Harry Potter director Chris Columbus puts his faith in childhood Jesus

Having transformed Harry Potter into a Hollywood film star, Chris Columbus is now turning his attention to an even more gifted child. The American director is to produce a film about the childhood of Jesus Christ.

Columbus, who also made the film Home Alone, is to adapt Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, the book by Anne Rice, who is best known for Interview with the Vampire.

“This film has the potential to be a cinematic classic, a picture that will appeal to all ages, all around the world,” says the director of the first two films about the child wizard, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

“I am proud to be part of this incredible production.”

Rice’s book tells the story of a seven-year-old Jesus, who departs Egypt with his family to return home to Nazareth and discovers the truth about his birth, who he is, and his purpose in life.

Rice wrote the novel after returning to the Catholic Church in 1998. Last year, however, she announced that she had “quit” Christianity.

“It’s simply impossible for me to 'belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group,” she declared. “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be antisecular humanist. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

Even during her temporary return to the Catholicism of her youth, Rice never renounced the highly successful vampire novels that she had written or the sado-masochistic erotica that she penned under the name Anne Roquelaure.

The film will be directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh from a screenplay that he wrote with his wife, Betsy. Rice approached Nowrasteh after she saw his film The Stoning of Soraya M, about a woman falsely convicted of adultery in Iran and subsequently stoned to death.