Mick Hartley

"It's very sad", said Harry Potter director Chris Columbus the other day. He was talking about JK Rowling. “It’s unfortunate, what’s happened. I certainly don’t agree with what she’s talking about. But it’s just sad, it’s very sad.” Sad about what, he doesn't say – but we can guess.

Today he's interviewed in the Sunday Times:

Columbus previously stated that he wanted to direct a film adaptation of the stage show, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, using the original Potter movie cast (their characters are older in the play). Since then, alas, the JK Rowling trans controversy has made any potential adaptation impossible.

“It’s never going to happen,” he says. “It’s gotten so complicated with all the political stuff. Everyone in the cast has their own opinion, which is different from her opinion, which makes it impossible.” He adds: “I haven’t spoken to Miss Rowling in a decade or so, so I have no idea what’s going on with her, but I keep very close contact with Daniel Radcliffe and I just spoke to him a few days ago. I still have a great relationship with all the kids in the cast.”

Miss Rowling?? Anyway the controversy is less about her than about the Harry Potter actors like Radcliffe who basically stabbed her in the back after she allied herself with the sex realist position in the face of gender ideology. That took some courage on Rowling's part. Muttering about "all the political stuff" takes no courage at all.

The point of the interview, though, is Columbus's latest effort, The Thursday Murder Club.

Chris Columbus has a confession to make. Something “really weird” happened to him when he finished shooting The Thursday Murder Club. The 66-year-old Oscar-nominated film-maker behind Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first three Harry Potter movies (directed one and two, produced number three) noticed that his views on ageing and even death had been radically transformed. After spending three months in the company of the film’s veteran stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie (combined age 306) he no longer feared the end of everything.

“With these actors, they’re all in their seventies and early eighties but there’s still a hunger there and an obsession with doing good work, and it’s not going away for any of them,” he says. “It’s like they still want to do better, even after everything they’ve accomplished. And I responded to that because it taps into my desire never to retire. There is no fear of death because the fear is of failing on something I’m working on right now.”

Columbus, who is warm and ingenuous, is ensconced in a swanky Mayfair hotel that he calls “posh” and is, he says, worlds away from his Pennsylvania roots as the only son of a father who worked as a coalminer and a mother who was a factory worker. There’s a winning wholesomeness to Columbus that has made him the perfect “family movie guy” (he also wrote The Goonies, Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes) and that he brings to his best films. The Thursday Murder Club is infused with it.

The interview is with the Times' film critic Kevin Maher, who gave The Thursday Murder Club a gushing 4-star review. And now gives the director a gushing interview.

I thought the film was awful. It set my teeth on edge. I'm old enough to enjoy a bit of "cosy crime", but this was one of the worst. I've never liked all that Richard Curtis, Marigold Hotel stuff anyway – selling a gentrified hammy vision of Britain to America, it seems to me.

Compare perhaps to the Marlow Murder Club. Nonsense, of course, but, in the first episode at least, quite clever: three killers swapping victims. Yes, it's been done before with Patricia Highsmith/Hitchcock Strangers on a Train, but it was well handled. And it didn't take itself too seriously. Low budget – and there weren't any megastars strutting their stuff. Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley in The Thursday Murder Club, though – godawful. And the dim lower class policeman bamboozled by all the clever Oxford-educated, ex-MI5 toffs….