d 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….
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