Harry Potter director Chris Columbus recalled the crew’s initial suspicions of him and how much ‘work’ it took to get their support.
The filmmaker helmed the first two movies in the franchise, 2001’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and 2002 sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
He most recently worked on the eagerly-anticipated adaptation of the Thursday Murder Club on Netflix, starring Pierce Brosnan, Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie
During a Q&A session with the cast at the New York premiere, held at the Paris Theater, host Josh Horowitz asked how he managed being an American surrounded by a group of A-list Brits on set – and he compared the experience to his efforts on the wizarding series.
‘I had already been through it with Potter,’ the 66-year-old replied, explaining that he grew up with a ‘love of everything British’, stemming from the Beatles and watching A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
‘I’m pretty well steeped in the culture, and I dealt with all the jokes and the ridiculousness when I started Harry Potter – the first two weeks, the crew was completely suspicious of me.
‘[They] thought, “What’s this Yank doing here?” I heard all the Chris Columbus, Christopher Columbus jokes… But then you have to keep up. You have to keep up a certain level.
‘The thing about working with the Brits is you have to keep up a certain level of humor. It’s self-deprecating humor, and you have to be as sharp as f**k.
‘You cannot ever, ever… If you lose your step, you lose your step for the whole shoot.
‘For me, it was casting all of these incredibly brilliant, funny people and just keeping up with them. I hope that endeared me to the crew the second time.
‘It was a lot of work on Potter to get that support from the crew – it felt a lot more comfortable going back for the second time on this movie. I’d do it again in a second.’
Chris jumped straight into another book adaptation – with a mostly British cast – for the Thursday Murder Club, which is landing on Netflix in just a few weeks.
The upcoming murder mystery film, based on Richard Osman’s best-selling novel of the same name, follows retirees who spend their free time casually solving cold cases – but things take a murderous turn when they are thrown into a real crime.
Naomi Ackie, Richard E Grant, Tom Ellis, David Tennant and Daniel Mays make up the rest of the line-up.
Speaking of the star-studded cast, Chris revealed that they were all the first choices for their roles – which had only previously happened when working on Harry Potter.
He continued: ‘The interesting comparison, ironically, is that on Potter, we made a list of all of our first choices – Dame Maggie Smith, Richard Harris and Robbie Coltrane – and they all said yes, and that has not happened to me in 20 years, until this book.’
‘And it was Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, and they all said yes. It inspires you to only want to work with British actors because they say yes,’ he laughed.
‘It was a labor of love … because when I walked in the first day of rehearsal, when we were reading through the script, the four of them were sitting there, and it was 160 years of British cinema, and it’s very intimidating.
‘I could hear my voice [shaking] and I had to get over that.
‘They just set such a level of trust. I felt trusted, and I hope you all felt trusted. It was just this level of trust that we all had through the course of the film. I think you can see it on screen, definitely.’
The Thursday Murder Club is premiering on Netflix on August 28.
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