'Pixels' Director Chris Columbus Tells Us How He Got Pac-Man to Eat New York
There’s nothing like beginning production on a movie by having your stars chase around a gigantic, insatiably hungry alien face!
Chris Columbus, the director of such iconic films as Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter flicks, joined Yahoo Movies in our New York studio to talk about Pixels, a comedy about a group of gamers (led by Adam Sandler) who protect Earth from an alien invasion of arcade characters. We got him to dish on one of the movie’s most eye-popping scenes: a massive Pac-Man chase around New York City. He threw his actors right into the action, testing the mettle of the men and women who were charged with saving the world (on screen of course).
“This was one of the first days of shooting… Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad and Adam Sandler,” Columbus explained. “And it was really my test of how these actors were going to perform.”
They shot the actors against a green screen, which is no easy task for both the performers and the crew. Meanwhile the digital Pac-Man chomps everything in its path into pixelated rubble. “The shot with Pac-Man biting through the firetruck was the initial thing that convinced me to create pixelated destruction,” says Columbus. “I said ‘I’ve never seen anything like this onscreen.’” Columbus describes it as a “psychedelic and hallucinatory mind trip” of an experience.
Pixels hits theaters on Friday, July 24.
