Chris Columbus reflects on how Macaulay Culkin's Home Alone stardom affected Harry Potter

Chris Columbus directed some of the most iconic kid performances in Hollywood history, and he says that his breakthrough movie, Home Alone, helped his approach to casting the massive Harry Potter franchise.

"We went from shooting Home Alone 1 [where] nobody cared, but in the course of a year, Macaulay Culkin became a huge star, and that was unexpected. It's not like Harry Potter, where you know that it may be extraordinarily successful," Columbus said in an interview with Demi Lovato in her new documentary Child Star.

Columbus said that he's seen the overwhelming pressure of child stardom firsthand. "I came from a working-class family, and I've seen it a couple of times with kids when you see someone who comes from a working class family, and suddenly they're thrown into — the kid becomes the breadwinner for the family," the filmmaker said.

Columbus, who helmed both Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, said that casting the wizarding franchise was "very intense" because he knew how much attention and scrutiny comes with roles of that magnitude.

"I had to put blinders on because that's all I was hearing everywhere," Columbus remembered. "You go on the street, you go into a pub, you go anywhere, and people are saying, 'Who are you gonna cast? Who's gonna be Harry Potter, who's gonna be Harry Potter?' And that, you take that information and you bring it back to the actor and the actor's parents: 'This is gonna get pretty intense.'"

Columbus said that he "felt a tremendous responsibility" to ensure that the young performers "knew what they were getting into," noting that Daniel Radcliffe signed on for multiple films at once. "That's the rest of your life as a child star," Columbus said. "That's gonna be your legacy, and you have to learn how to live with that."

The director said that he wasn't particularly clued into Culkin's home life while they shot Home Alone. "When I was young, I had some pretty rough experiences on other films that I'd done," Columbus said in the documentary.

"Once we wrapped, I didn't know what was going on [with Culkin]." Columbus previously told The Guardian, "We didn’t know that much about the [Culkin] family at the beginning; as we were shooting, we learned a little more. The stories are hair-raising. I was casting a kid who truly had a troubled family life."

Columbus told Lovato in the documentary, "Suddenly, I realized that parents had to be a big part of it. I can't have [an actor] go home to a really sort of shaky environment for the sake of a film. It's not worth it. It was as important to cast the parents as it was to cast the kids."

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At the end of their filmed conversation, Columbus asked Lovato about her own support system: "You're supposed to be interviewing me, but I'm just curious, did you have people supporting you?"

Lovato famously had her own difficult experiences with child stardom. As she juggled the Camp Rock movies, her series Sonny with a Chance, and a busy music career, the pop star struggled with addiction, body image, and mental health issues — all of which she reflects on in Child Star.

"I love my parents to death," Lovato told Columbus, "but they didn't know how to manage that situation. It's a very tricky situation when I'm the breadwinner, and my parents — there was no manual on what to do."

Child Star, which is co-directed by Lovato, is now streaming on Hulu.