Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York director Chris Columbus was almost at the helm of a different Christmas classic.
On this week’s episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, the veteran filmmaker — who most recently produced the new version of Nosferatu, which hits theaters on Christmas Day — reflected on how a “bizarre” meeting with Chevy Chase led him to the franchise in the first place.
It all started, Columbus recalled, when fellow Chicagoan John Hughes sent him the script of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which Hughes was set to produce, and asked him to direct it. Columbus, who badly needed the gig after a couple of box office disappointments left his future directing prospects up in the air, enthusiastically said yes and began shooting second unit footage over Christmas.
Then he sat down with the film’s star, Chevy Chase, and things quickly got very awkward. “I’m asking him all these questions, and he was just dead and not interested and distracted,” Columbus said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is weird. For an actor who’s committing to this movie, he really doesn’t want to talk about it.’ Then, 40 minutes into the conversation, he says the most surreal thing I’ve ever heard in a meeting, before or since. He said to me, ‘Wait a second, you’re the director?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I thought you were a drummer.’ I don’t even know what the hell that meant.”
Afterwards, Columbus described the “surreal” meeting to Hughes, who suggested the three of them grab dinner together to try to rectify things. But this time, Columbus says, “It was even worse. [Chase] was ignoring me. It was like I wasn’t even involved in the film. Every time I brought up the film, he changed the subject.” Columbus concluded that he had no choice but to bow out of the film, even though he had no idea if he’d get the opportunity to direct another.
Just a week later, Hughes, “being the ultimate mensch,” sent Columbus another Christmas-related script that he had written and intended to produce: Home Alone. “Talk about dodging a bullet,” Columbus marveled some 35 years later.
While Hughes was all-in on casting young Macaulay Culkin to play the film’s main character, Kevin McCallister, Columbus wasn’t sure at first. “This is why John Hughes was a great producer for a director, and I learned a lot from him,” Columbus explained: “He said, ‘Will you take a look at meeting Macaulay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to meet Macaulay, but I’d like to meet everyone else, too.’ I ended up meeting 300 other kids, too. Total colossal waste of time, because then I met Macaulay again, and it was magical.”
As for the rumor that Chris Farley was almost cast in Home Alone? “Farley was just starting out at the time,” Columbus said, and the director invited him to a Saturday morning audition. “This guy came in at 7 a.m. for our first reading for the guy who played Santa Claus in the movie. He was not in any particularly great shape. He had just come out from all night being in Chicago.” The director continued, “We had to say, ‘Well, not this time.’ And then over the years I got to know Farley really well, and we always talked about that.” The first time we met was at that audition,” Columbus said.
Columbus also weighed in on one of the internet’s biggest debates: what did the McCallister parents do for work to be able to afford that beautiful Chicago house?
“Back then, John and I had a conversation about it, and we decided on what the jobs were,” Columbus said. Catherine O’Hara’s Kate McCallister “was a very successful fashion designer,” as suggested by the mannequins in the family’s basement. As for John Heard’s Peter McCallister, he can’t say for sure. “The father could have, based on John Hughes own experience, worked in advertising, but I don’t remember what the father did.” He was able to rule out one profession, though, which people online speculated might have drawn criminals Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) to the McCallister home in the first place: “Not organized crime — even though there was, at the time, a lot of organized crime in Chicago.”