The New World of Chris Columbus

Q: As a father, how do you view child acting?

A: Macaulay is a very special case, a gifted child who should be acting. Prevent him from becoming one and you're sort of robbing a lot of people of this little kid who's a star. What saddens me is that, as a result of the Home Alone phenomenon, all these other kids are trying to be Mac. I see parents pushing their kids in directions kids may not want to be pushed in. Kids were coming in [he mimes a precocious handshake and bow]: "Hello, Mr. Columbus! How are you?" And everything's robotic and forced. Macaulay Culkin's a star--the camera loves him. It's stuff you hear in the '30s movies-- "The camera loves ya, kid!" So my theory is, unless these kids are supremely talented, and you know you have a star like Macaulay Culkin, I would never do it. As beautiful as I think my kids are, as incredibly talented as I think they are, I would do everything in my power to talk my daughter or son out of becoming an actress or actor.

Q: What is your relationship with John Hughes?

A: We relate over work--and we work well together. We're very much in sync. John is an incredible writer and a great producer--ideal for me as a director, because he doesn't interfere.

Q: Are you friends apart from your work?

A: We don't have time. Any free time either of us has, we spend with our families. We're particularly like-minded that way.

Q: On Home Alone 2 you had to compete with the volcano that erupted after the first Home Alone. What was the mandate you put over your desk when you sat down to hammer out what the film was going to be?

A: John and I talked about some ideas, then John went off and wrote, and spent five months, I think, working on the first draft. I wanted to make a better picture than the first picture, and I wanted to make a picture that would stand on its own. When John sent me the script I realized, had I not done the first Home Alone, I would have done this one, because it did stand on its own. It tapped into the fears and fantasies that made the first one so appealing to me. In the first one, it was just a kid left alone in a house. In this one, it's a kid alone in a city. There are certainly a lot of references in the second film to the first film. I felt we owed a few things to the kids who'd seen the first one so many times. I keep hearing from parents who say their kids have seen the first one 10 and 15 times; that the tape never leaves the VCR. But if you haven't seen the first one, it's not like an inside joke that no one's going to get.

Q: What are the specific things you wanted to do better?

A: I just wanted the film to look better, to feel its setting. I wanted to photograph New York City in a way I hadn't seen done before. I spent 16 years in New York. I still live there, part time. And I have a real love affair with that city. I wanted to express that on film. I had to do it in a different way than Woody Allen did in Manhattan. This had to be more of a child's view of New York.

Q: It's interesting to note that Adventures in Babysitting is a movie that dealt with this theme. You were sharply criticized, then, for the way you dealt with the homeless and black people.

A: Home Alone won't touch on those issues as dramatically. Those cries of "racism" directed at Adventures in Babysitting made me very angry. The "blues bar" scene, in particular, was heavily criticized. But all of the black actors from the picture called me up and said, "Chris, we'll write a letter, we'll do whatever you want. We support the picture.

We believe strongly that that scene is real. It's not racist in any sense." I felt it was a scene about music. Kids listen to Simple Minds in the suburbs, and when they come here they're being exposed to blues for the first time. You can't argue that this scene was done with anything but love, for the music and the people.

Q: I thought the idea was that Elisabeth Shue gets up and sings the blues because, after the terrifying day she's had, she's earned the right.

A: Exactly. That was the epicenter of the movie to me. It's one of my favorite scenes from any of the things I've done. My theory is that the suburbs are a cloistered, awful place to be. The critical attack was frustrating to me, but I felt at the time that it was better not to even deal with any of it. To just ignore it, and it will pass. And hopefully my future work will speak for itself.

Q: Let's talk about one of your disappointments, Heartbreak Hotel, which you both wrote and directed.

A: I was always a big Elvis fan. That film was about me trying to convince America that Elvis was this great rock'n'roller, as opposed to this fat Las Vegas performer. We made what I felt was a very good two-hour, 50-minute movie. I wrote a long script, and it really should have been released at that length-- it would have made a lot more sense. But we got caught up in the preview process of the studio, trying to make the picture a hit. I was too young at the time--it was only my second picture as a director. I should have realized that not a lot of people were going to see the picture anyway, just leave it as it was, because then it would have made a lot more sense, and been a much better picture. I saw it by accident three months ago, and there were pieces of it I loved. I have a cassette copy of that first cut, but I don't think a restoration will ever happen. It was never enough of a popular or critical success to warrant that.

Q: Tell me about breaking out of Ohio.

A: When I was a kid, I was always obsessed with Marvel Comics. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita--all the great artists of that era. Those guys were my heroes. And I became obsessed with New York City; New York is where all those superheroes lived, New York is where Marvel was. So I had this dream of going to work for Marvel, from an early age. Then when I was in eighth or ninth grade, and starting to see more movies, I realized that by going to work for Marvel and drawing, I'd end up being in a room by myself all the time.

I really didn't want to do that--I wanted to work with people. So film was a natural outlet. Film, again--those '70s films-- opened up a world to me that I'd never really seen before. I saw Greenwich Village in Serpico, I saw the New York of the '50s in The Godfather, all these things that I was never aware of, and I had to go there. I became obsessed by New York and with filming. So I started making Super-8 films. Then I applied to New York University--it was the only place I applied to--and went there straight out of high school. I knew I had to get out of Ohio, because both my parents were factory workers. They were very supportive of my plans to be a filmmaker. I think it was our collective naivete--not knowing how tough it was out there. We were really sequestered away in that little town.

All the people we knew worked in factories. I could see that was exactly what was going to happen to me. You always hear these stories of parents saying, "You'll never make it in the film business." My parents were saying, "You've got to make it in the film business." Psychologically, that's always at the back of your mind: "Jesus, if I screw this up, I'm back there."

Q: How has experience changed you, as you get older?

A: The biggest change in my life, apart from getting married, was having my first daughter. My daughter was born about eight weeks before I read the first Home Alone script. And that had a big impact on me also. I think everything coming together at once--the disaster of Heartbreak Hotel and the joy of the birth of my daughter Eleanor, and realizing that someday she'll be sitting with a bunch of her friends at two in the morning and some film I've made will come on. I never want her to be embarrassed by that. This is taking root in the films I'm making now. I want to make sure that they're always films that she doesn't have to sit with her family and be embarrassed about, years from now.

Q: Critics--fairly or unfairly--attacked Only the Lonely for being too sentimental.

A: Only the Lonely would have been a much more serious film had I directed it before Home Alone. And I don't think it would have been as interesting a film. I've always thought John Candy would be a great serious actor, and when you see the film, you'll see that he does a great job. But there were a lot of times when I let him just improvise, and he comes up with great stuff.

Q: Did you originally see it as a vehicle for Candy?

A: No. It was written for an Italian family, because I knew that world. But I also know--since my wife's Irish, and I've known her for 12 years now--I've known this great Irish group of people here in Chicago. And I've also known my father-in-law's friends, who were two Irish bachelors who never got married. That whole world is fascinating to me. So I based it on a lot of people I knew in Chicago. It's one of the films I'm most proud of, because people in this area are always coming up to me, especially now that it's running on cable, and they say, "My God! That's my family! That's my brother up there!"

Q: What you're saying touches on something I recall a director once saying about "The Over-21 Factor." He feels comfortable working with any actor who he became aware of or excited by after he was 21. How did you cope with working with, say, Maureen O'Hara in Only the Lonely?

A: With respect to the "awe" factor, you just have to put yourself in their situation. It so happens that 40 years ago they were doing the exact same thing you're doing. They were simply out there to make a great movie, or a good movie. With the passage of time, we've put these people up on pedestals when--really--they were just very professional people. That's what's really exciting to discover, working with older stars: These people are the most professional people in the world. I mean, they report to the set on time. They really study the script, they learn it cold. I've worked with a lot of actors who aren't stars--supporting actors, who, because their egos are getting in the way, don't know the lines when they come to the set, don't come out of their trailers for a half hour. Anthony Quinn, Maureen O'Hara and Eddie Bracken in Home Alone 2--these people are always there.

Q: Why have such bad habits developed among newer actors?

A: I think they have too much power. I can never name names, but I had an actor in Home Alone 2 who was nixed from another movie because the star of that movie was a young kid who had just done a TV series--and he was nixed simply because that kid had "actor approval." Now this guy in Home Alone 2 has done 20 years of film work. And this kid comes out of TV, and says, "No--I don't want him. I want someone else." And my actor was--not devastated, but he was hurt by that. To me, that power and attitude is absurd.

The director should be the person, first of all, who decides who's in the picture or not. Another evil thing that happens on sets that I visit--I'll see the actors all gathered around the playback on the video monitor. Now, that's a tool you need, and which I use on certain performance days--mostly for stunt work. But what happens is, a lot of these actors gather around the video monitor and comment on their own performances, and tell the director what needs to be changed, and insist on another take or on what needs to be printed. That comes from actors who have this ridiculous amount of power on the set. It's not that I have an enormous ego--it's just that I know you have to make the film a certain way, and the actors have to trust you.

Q: Now that Home Alone 2 is put to bed, if you could wave a wand and just pick your next three pictures, what would they be?

A: I don't know, and that's the beauty of it. Because Home Alone did well, I'm reading a lot of great scripts with a lot of potential, but I want to find the script that I haven't seen before, or that I can add a new twist to. Or that can bring me into a new line of comedy. Or take me into a new side of drama. Even in the area of special-effects movies--which I still have a fondness for--there remain new things you can do, as a result of breakthroughs that were unthinkable five years ago, but became the state of the art in Terminator 2.

Q: Are you a religious person?

A: Oh yeah. I'm Catholic--I go to church every Sunday. I have two children, and I want them to be raised in a traditional religious family setting, so they can make their own decisions. I don't want to inflict my beliefs by hammering them over the head, and I also don't want to cloud them with whatever doubts I have. I'm sure that some day, when my daughter goes to college, or my son goes to college, we'll be having conversations about aspects of the Catholic religion that they don't agree with, or don't agree with. Those sorts of intellectual conversations are beside the point now. I think kids need some sort of basis. The people I've met in life who I respect the most are people who have had those traditional values-- whether they've rejected them or not when they got older is irrelevant.

Q: Switch on any talk show, and you get an aria about the dysfunctional family. You strike me as rare in that your experience of family has been very affirming.

A: My most sincere belief is that families, no matter how screwed up they may be, are still--important. It's better to be in a family than to be alone in the world. There was this great little thing on "Sesame Street" that my daughter watches every day. It went: "Anyone can be a family. You're a family if you're two siblings with a grandmother; you're a family if you're a father with a son, a mother with a daughter, or an uncle or an aunt with kids. Any two people can be a family. It's always a family." It's tough for me to not be part of a family. When I met my wife, I was an only child and she had seven brothers and sisters. And to me it was like a great party all the time. There's always something to do, there are always these great people to hang out with--and I loved it. That's what's kept me going, and some day when I have a little bit of objectivity, I'd like to write about that. I haven't found a particular avenue to articulate that feeling yet.

Q: How did you come to be named Chris Columbus?

A: [Laughs] My dad had 12 kids in his family. Every time my grandmother would have a baby, my grandfather would go off and drink a little bit. She would be passed out after the baby was born, and he would come back in and sign the birth certificate. Every time, 12 times running, he would deliver the name "Christopher" or "Christine" to the doctor, hoping that would be the name. Grandmother, who hated the name, would always change it. So there were these 12 Italian kids who were not named Christopher Columbus. My father vowed then that his kid would get the name. [Laughing] And I've always been nervous about how that name would go down in Hollywood.

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F.X. Feeney interviewed Richard Price for Movieline's October issue.

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