Chris Columbus Says He Was Terrified Every Day That He Worked On HARRY POTTER Thinking He Might Get Fired

Director Chris Columbus helmed the first two films in the Harry Potter films in the franchise, and though Columbus is a trusted director, who has successfully made several hit films that have stood the test of time like Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Stepmom, he was intimidated by the scope of these films and the weight they carried. In a 2020 interview with Collider, the director said:

“The reality is the pressure of the world was upon us, and on me particularly because I knew if I screwed this one up it’s all over. You can’t screw up this book. So I had to go to the set every day with sort of tunnel vision in terms of not thinking about the outside world, and that was a lot easier 19 years ago before the internet blew up.”

He went on to talk about the fact that he was a ball of nerves the entire time, but hid it from his cast and crew:

“The first film was fraught with anxiety for me. The first two weeks I thought I was gonna get fired every day. Everything looked good, I just thought if I do one thing wrong, if I fuck up, I’m fired. And that was intense. I didn’t let any of that show on the set, there was no frustration, I’m not a screamer, I get along with everybody and I want everybody to feel like they’re part of the family, so I just had to hide that side of my emotions.”

Columbus was asked when he knew he had nailed the adaptation, and he relayed a story about screening an early cut that was almost three hours long for audiences in Chicago:

“By the time we finished the film and we screened it in Chicago – it’s good luck for us to screen our films in Chicago, so back in the day when we could go to a movie theater we would fly to Chicago and show the film to an audience – the audience loved it. The audience just ate up the film. The film was two hours and fifty minutes long at that point and the kids thought it was too short and the parents thought it was too long.”

18 minutes ended up being shaved off that cut to make what we ended up seeing in theatres. The director said he was bolstered by that first screening and was finally able to relax while directing the second film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was shot back-to-back with Sorcerer’s Stone:

“So I started to feel a little relief, and then when the first movie opened well I had so much more fun on Chamber of Secrets. It was like night and day, because then I could really let loose a little bit and bring a little bit more of my particular style to the movie. That was a very specific choice, the style of the first Potter movie, but part of it we were boxed into because as I said we had three cameras on the kids at a time. They were brand new, they had never been on movie sets, so they would say a line and they would look into the camera and smile. The first week they were just so delighted that they were in Harry Potter, it meant the world to them, so they would just be smiling like they were in a trance. So that was something we had to overcome as well.”

Columbus handed the directing reins over to Alfonso Cuaron for Prisoner of Azkaban after the exhaustive process of making those first two movies back to back, and when I asked if he ever considered returning to the franchise, he confirmed he would have loved to have adapted the final book but admits director David Yates — who helmed the final four Potter movies — did a terrific job:

“I always wanted to go back and shoot the final two movies, but Yates decided he was gonna stay with the series, and it was a great thing to do because I particularly love the very last movie. I think that is just a brilliant film, the second part of Deathly Hallows.”

All the movies turned out to be pretty great. The only complaint from a fan’s perspective was that so much of the story was cut from the films based on books 4-7. But I’m hoping that gets rectified in the upcoming Harry Potter series that is headed to MAX.