“SO WHAT ISJOE PESCI REALLY LIKE?”

Iwish I had footage of myself the first time I read the script for Home Alone. I was alone in the house, lying on the sofa in the living room, and it was the first time I read a script that made me laugh so hard that I got stomach cramps. John Hughes’s screenplay was a masterpiece, the perfect family Christmas story. He thought of some of the best physical comedy gags ever and he wrote them with such specificity, shot by shot, that it was like watching the movie already made. It would be a riot to see what I must have looked like reading it—rolling off the sofa in laughter and then tearing up when the neighbor saves the day and the family reunites—like a crazy person going through every emotion in the world by himself in a room. From page one, I started to see myself in the role of Marv Merchants. I absolutely loved physical comedies when I was a kid—Stooges, Chaplin, Keaton, Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny—but that kind of comedy had fallen out of favor, and John’s script was brilliant in bringing that lost art form back to the big screen. By the time I put the script down, I was determined to get that part!

I can’t remember what scenes were used for the audition, but I met the director, Chris Columbus, in the National Lampoon offices at Warner Brothers. I listened to Chris’s vision for the film and then did the scenes a few times. He seemed to like what I did, but when I was driving home, I felt disappointed in myself. I replayed the scenes in my head, and thought about the vision Chris had talked about, and I suddenly understood exactly how I should have played it. I pulled over, called my agent, and asked them to call Chris and ask if I could come back and try it again. My agent assured me that wasn’t necessary, but I insisted, and I stayed on hold until he got the okay that I could go back to Warner Brothers and try it again. So I did. Chris told me later that he had already decided to cast me and there was no need to come back, but I didn’t know that. I wanted to give myself my best chance to be a part of something very original and laugh-out-loud funny. And it was a good chance to really try to play Marv for the first time and lock in with Chris and John’s vision of the film.

My agent made the deal, the same as I had gotten on Coupe de Ville, three hundred thousand dollars for six weeks of work. I was very happy with the deal but feeling anxious and guilty about leaving the family behind; it was too much to ask Laure to move us all again. Just before I was about to leave, I got a call saying they had redone the shooting schedule and they would now need me for eight weeks instead of six. They were asking me to add on 33 percent more shooting time, so I asked if they were going to raise my salary the same amount, and they said they were not. My agent said to just do it anyway, that when you get to this pay level, you commit to the project, and the weekly salary doesn’t matter. But I was still in the blue-collar work paradigm of getting a daily or weekly rate for one’s work and I didn’t think it was fair, since the deal had been set for a month or so. My guilt at leaving my family further clouded my thinking, and I ended up making one of the stupidest decisions in my show business life—I backed out of the movie. They hired another actor, and he and Pesci started rehearsals in Chicago. I still had The Wonder Years directing and acting work, but I realized quickly what a mistake I had made and was kicking myself for letting my pride get in the way of doing something I deeply wanted to do. The gods somehow intervened (and when I say “gods,” I mean Joe Pesci), because after a couple days of rehearsal, I got the call that they wanted me back in the movie and that they would honor the original contract and make the schedule six weeks. By that point, I was so full of regret that I would have done it even if it took six months to shoot!

Within a day, I was sitting in a restaurant in Chicago with Joe and Chris, laughing, drinking beer, and talking through the film. Chris wanted us to be as scary as we could at the beginning of the film so the audience would feel a real threat to the kid, and who better to scare people than Joe Fucking Pesci. Joe said he was going to make up a cartoon language for when Harry gets angry and frustrated, which Chris loved. Marv was always the dumber and sillier one, so I was looking for my way to play against Joe. In Stooges talk, Joe was Moe, and I was a cross between Larry and Curly. It was so fun to work with the costumer to find just the right look—the coat, sweater, and shoes—and with the makeup artist to figure out just what kind of damage an iron was going to do to my face. We shot on location at the house that has now become a tourist destination spot but at the time was just a nice house in a nice neighborhood, with the locals hanging out on the sidewalk right there with the movie crew. It was winter in Chicago, so it wasn’t pleasant, but it was perfect for creating the look of the Norman Rockwell Christmas that we were going for. Joe and I started with a few of the scenes parked in our van, plotting our fool-proof strategy, and it was a nice way to break the ice, but the fun began when we actually started to try to break into the house.

This film had absolutely no special effects. Everything in it really happened, relying on great camera work, great props, and great stunt people. The first physical comedy scene I shot was Marv going down the outside stairs to break into the basement. Kevin, that little devil, has made the steps icy, sending Marv falling and sliding down the stairs on his back. We started shooting the scene. I walked to the top of the stairs, scanned my surroundings, took my first step onto the icy stairs, slipped, and fell backwards out of the shot and onto a nice soft landing pad behind me, just off camera. We did a few takes and got some funny ones. Then they set up for the stunt of Marv actually sliding down the concrete stairs. Leon Delaney, my brilliant stuntman, took his place at the top of the stairs, Chris said, “Action,” and I watched in painful amazement as Leon threw himself up in the air, landed hard on his spine at the top stair and proceeded to slide down the entire flight of concrete stairs on his back, landing in a heap at the bottom. Holy shit, it was something to see, so painfully funny, and the whole crew applauded loudly—and set up for take two. Leon did it again, and then again, each time adjusting to Chris and the stunt coordinator’s notes to “Jump a little higher,” “Slide a little bumpier,” and “Keep your face hidden,” until they got it exactly how they wanted it.

I vividly remember sitting with Leon that night between takes and asking him, “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Fuck yeah, it hurts.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because I have two girls in college and Daddy’s got to pay the bills . . . and besides, it’s really fun.” It started to dawn on me just how far we were going to take the physical comedy, that it really was a live-action cartoon. They moved the camera to the bottom of the stairs for the shots of me sliding down the last few stairs, getting up, and breaking into the house. Leon gave me his body pads, apologizing for how sweaty they were (even in freezing weather). They felt good to have on, ready to take a hit like I was wearing football pads, and I decided to go for it as best I could. I slid down enough stairs to get good momentum to crash land on the bottom landing. I thought it would be fun to make it super slippery when I tried to stand up, and I had the set decorators grease the landing to make it easy to slide around. At one point, I brought my slip-and-slide to an abrupt end by sliding my feet out to the side to brace myself in the narrow stairwell, channeling a Roadrunner cartoon, the way something chaotic comes to a sudden, frozen, comic halt. It was a small beat but felt just right, and the crew and Chris loved it. The scene was really funny, and I now understood how this movie was going to work—Leon would do the big stunts, but I was going to have to keep up my end of the bargain and bring this cartoon to life when it was my turn in front of the camera. Joe’s stunt double was Troy Brown, a former rodeo rider who was tough as nails. I watched him and Leon do such dangerous things that any other normal human would end up in the hospital if they did them—falling from the staircase after the paint cans to the face, climbing across the rope in the backyard and then crashing into the side of the house—but because of their professionalism, they not only survived but thrived in their craft.

There were so many fun gags to play—the nail in the foot, glass Christmas bulbs crushed into my feet, paint can to the face, iron to the face, BB gun to the face (my face took a beating!)—it’s hard to pick a favorite because I loved doing them all. John had written each one so vividly, and the way Chris and the cinematographer shot them brought them to life just as I had imagined. I knew just what Marv was supposed to look like in each shot, with each lens, just how Redford had taught me, although in a very different milieu. The prop department was genius, creating such realistic props that it made you feel like each gag was really happening. Christmas bulbs made of sugar crunching under my feet made me feel the pain that poor Marv was feeling. Driving a rubber nail into my foot and feeling a foam iron smash me in the face are as close as I ever want to get to having those things really happen, but what an opportunity to get to play it out in such a funny and safe way. The worst I ever got hurt was doing one of the simple scenes. It was a perfect comic frame, sticking my big face through the doggy-door and right into the camera, with a big shit-eating grin, only to get shot in the face with a BB gun and have to pull my head back out again. The problem was that my nose is so fucking big that not once, but twice, I clipped it on the frame of the doggy-door when I was pulling my head out and gave myself a bad bloody nose. It’s those little ones you think are simple that will get you every time.

But the weirdest one had to be the scene when I have a tarantula crawl on my face. The day came to shoot that scene and I assumed the genius prop department would come up with a realistic-looking tarantula, but when I got to the set, the prop was just a rubber bug, no mechanics for it to move or crawl. That’s when they brought in the “Tarantula Wrangler” and introduced me to a very large and scary-looking spider. The wrangler explained to me that they had done some tests where he had let it crawl on his face and nothing bad happened, so it was probably safe. I asked how he trains a tarantula and he said that they are not really trainable, but as long as I didn’t make any sudden moves, I should be fine. He explained where the poison is located on the spider, how it bites, and how long you have to live once you get bitten. He told me that they could remove the poison, but that the tarantula would then die. I said I understood, but if the tarantula bit me then I would die, so maybe we should think about removing the poison. But I could tell that was not going to happen. The scene had me lying on the floor, not noticing the spider crawling up my body until it eventually crawls across my face, at which point I scream with fear. I was concerned that when it came time for me to scream in the scene, that might scare the tarantula and cause it to attack me, but the wrangler brushed off my concern, telling me that spiders can’t hear. I guess that could be true, since as far as I know, spiders don’t have ears, but this question had never come up in my entire life. I was going to have to hope for the best. Before the camera rolled, they had it crawl around my face, just to get it used to the terrain, and I started to get comfortable with it. By this point in the filming, I was loving the challenge of each individual stunt and gag, and ready to take a few chances. Once I got comfortable, I could really let it rip. They rolled the cameras and released the tarantula onto my face. It just walked around randomly but any time it got into a good camera position, I was ready to go. The crew squirmed, watching it go in my mouth and all over my head, and that only made it more fun. I wanted the scream to sound like the woman being attacked in the shower in the movie Psycho, and I think I got pretty close. Once we got those shots, we moved on to the equally dangerous part where Pesci beats me with a crowbar. Joe had a rubber crowbar, and I had a pad protecting my stomach, but he got me good a couple of times on unprotected areas. Quite a badge of honor, to have been beaten by The Man himself. God, did we have fun!

There were only a couple of scenes where Joe and I got to act with Macaulay, and he was as sweet a kid as he appears in the movie. Chris was so great with all the kids, directing them so that they felt they were doing a great job, making them feel safe, keeping things simple, giving them line readings, and acting out for them so they could mimic him and clearly know what he wanted. John Hughes didn’t really spend much time on the set, trusting Chris completely—and probably spending his time writing all the great scripts that came after this one. We didn’t have scenes with any of the cast except Macaulay, but we did get to cross paths with everyone and watch them work—Catherine O’Hara was a hero and great in the film, Kieran Culkin was just as funny at age seven as he is now, and John Candy’s improvisations had everyone rolling on the floor with astonished laughter. But the biggest treat was that John Heard played the dad. An amazing twist of fate that the stranger who took me into his home my very first day in New York and I would now be doing our third movie together.

I rented a little apartment outside of Winnetka and ate at the Wendy’s next door just about every night, barely able to take care of myself on the road. I missed my family so much, but it was frustrating trying to talk to the kids on the phone because, frankly, they were boring as hell. In person, we talked and played and did homework, but on the phone, everything was a monosyllabic answer. They wanted to get back to real life, not answer questions from a disembodied dad on a phone call. At some point during the shooting, Warner Brothers decided the budget was getting too expensive and wanted to unload the movie. I got that call from Joe Roth, who had been running 20th Century Fox for less than a week. He saw the footage of what we had shot and scooped up the movie, seeing the potential the film had. I finished my six-week stint and was glad to get home to Laure and the kids and our friends—and started looking for my next job, with no idea that the film I had just put in the can would become the worldwide cultural phenomenon that it has become.