John Candy improvised all his lines for ‘Home Alone’
One of the best-loved Christmas films of all time is undoubtedly Chris Columbus’ 1990 feature, Home Alone. The film starred Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister, a young boy who is accidentally left at home when his family go on a Christmas holiday to Paris.
It’s somewhat common knowledge that Culkin improvised one of the film’s most iconic scenes, in which he screams into the mirror after splashing aftershave onto his face. Discussing when he knew that the scene would work, Chris Columbus said: “[It was] kind of on set because he wasn’t supposed to do that.”
“If you put something on your face that burns, most people move their hands right away,” he added. “So my direction to him was when you pat your face, move your hands and scream. And I think it was the first take; he kept his hands on his cheeks. We all started laughing hysterically. It’s funny, the iconic moment from Home Alone was an accident.”
However, Culkin was not the only Home Alone star to improvise some of the movie’s best scenes. Columbus went on to explain the importance of the technique in comedy. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “Sometimes what happens in comedy is a ridiculous choice by an actor works. I saw that a thousand times with Robin Williams. Those are the things that end up in the movie and remain with people for years and years and years.”
He then drew note to John Candy’s performance in the film: “I mean, John Candy in the movie is a perfect example. He was on the movie for only one day, but it resulted in so much great improvisation. None of that stuff was in the script. The funeral-parlour story, that was all improvised at 4:30 in the morning. We could barely keep a straight face on set just listening to John.”
Interestingly though, Candy took a relatively low paycheck for the film, unknowing that it would become a great commercial success. He must have felt a bit wound up by this, and Columbus noted, “There was certainly a little resentment on John’s part. It was a deal between him and John Hughes at the time.”
“I never met John Candy before he came on the movie,” he added. “I don’t know if John ever got any kind of compensation from Fox. We did a movie together after that, Only the Lonely, and there were a couple times on set when he would make a cutting remark about Fox and what he was paid.”