The Chris(tmas) Chronicles
CHRIS COLUMBUS TALKS EMPIRE THROUGH HIS RUN OF ICONIC YULETIDE MOVIES
WORDS JOHN NUGENT
EVERY CHRISTMAS, a jolly man commandeers our screens to bring gifts of festive joy and good cheer. His name? Chris Columbus (no relation to the explorer). He is the filmmaker behind some of the most beloved, endlessly rewatchable Christmas films of the past four decades. His Crimbo-filmography began in 1985 as the screenwriter behind Gremlins; later, he almost directed National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, before scoring his first major hit as director with 1990’s home-invasion classic Home Alone, and its inarguably superior 1992 sequel. Less festive films followed (including Mrs. Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potters), but Columbus always found a way to return to the Yuletide hearth, whether as writer (Christmas With The Kranks), producer (Jingle All The Way), or director (The Christmas Chronicles 2). He spoke to Empire about his longtime love of the holiday spirit —and why Nosferatu is a stealth Christmas movie.
Is Christmas a big deal for you? What is Christmas like at the Columbus house?
Christmas
is
a big deal for me. I enjoy it tremendously. I treat it as a way to improve the lighting in my house, if nothing else.
(Laughs)
I’ve realised over the years that it’s kind of an easy lighting trick to add a few Christmas trees and some candlelight to a scene, and suddenly it’s quite beautiful.
Your first Christmas film was
Gremlins
in 1985. You were pretty young when you wrote that, right?
Yeah, I was still in college. I was living in a loft in Manhattan with a couple of friends of mine, and we had mice. When I went to sleep at night, the mice would scuttle by in the middle of the night and wake me up. I thought, “These little things keeping me awake at night are pretty frightening,” and it just inspired this idea of Gremlins. The script came out rather quickly. Within a few weeks, actually.