![]() Only the Lonely, which Columbus also wrote, is about a man who needs to extricate himself from his mother's domineering presence in order to marry the woman he loves. Doubtfire is about a man who loses his family through divorce and the only way he can reenter their world is by doing the outrageous, dressing up as the family housekeeper. Home Alone is about a boy who loses his family and must find the inner strength to survive alone. If there is a common theme to his films, it would be variations on familial relationships. Doubtfire (1993), Columbus joined a small group of directors whose work earned more than $1 billion worldwide. With Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) and Mrs. Budgeted at $15 million, Home Alone reaped $533 million at the worldwide box office. But it was the monster hit Home Alone, from a John Hughes script, that really propelled his directing career to the next level. That, first and foremost, when making a motion picture he needed to consider that he was making something for an audience.Ĭolumbus' directorial debut came with 1987's Adventures in Babysitting followed by Heartbreak Hotel, a film he also wrote. The experience also confirmed what he'd known all along. He was always there for me during two and half, three solid years of a really wonderful collaboration." ![]() He was incredibly generous with his time, patience and knowledge. He'd make some changes and I'd run down the hall and continue writing. Basically, I could go into his office whenever I wanted. "Steven told me when I was writing Gremlins (directed by Joe Dante), The Goonies (directed by Richard Donner) and Young Sherlock Holmes (directed by Barry Levinson), that when I finished a scene, I should just come into his office, show it to him and we'd talk about it. "They set up an office for me right down the hall from Spielberg," he said. That’s the one detail, an important detail, that I wish I could go back and tweak.Director Chris Columbus with actors Rupert Grint (left) and Daniel RadcliffeĬolumbus recalled that in the early '80s Amblin was a small, homey place. We couldn’t really utilize a prosthetic scar, which is kind of what I saw, like a real scar. When you’re working with kids under 16, or something, you can’t really use prosthetics, or you couldn’t back then. I don’t know if we ever really did to be honest with you,” he says. “Harry’s scar was so incredibly difficult to get right. But there is one thing he still thinks they didn’t quite get right. We got lucky with that one.”įor the most part, Columbus remains pleased with how the choices from the first movie went on to define the seven following films. “It’s interesting to me that you can watch these films back to back without a hitch in terms of Oh, that was Voldemort. “Voldemort in the first film was not played by Fiennes, but he looks almost exactly like him,” says Columbus. Some, like the set design, were deliberate choices, but others were a matter of casting luck. However, his early gambles stuck, from the Quidditch uniforms to the Great Hall. PicturesĬolumbus directed the first two Potter movies, and went on to produce the third, but was not involved with the later adaptations. “And then as the series progressed, we had to utilize the same sets and create a darker world.” Image: Warner Bros. “We did put into the design the fact that these sets have to start off with some sort of storybook kind of warm fantasy feeling,” he explains. Rowling, was that the books would get grim - and that ultimately informed the set design. What Columbus did know, however, from conversations with author J.K. But in 2001, only four books had been published, leaving the exact direction of the series unknown to the filmmakers and audiences. Led by 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, Sorcerer’s Stone was paramount in establishing the visual design of the first movie, which would continue on not just in the subsequent movies, but also in the multimedia future of Harry Potter, including theme parks built in its image. 14, 2001, and turned Potter book fever into a worldwide phenomenon. The first Harry Potter film debuted in theaters Nov. “So weirdly, every decision was important, every decision would eventually affect what would come later.” “I was undertaking this job where billions of people were going to be scrutinizing every move,” he tells Polygon, on the occasion of the movie’s 20th anniversary. Director Chris Columbus recalls feeling a sense of terror when he signed on to direct Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the late 1990s.
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