Dining out on murder
Chris Columbus on bringing the bestselling Thursday Murder Club to screen...
Netflix
- Caroline Frost
The Thursday Murder Club will be available on Netflix from 28 August and there will be a limited cinema release on 22 August. Add it to your watchlist
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A crime fiction novel that broke sales records on its debut, a roll-call of veteran A-list actors and an impatient global audience… even veteran film director Chris Columbus admits the prospect of directing Richard Osman’s 2020 bestseller The Thursday Murder Club was, at first, rather intimidating.
“Walking into a room for the first day rehearsals, and seeing Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie and Pierce Brosnan sitting there, looking at me saying, ‘What do we do now?’ I had to just take a breath and realise, ‘OK, you’ve done this once before.’”
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Indeed, Columbus has pedigree in guiding the most loved of British fiction to the big screen, having directed the first two Harry Potter films in the early 2000s. That, he remembers, was even more of a challenge, due to the youth of much of the cast. “A lot had never had any film experience, so part of the Harry Potter films was really acting class for me, helping them understand how to behave on a film set — the first day they were looking into the cameras, smiling.” Quite different from his Thursday Murder Club cast? He nods.
Chris Columus with Helen Mirren, who plays murder-solving retiree Elizabeth. Netflix
“There’s 160 years of British cinematic history between our four leads,” is how he puts it. “You know that every actor you’re dealing with is going to be incredibly well prepared, so there’s a lot of trust.”
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Can we trust a Pennsylvania native to steer this very British crime caper safely to screen? Columbus would appear to understand the world created on Osman’s pages very well. “I fell in love with the books because of the characters, and their dark, self-deprecating humour,” he says. “It was the emotion more than the murder mystery that made these books feel different to me and why I wanted to make them.” I think we’re in safe hands.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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