Chris Columbus, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, was behind some of the most beloved and successful family films of all time. Among others, he wrote 1984’s Gremlins and 1985’s The Goonies, and he directed 1990’s Home Alone and 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York — both Christmas classics — as well as 1993’s Mrs. Doubtfire and 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Which makes it all the more surprising and interesting that now, at the age of 66, he has produced — with Eleanor Columbus, his daughter and partner in Maiden Voyage Productions, an incubator for young filmmakers — Robert Eggers’ terrifying new horror film Nosferatu, which stars Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård, and which Focus will release on Christmas Day.
Over the course of a conversation at the L.A. offices of The Hollywood Reporter, Columbus reflected on how a kid from a blue-collar family in Ohio wound up working, in his mid-twenties, for Steven Spielberg. He revealed how a disastrous meeting with Chevy Chase led him to quit as director of National Lampoons’ Christmas Vacation — and to a film that is now considered an even greater Christmas classic, Home Alone. He discussed how, a decade after that film became the highest-grossing comedic film of all time, his stock had fallen, and he had to convince Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling to hire him to helm the Harry Potter films, the three principal leads of which he then cast. And he explained why, after the first two Potter films, he began to focus more on producing, and ultimately on championing young up-and-coming filmmakers like Eggers, on whose earlier films, 2015’s The Witch and 2019’s The Lighthouse, he served as an executive producer.
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