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A lot of people only think of Chris Columbus as a kiddie filmmaker now, with two Harry Potter films and Home Alone. Don’t forget, he made some classic ‘80s teen movies, writing The Goonies and directing Adventures in Babysitting. His latest, I Love You, Beth Cooper, is more like that, before he goes back into fantasyland to direct Percy Jackson & The Olympians.
Crave Online: Was I Love You, Beth Cooper like old times for you?
Chris Columbus: You have to go back to Adventures in Babysitting. That’s where you’ve got to start. For me, the reason I did this movie was that I was in a situation where you have big budgets, like with the Harry Potter movies, and you tend to work at a slightly slower pace, and you become spoiled and a little soft, and I thought, “I need to reinvigorate the process of filmmaking.” I wanted to go back to that, and I said to myself, “If I were getting out of film school right now and I was starting to direct my first movie, what would I do?” And, I went back and looked at the movies I had written - Gremlins and Goonies - and then I looked at the first movie I directed, which was Adventures in Babysitting, and this had been sitting in our office as a book. Hayden [Panettiere] was attached to it, and I thought, “Well, this could be a companion piece to Adventures in Babysitting.” This gave me an opportunity to do a movie on a lower budget, fairly quickly, with a brand new cast, and try to recreate that energy for a filmmaker, like myself, who’s been given a lot of money to make movies.
Crave Online: Was this also easier because you didn’t have to worry about expectations, like you would with Harry Potter or Rent?
Chris Columbus: But, I worried about the schedule because the schedule was back-breaking. In a weird way, there was actually more pressure. On Harry Potter, if you didn’t finish a scene, the Great Hall would be standing there for the next seven years. In this movie, we just had to move on. If we had a blizzard, I had to rewrite on the spot and lose a scene. There was no chance of going back, and that was exciting.
Crave Online: Were you interested in this material because of your own high school experience?
Chris Columbus: I was a complete combination of these two guys. I was Denis Cooverman and Rich Munsch because I just was a freak in high school. I was a guy who, literally, was in love with movies, in a town that was a factory town. I would see movies all weekend and imitate the characters, and didn’t make a lot of friends.
Crave Online: Were you hopelessly in love with a girl in high school?
Chris Columbus: I was hopelessly in love with probably 7 or 8 different girls, who all said no. But, that sense of putting them all on a pedestal and not really knowing who they were was a big problem.
Crave Online: Did you have to work around Hayden’s schedule with Heroes?
Chris Columbus: She was pretty free. We shot in her hiatus period, so we didn’t have to worry about that. There was no scheduling issue at all. One time, we needed her and she had to do some sort of Heroes promotion, but it never was a huge issue.
Crave Online: How did you find the girls who played Hayden’s two friends?
Chris Columbus: Just through casting. Lauren London is an actress I liked, in a movie called This Christmas. It’s usually movies that I’ve seen. And, I saw Lauren Storm in The Game Plan, as this crazed babysitter. She was only in the movie for like four minutes, but she made an impression on me, and then when I met her in person, I thought she was perfect. They were great. Lauren is a very skinny little girl, and I had to make her eat a lot of Twinkies and donuts and things, to get her to gain weight. It was a tough job.
