Chris Columbus Says a Bad Experience on ‘Harry Potter’ Made Him a Better Producer on ‘Nosferatu’

Chris Columbus, the director of family favorites like “Home Alone,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” and the first two “Harry Potter” movies, is an unlikely producer on one of 2024’s more talked about and grizzly horror films, Robert Eggers‘ “Nosferatu.”

In fact, Columbus has produced Eggers’ films dating back to “The Witch,” and he’s worked with Eggers to get “Nosferatu” to the screen for over a decade. He may direct a lot of family films, but he’s a film history buff (just check out Columbus’s picks from the TCM lineup) and still shares sensibilities with someone like Eggers (to be fair, he also wrote the script for “Gremlins,” which originally was a Hard-R horror film).

In an interview with THR, Columbus explained how an unfortunate experience working on “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” influenced him to be a better producer when it came to working with other auteur filmmakers.

Columbus spoke about his production company Maiden Voyage alongside his daughter and production partner Eleanor Columbus, and he said the guiding ethos of the company is to never say “No” to a director, something that happened to him on “Sorcerer’s Stone.” Columbus said he was upset with the Devil’s Snare scene in the film and hoped to enhance it with CGI, but a producer squashed the idea.

“One of the executives said to me, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter if that scene is not as good as the other scenes in the film. It’s fine,'” Columbus recalled. “And I thought, ‘I never want to have that attitude. Every scene has to be great, and you have to help the filmmaker realize their vision.’ So when I heard that about my own film, I told myself that I’m never going to say that if I’m producing for someone else. I instead say to the filmmaker, ‘We have to help you find the best possible way of getting this made.'”

Eggers has been sitting with his vision for “Nosferatu” for years, and Columbus said they got a fair amount of push back from other studios that didn’t get it.

“We received some hideous suggestions about who should star in the film and plot points and script points, but Rob was very adamant about not changing anything,” Columbus said. “It’s not that he wouldn’t change a word of his script, but he had a vision. He’s lived with it since he was nine years old for God’s sake. So he wasn’t going to shift, and that was scary to a few people at other studios.”

Columbus was quick to clarify that the “hideous” casting suggestions were not Anya Taylor-Joy and Harry Styles, both of whom were originally attached to “Nosferatu” before Lily Rose-Depp and Nicholas Hoult joined the project.

“I wish I could tell you who we’re talking about, but it was no one that Rob suggested,” Columbus said. “They were actors of an American descent, who are probably in their sixties, who have absolutely no connection to Count Orlok whatsoever, if that helps.”

Check out Columbus’ full interview with THR here.