Home Alone director Chris Columbus quit Christmas Vacation after bizarre meetings with Chevy Chase: 'I couldn’t work with the guy'

Home Alone filmmaker Chris Columbus was originally supposed to be behind the camera on a different holiday favorite, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, but says he quit after a series of awkward encounters with actor Chevy Chase.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Columbus shared that he'd already started work on the Griswold family adventure when a meeting with its star changed his mind. "I was signed on…and then I met Chevy Chase. Even given my situation at the time, where I desperately needed to make a film, I realized I couldn’t work with the guy," he told the outlet.

At the time, Columbus had already written classics like Gremlins and The Goonies, and directed Adventures in Babysitting when fellow filmmaker John Hughes sent him the script for Christmas Vacation. Columbus later had to break it to the late Brat Pack auteur that he was pulling out of directing the comedy.

"I called John and I said, 'This is really hard for me, but I can't do this movie with Chevy Chase,'" he recalled.

Columbus elaborated that it was two different meetings with the Saturday Night Live legend that left him with a bad taste in his mouth — and one comment he remains baffled by to this day.

"My first meeting with him, 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," Columbus said. "Forty minutes into the meeting, he says, 'Wait a second. You’re the director?' And I said, 'Yeah…I’m directing the film.' And he said to me the most surreal, bizarre thing. I still haven’t been able to make any sense out of it. He said, 'Oh, I thought you were a drummer.'"

Columbus said he tried to get the conversation back on track to the movie, but "after about 30 seconds, he said, 'I got to go.'"

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Vanity Fair later noted that it's been suggested Chase was jokingly referencing a jazz drummer also named Chris Columbus. Either way, Columbus obviously wasn't in on the joke. "I guess that sense of humor was funny in the early ’70s," he proclaimed. "Who says anything like that to anybody? It makes no sense."

Still, Columbus did agree to a second meeting with Chase in which Hughes was also present, but it didn't go much better. "I was basically nonexistent. It was Chevy and Hughes, and they talked about everything except Christmas Vacation," he lamented. "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 s---. I don’t need this. I’d rather not work again. I’d rather write."

Luckily, Hughes had another festive script to send Columbus' way: Home Alone.

"I thought, I can really do something with this, and I don’t have to deal with Chevy Chase," recalled Columbus, who went on to direct Home Alone 2, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the first two Harry Potter films, among others.

Representatives for Chase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After previous reports of his Community costars calling him out as difficult, the comedy star responded, "I don't give a crap! I am who I am. And I like... who I am. I don't care. And it's part of me that I don't care. And I've thought about that a lot. And I don't know what to tell you, man. I just don't care."

Jeremiah S. Chechik ended up taking over as director of Christmas Vacation, which was released in December 1989 and made $73 million at the box office. Home Alone came out the following November and grossed more than $476 million worldwide. Both films have endured as Christmas classics.