The characters best loved by Chris Columbus, the blue-chip director of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire, are the everyday American men, women and children who struggle to uphold family traditions against a changing, sometimes intimidating society. On 16 November, however, he will reveal how he has faced up to his most difficult challenge: will the career of one America’s most bankable directors have met his match in young wizard Harry Potter?
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is the most eagerly anticipated movie of the year, and it has all the prospects of turning the phenomenally successful J.K, Rowling books into a cinematic venture as all-conquering as the Star Wars series. But as the director’s career to date shows, his sentimental and mainstream style often irks critics and cinema-goers who accuse him of playing to obvious emotions.
Columbus was born in Spangler, Pennsylvania, in 1958 but was brought up in Youngstown, Ohio, where his father was a coalminer. He was first inspired to make movies at the age of 15 after watching The Godfather.
As a youngster, Columbus wanted to draw cartoons for Marvel Comics, little realising how similar comic books are to movie storyboards – the building blocks of every film director. At high school, he began making 8mm films and drawing his own storyboards – something he continues to do for his films today.
Later he enrolled on the directors program at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating, Columbus penned a small-town drama based on his experiences as a part-time factory worker. It was well received and led to a spell writing original scripts for Steven Spielberg.
This partnership produced 1984’s phenomenally successful Gremlins – inspired by the liberal sentiments of one of Columbus’s favourite films, It’s a Wonderful Life. In Gremlins, and as a homage to Frank Capra, Columbus imagined a small town (Kingston Falls) where miniature green monsters run amok after mutating from cuddly pets, using the fantasy horror premise to illustrate the gradual extinction of American suburbs and of the ordinary man (James Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life).
Gremlins was a blend of violent slapstick and moral decency. And more importantly, typical of the kind of feelgood movie that provides the backbone of Columbus’s work as a writer, producer and director.
He directed his first feature, Adventures in Babysitting, in 1987 to lukewarm reviews. But it was the first of three collaborations with writer/director John Hughes (driving force behind teen movies Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) for 1990’s Home Alone, which secured Columbus’s elevation to the ranks of the Hollywood élite.
The film introduced Macaulay Culkin, the most successful child star since Shirley Temple, and was the highest grossing comedy of that year. It has taken nearly $300 million worldwide, and there has been just one sequel, the hit Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, which Columbus also directed.
With the two Home Alone films, Columbus has shown that he is a director with few sociological leanings – and certainly none of the reckless box office abandon that often characterise the works of such contemporaries as Tim Burton (Planet of the Apes) and Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, The X-Men). Columbus is regarded as an affable and undemanding, if sometimes shy, presence on set and in company. And his career indicates an inclination to bank on surefire subjects that break the all-important opening weekend box office records.
Columbus has established himself as a director whose only desire seems to be to gratify Mom and Pop audiences in Middle America. Witness acceptable comedies such as the Robin Williams comedy Mrs Doubtfire, as well as 1999’s hideous Christmas release, Bicentennial Man, which Columbus produced.
In an industry overwhelmed by focus groups, Columbus can occasionally sound defensive of his audience-friendly and almost neighbourly directing style. He certainly shows little of the directorial or narrative flair associated with other young mavericks like Quentin Tarantino and Sean Penn. In 1993 he said: ‘I can understand the validity of showing people the ugliness of the world, but I also think there is a place for movies to leave people with a sense of hope. If you’re film isn’t going to do that, I just don’t think it’s worth making.’
Even with a string of hits, in Hollywood terms Columbus still seemed a controversial choice to helm the Potter franchise. He has now agreed to direct all seven Potter novels and has moved with his family to London. To date, J.K. Rowling’s four Potter books have sold more than 100 million copies.
For most of 1999, Steven Spielberg had considered directing the Philosopher’s Stone, opting at the last minute to take on the unfinished Stanley Kubrick movie, A.I. And with a script written by Steve Kloves, the screenwriter behind Wonder Boys, Warner Bros invited prospective directors -Columbus, Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), Bard Silberling (City of Angels) and Terry Gilliam (12 Monkeys) – to audition for the job.
‘There is no question,’ said the film’s head of production, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, on the studio’s hiring of Columbus, ‘that there are expectations attached to this project.’ Columbus, he insinuated, got the job because he was the director who delivers mainstream hits – with a proven record at securing all-important returning audiences at American multiplexes as well as a gift for drawing strong performances from children.
Some Potter fans, however, considered Columbus an unsuitable choice. In the Harry Potter usenet group, one fan entitled her posting ‘Nooooooo’ and suggested that the film ought to be called Harry Potter and the Mainstream Inflate-a-Budget Crap.
Yet the Potter franchise couldn’t be in safer hands. The translation of Rowling’s source material has been helped onto the screen by the near constant presence of the author on set. And while ambitious in their retelling of childhood fantasies, the linear Potter narratives about a child magician’s adventures at the ‘Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’ provide few daring challenges and, more importantly, little room for error. Especially when compared to, say, Terry Jackson’s ambitious forthcoming attempt to capture J.R.R. Tolkein’s epic history of Middle Earth, the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
There have, however, been fleeting indications from the film set over the last year that Columbus has sought to finally patent his own directing style. Perhaps he wants to throw off the image of a competent if uninspiring film-maker. The first instalment of the Potter books is more than two and a half hours long, at least an hour longer than films aimed at a similar age range.
‘Everybody thought I was this cuddly, sentimental guy,’ said Columbus recently. ‘My films have always been brightly lit and never as visually exciting as I wanted them to be. I don’t know why. I didn’t realise how liberating it would be. I wanted to take this film to the dark side in a big way.’
The quote seemed to indicate an independent streak never witnessed in his previous work, a threat to redraw Potter as some Tim Burton-inspired monstrosity. But perhaps on realising the bottom-line – the project’s universal appeal in view of product placement campaigns and lucrative licensing deals – he added politely: ‘Not that we’re making Seven here.’ – The Observer