Chris Columbus has a confession to make. Something “really weird” happened to him when he finished shooting The Thursday Murder Club. The 66-year-old Oscar-nominated film-maker behind Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first three Harry Potter movies (directed one and two, produced number three) noticed that his views on ageing and even death had been radically transformed. After spending three months in the company of the film’s veteran stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie (combined age 306) he no longer feared the end of everything.
“With these actors, they’re all in their seventies and early eighties but there’s still a hunger there and an obsession with doing good work, and it’s not going away for any of them,” he says. “It’s like they still want to do better, even after everything they’ve accomplished. And I responded to that because it taps into my desire never to retire. There is no fear of death because the fear is of failing on something I’m working on right now.”
Columbus and Macaulay Culkin on the set of Home Alone
ALAMY
Columbus, who is warm and ingenuous, is ensconced in a swanky Mayfair hotel that he calls “posh” and is, he says, worlds away from his Pennsylvania roots as the only son of a father who worked as a coalminer and a mother who was a factory worker. There’s a winning wholesomeness to Columbus that has made him the perfect “family movie guy” (he also wrote The Goonies, Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes) and that he brings to his best films. The Thursday Murder Club is infused with it.
Making the film, which is about four elderly sleuths caught up in a murder case in a Kent retirement home, was a constant balancing act, he says. Two of the film’s supporting characters have dementia, one is catatonic, and there is a suicide at the home and an assisted dying. And yet — as the wildly successful Richard Osman source novel established — this is still, underneath it all, a comedy. “It’s really a matter of how far you can push it [the seriousness and the comedy],” he says. “It becomes a very delicate thing.”
He adds that huge chunks of Osman’s nearly 400-page-long novel had to be axed to squeeze it into feature film length, and even then the initial edit was over two and a half hours long (it now runs to 118 minutes). The book’s juicy subplot about Father Mackie (Joseph Marcell), for instance, was ultimately removed and now exists as a short film, The Priest Who Wasn’t a Priest, which will be shown on Netflix.
The joy of making the film, Columbus says, was the cast. “I’m not putting down American actors, but when working with these incredible British actors there’s just a level of professionalism you don’t see elsewhere. It brought me back to the days of Potter.”
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Ah yes, Harry Potter. Columbus is, effectively, the Pott-father. It was his films that set the template on how to adapt JK Rowling. He defined the visual world that then ballooned into a billion-dollar franchise and global phenomenon. He says that when he directed the first film he was a bag of nerves. “I went into that knowing that it was a franchise and that if I f***ed it up, that was that.” It’s only recently that he’s begun to feel his sense of “ownership” over the Potterverse. “I look back and I realise that I cast the film, with my team. And we created the world, the look and the costumes,” he says.
On the Harry Potter set with Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe in 2001
ADAM BUTLER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Of the new Harry Potter TV series, shooting at Leavesden studios, he has ambivalent feelings. “I’m anxious to see what they do. But from what I’ve seen already they’re basically doing the same thing we did, only [because they have eight episodes] they get to do more of it.”
He’s not especially excited about the new cast, including John Lithgow as Dumbledore and Nick Frost as Hagrid, either. “You have to understand that when Richard Harris passed away and Michael Gambon took over as Dumbledore that transition, even back then, was difficult for me. So now it’s difficult imagining anyone else in these roles. I still see Alan Rickman, and I still see Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane. It’s part of my DNA and I can’t get beyond it.”
Columbus previously stated that he wanted to direct a film adaptation of the stage show, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, using the original Potter movie cast (their characters are older in the play). Since then, alas, the JK Rowling trans controversy has made any potential adaptation impossible.
“It’s never going to happen,” he says. “It’s gotten so complicated with all the political stuff. Everyone in the cast has their own opinion, which is different from her opinion, which makes it impossible.” He adds: “I haven’t spoken to Miss Rowling in a decade or so, so I have no idea what’s going on with her, but I keep very close contact with Daniel Radcliffe and I just spoke to him a few days ago. I still have a great relationship with all the kids in the cast.”
Columbus began his career as a scholarship student at NYU, where his classmates included his close friend Alec Baldwin (“he was ‘Alex’ back then”). He caught the eye of Steven Spielberg — he directed an NYU short film that Spielberg liked, then wrote the 1984 film Gremlins (which Spielberg produced). It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. He walked off National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation before filming even began because he clashed with its star, Chevy Chase. And he was fired from the 2005 superhero movie Fantastic Four because, he says, “I had an opinion.”
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His Harry Potter work ultimately secured his reputation and these days he sees himself as a father, grandfather and family man (he’s been married to the choreographer Monica Devereux since 1983) who never plans to retire. He is working on sequels to Gremlins and The Goonies — “Well, we’ve been working on them for 30 years, but right now it feels like we’re getting close with something that Steven [Spielberg] and I are happy with.”
There’s also, of course, the prospect of an entire Murder Club franchise to tackle — there are four more books in the series. “I didn’t approach it as a franchise when I started,” he says cautiously. “But because of the experience I had working with those actors and how they inspired me, I would definitely consider doing another one.”
The Thursday Murder Club is on Netflix
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