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<\/p>\nChris Columbus has a confession to make. Something \u201creally weird\u201d 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\u2019s veteran stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie (combined age 306) he no longer feared the end of everything. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith these actors, they\u2019re all in their seventies and early eighties but there\u2019s still a hunger there and an obsession with doing good work, and it\u2019s not going away for any of them,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like they still want to do better, even after everything they\u2019ve 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\u2019m working on right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Columbus and Macaulay Culkin on the set of Home Alone<\/p>\n
ALAMY<\/p>\n
Columbus, who is warm and ingenuous, is ensconced in a swanky Mayfair hotel that he calls \u201cposh\u201d 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\u2019s a winning wholesomeness to Columbus that has made him the perfect \u201cfamily movie guy\u201d (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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s supporting characters have dementia, one is catatonic, and there is a suicide at the home and an assisted dying. And yet \u2014 as the wildly successful Richard Osman source novel established \u2014 this is still, underneath it all, a comedy. \u201cIt\u2019s really a matter of how far you can push it [the seriousness and the comedy],\u201d he says. \u201cIt becomes a very delicate thing.\u201d <\/p>\n
He adds that huge chunks of Osman\u2019s 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\u2019s juicy subplot about Father Mackie (Joseph Marcell), for instance, was ultimately removed and now exists as a short film, The Priest Who Wasn\u2019t a Priest, which will be shown on Netflix.<\/p>\n
The joy of making the film, Columbus says, was the cast. \u201cI\u2019m not putting down American actors, but when working with these incredible British actors there\u2019s just a level of professionalism you don\u2019t see elsewhere. It brought me back to the days of Potter.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u2022 The Thursday Murder Club review \u2014 camp and quietly sad, a franchise is born<\/a><\/p>\n 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. \u201cI went into that knowing that it was a franchise and that if I f***ed it up, that was that.\u201d It\u2019s only recently that he\u2019s begun to feel his sense of \u201cownership\u201d over the Potterverse. \u201cI look back and I realise that I cast the film, with my team. And we created the world, the look and the costumes,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n On the Harry Potter set with Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe in 2001<\/p>\n ADAM BUTLER\/ASSOCIATED PRESS<\/p>\n Of the new Harry Potter TV series, shooting at Leavesden studios, he has ambivalent feelings. \u201cI\u2019m anxious to see what they do. But from what I\u2019ve seen already they\u2019re basically doing the same thing we did, only [because they have eight episodes] they get to do more of it.\u201d <\/p>\n He\u2019s not especially excited about the new cast, including John Lithgow as Dumbledore and Nick Frost as Hagrid, either. \u201cYou 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\u2019s difficult imagining anyone else in these roles. I still see Alan Rickman, and I still see Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane. It\u2019s part of my DNA and I can\u2019t get beyond it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n![\"Daniel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/51416a9c-087b-467a-8d5f-b110bc5ad4e8.jpg\")
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