reading it over the phone, saying, this is the most brilliant writing.

And I said, but

as the director, I must cast this.

What an idiot I was.

So that was, there was that one.

I love that film.

I think it's a brilliantly made film.

Thomas Mansbridge asks, who is easier to direct?

Children in Hogwarts or pensioners in Cooper's Chase?

Pensioners at Cooper's Chase.

Children at Hogwarts.

Remember, the kids at the time had never been in a film.

It was just the fact that we had three cameras on them at all times.

The first three weeks, essentially, someone would say a line in character and then look at the camera and smile.

Like, this is fantastic.

I'm here.

Wow, I'm on a movie set.

They would just look around.

They would look around at all the people.

And I had to have three cameras going just to get a moment when they were focused.

When one kid was focused, the other kid was grasping at butterflies or something.

It was a course in film acting.

In other words, and also Home Alone as well.

I was basically the acting coach for those three kids.

And then they had to leave.

And then I became them for Richard Harris or Maggie Smith or Alan Rickman off camera.

Wow.

So

you have been Harry Potter.

I've been Harry Potter.

I've been Hermione.

I've been Ron.

I've been Neville Longbottom.

I've just been whoever was off camera.

And that's why there are so many cuts in the first Harry Potter film.

We couldn't do one shot.

And by the time we got to the second film, midway through the second film, the kids were great.

And suddenly I could do a tracking shot with the three of them having a conversation.

And

that was kind of a wonderful thing to get to that point.

But it was also wonderful for me to be able to.

able to do scenes with these legendary actors off camera.

It was just fantastic.

Well listen, Chris, I have to say firstly, thank you so much for coming in.

Secondly, having worked with you now for a little while and seeing what actors think about you and they adore you.

But

you can see it from Dame Helena, Saben, Celia, Pierce.

They all absolutely adore you.

When I've been down to set, it's clear the crew adore you as well.

It's been such an absolute pleasure seeing your process as well, seeing the way you work and seeing what you bring to a film.

And it was lovely when Steven Spielberg came down and you could see him.

He's just looking over your shoulder saying, what's Chris doing?

What's Chris doing?

It's such a lovely thing to do.

It's been one of the greatest joys of my professional career having worked with you.

So, thank you so much for that.

The Thursday Murder Club film is out today

on Netflix.

We recommend everyone go to see it, and maybe we'll do another one next year.

Two more.

Two more.

Two more.

There's loads more books.

Chris, thank you so much.

Thank you, Richard.

Hello everyone, this episode is brought to you by our good friends at Sky.

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