Chris Columbus Delivers Holiday Magic When We Need It Most with ‘The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two’

I believe that Christmas movies are tricky to pull off, especially modern holiday stories. They tend to have an artificial quality to them that signals to the audience that it was filmed in the summer time and they tend to be, dare I say, hokey and contrived. You need a director who truly loves the holiday season. Chris Columbus steps in to direct the sequel to Netflix’s cheerful, action-packed adventure, The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, and it’s such a good time that it will help distract you from everything going on outside your home.

Columbus, who served as a producer for the previous film, has a filmography steeped in the holiday spirit. He directed the first two Home Alone films and wrote the screenplays for Gremlins and Christmas with the Kranks. Even the first two Harry Potter films have memorable holiday moments. You need someone that believes in the essence of the holiday and can capture the feeling of the Christmas spirit. That’s Christ Columbus.

This sequel centers on a scorned elf who is determined to take down Santa’s village and that conflict is eerie considering how many people will have to alter their family plans for the upcoming holidays. Columbus is offering us something hopeful with The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two. It’s a cozy hug of a film that inspires you to strive towards goodness.

Awards Daily: You keep coming back to the holidays.

Chris Columbus: I do.

AD: Why do you think you keep coming back to this time of year and how do you think your perspective of the holiday has changed over the years?

CC: Christmas time, for me, is when people can be at their happiest but also their loneliest and saddest. That conflict is fascinating to me. Setting films during that emotional period of time was always something I wanted to explore. The first time I did it was with Gremlins, and that was basically a comedy horror film and having Christmas as a backdrop. That appealed to my darker side. With Home Alone, I remember I was always terrified of home invasion as a kid. It freaked me out.

AD: Me too (laughs)

CC: I think I saw In Cold Blood on television when I was kid. Home Alone was dealing with those demons over Christmas. The holiday theme was something that I always go back to. With Christmas Chronicles 2, it was important to me to dig deep into the mythology of Santa Claus. Who he was and his world. I wanted to create a Santa’s Village that had the same amount of integrity and mytholigy as Harry Potter. I wanted kids to say to themselves, ‘I’ve never seen that before!’ It’s not all primary colors but it’s still inviting. It feels magical. That was all part of it.

AD: I wanted to ask about The North Pole because we get to see it at night. There are shadows in it.

CC: Yeah.

AD: What’s the most important thing in establishing a sort of new world even though we may have seen The North Pole in other films before?

CC: If you treat it with integrity and you know that if you do that it’s a way to take the hand of the audience to take them into it. People don’t treat Christmas–a lot of filmmakers don’t–with that level of respect. Most holiday movies are, for lack of a better word, silly or a little cheesy. Kurt [Russel] and I consider ourselves to be Christmas nerds. We love Christmas so much. Kurt wrote 200 pages of a backstory in terms of who Santa is. It’s remarkable.

AD: My husband would probably love to hang with you guys. He’s obsessed with Christmas. 

CC: That’s great! I love that.

AD: I love that Goldie Hawn has a bigger part in Part Two. You’ve worked with so many incredible women but I was wondering what you were looking forward to doing with Goldie this time around. 

CC: The key was to not lean into the comedic, slapstick side of Goldie. I was more interested in exploring more of Goldie, the Academy Award winning actress. Mrs. Claus had to be a strong, formidable, and tough woman. I didn’t want the cliche Mrs. Claus with the round glasses, baking cookies, and bringing Santa his slippers. That was of no interest to me at all. It was about creating a pioneer woman–she designed Santa’s village, after all. She has just as much strength as her husband.

AD: She’s a badass in this. 

CC: Yeah.

AD: She’s doing her own thing and she’s not pining for Santa to come home. 

CC: (laughs) Exactly!

AD: You’ve worked with so many incredible kids. The two leads of this, Darby Camp and Jahzir Bruno, are so great both when they share scenes together and when they are apart and helping our the Clauses. How has your experience of directing children changed over the years?

CC: With somebody like Darby Camp or Sunny [Suljic] in the airport scene, there’s very little do. They can do a scene and then I can give them some notes and they’ll tweak it. They’re that good. It’s like giving notes to Meryl Streep or Al Pacino. Some of the other kids I’ve worked with, it’s their first movie, and sometimes you need to create acting school on the set. This was Jahzir’s second movie and getting that great performance from him, it was a different experience. It was more along the lines of Macaulay Culkin, off-camera kind of directing where you help build up their energy. It’s almost like a gym session. That’s a way to get a gifted actor, who is newer, to deliver. By the time we got to the end of the film, he was very savvy and he was able to do two or three takes in a row. There’s the Macaulay, Harry Potter style but then there’s the Darby Camp style. They’re both great, but they are different.

AD: I just saw Jahzir in The Witches so I was excited to see him pop up in this. 

CC: He’s really good in that.

AD: With the airport scene, were you conscious of all the references to Home Alone? Darby is walking backwards with the batters like Kevin does with the toothbrush. There’s a shot of a band waiting in the airport–granted, it’s not a polka band. A woman is demanding that she get back to Chicago. Even the costuming took me back. Am I just reading way too much into that or was that intentional since this year is the 30th anniversary?

CC: I don’t think all of them were intended. Certainly the musical number was my desire to do a musical number. When the disgruntled passenger is arguing with Darlene Love, she’s basically screaming at her. I was watching the monitor, and I realized that it reminded me so much of Catherine O’Hara screaming at a car rental guy or an airport employee. That’s the Home Alone connection. Ironically, that scene is set in 1990 and that’s when the movie came out. It was a very weird experience for me. It’s just in my DNA so it’s subconscious.

AD: There is a line that really stood out to me where a character says, “It doesn’t matter where you are but who you are with.” That line feels scarily relevant since a lot of holiday plans are being adjusted or changed due to everything that’s happening. 

CC: It’s a very odd situation. That line affects me the same way. I remember we shot the Mexico sequence after Christmas and it was a lovely time to shoot. It was intense because of the winds and the short days. The pandemic hit when we were in post production, and the thought that we would even be able to fly to Mexico and shoot that feels like such a privilege. I’m hoping that our movie brings some solace to people. There’s an intense emotional element to me, and it’s become more emotional during COVID. I don’t know why. That line is really brutal You’re absolutely right. A lot of people aren’t going to be able to have time with people they are normally with during the holidays.

The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two rides onto Netflix on November 25.