Chris Columbus Quit ‘Christmas Vacation’ Because ‘I Couldn’t Work With’ Chevy Chase

While looking back at past projects, Chris Columbus, the director behind holiday classics Home Alone and Gremlins, shared a not-so-merry holiday recollection involving comedian Chevy Chase.

Speaking to Vanity Fair for a recent interview, Columbus said John Hughes had sent him the script for 1989’s Christmas Vacation, starring Chase. Columbus said he signed onto the film before meeting the actor, and didn’t actually meet Chase until he began second unit shooting.

“I probably have never told this story,” the director told the publication, before detailing his first of two encounters with Chase. “I sat down with him. It was just the two of us. He had to know I was directing the movie. I talked about how I saw the movie, how I wanted to make the movie. He didn’t say anything,” said Columbus. After forty minutes, he said Chase stopped him and asked him, “Wait a second. You’re the director?”

Columbus said his response was “the most surreal, bizarre thing,” and that Chase also remarked, “Oh, I thought you were a drummer.”

Their second meeting was apparently just as unproductive. Columbus said he had dinner with Chase and Hughes but that, “I was basically nonexistent.” He explained, “It was Chevy and Hughes, and they talked about everything except Christmas Vacation. We spent two hours together, and I left the dinner and I thought, There’s no way I can make a movie with this guy. First of all, he’s not engaged. He’s treating me like shit. I don’t need this. I’d rather not work again. I’d rather write.”

Columbus then called Hughes to tell him he couldn’t “make a good movie with this guy and I will let you down.” According to the director, Hughes simply replied, “I understand. Completely understand.”

A representative for Chase did not immediately get back to Rolling Stone for comment.

Just a week after, the script for Home Alone would land on his lap, which Columbus said “for me, was even more personal, a better script.” The 1990 comedy film written by Hughes and starring Macaulay Culkin as the mischievous Kevin McCallister would go on to be a blockbuster hit, and become a beloved Christmas classic leading to several sequels.

When asked about Donald Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Columbus told Vanity Fair that “the only way we could get to shoot in the Plaza Hotel was that Trump had a cameo.”

Trump has claimed that he never asked for a cameo, and that the production team begged him to be in the movie. Although Columbus considered responding, he took his wife’s advice to “stay out of it.” The director added, “I’m not going to get in a fight over Home Alone. There are much bigger battles to be fought.”

Columbus also served as a producer on Nosferatu, the critically-acclaimed film gothic horror film, written and directed by Robert Egger, set to release on Christmas Day.