Following two hit Paddington films, Paul King cooks up an origin tale for Roald Dahl’s genius chocolatier Willy Wonka. The writer/director tells Screen how he assembled all the ingredients for his latest family blockbuster confection.
Wonka does not announce itself as “A Paul King film” or “A film by Paul King”. Rather it presents itself as “A Paul King confection”. But the idea behind this playful possessory credit does not lie with the Warner Bros marketing or publicity departments. “I think that might be me,” says Wonka director Paul King. “It seemed like the family version of ‘A Spike Lee Joint’. You get to put lots of lovely ingredients together and twirl them around and hope they come out with something lovely.”
After wooing the world with his two Paddington films, King has taken on another beloved character, that of chocolate-maker extraordinaire Willy Wonka. The confectioner first appeared in Roald Dahl’s children’s classic Charlie And The Chocolate Factory published in 1964 — adapted in 1971 by Mel Stuart as Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder, and then in 2005 by Tim Burton as Charlie And The Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp. Burton’s film gave a little backstory to Wonka, but the idea of a prequel has been swirling around at Warner Bros for years.
King was in a car with Harry Potter and Paddington producer David Heyman after the final visual-effects review on Paddington 2 when the idea was raised. “I was idly fishing for work, saying it would be lovely to find something else to do,” King recalls. “And he said, seemingly casually, ‘I do have something. It’s two words — young Wonka.’ I went, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting, but I’d have to think about it.’ Because origin stories, they’re not always great. And because it’s such a treasured and beloved property, book and film and IP, to use all those ghastly terms.”
King went back and re-read Dahl’s book. “It was a book I’d loved as a child. And one of the first I read to myself. I read it from cover to cover so often, the pages fell out of the middle. I remembered the anarchic humour, Oompa Loompas and Willy Wonka and all the ghastly children, but what I’d forgotten was how incredibly emotional, poignant and touching it is. I was weeping. It was this Dickensian-style story,” King explains. “Because I was coming off a Paddington, which has, hopefully, emotional heft and larger-than-life characters and slightly grotesque figures, I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I could dip a toe into without messing it up entirely.’”
With his Paddington scripting partner Simon Farnaby, King set to work in conjunction with The Roald Dahl Story Company (Luke Kelly, Dahl’s grandson, is one of Wonka’s producers). “The Dahl estate was open to it because Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is the only book he wrote a sequel to and, in the book, there are stories of young Willy Wonka, so it felt it could sit within the Dahl universe without spoiling the book.” Moreover, King wanted his film to sit alongside not only the book, but the 1971 movie, “as a companion piece. We tried to keep them as our North Stars.”
Sweet dreams
Set roughly 20-25 years before Dahl’s story, Wonka sees wide-eyed Willy (Timothée Chalamet) back on land after seven years at sea to start his journey as a chocolate maker. But Willy finds his dream thwarted by an unscrupulous chocolate cartel and trapped into a life of servitude by Olivia Colman’s grotesque Mrs Scrubitt. And so he joins forces with fellow orphan Noodle (Calah Lane), a partnership that finally allows his dreams to become a reality.
King always had Chalamet in mind. “I saw him in Call Me By Your Name and was blown away like everyone else. Then I saw him in Lady Bird and he was so different and funny and sardonic and happy to look ridiculous. So right from the start, I thought he has all the qualities you want for a Willy Wonka. He’s slightly unknowable, like he’s stepped in from another world, but also able to hold great emotion. Obviously, the difference between this and the book is he’s the emotional core of the story, not just the Wizard of Oz. He’s got to carry the meaning and emotion of the movie.”
Fortunately for King, Chalamet could also sing and dance, having attended the Fiorello H LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City. “Somebody told me his high school performances were online, which they are, because the 21st century is an absurd time to live,” King laughs. “There’s a performance of Sondheim, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.”
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was a musical of sorts, in that the songs by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley — the most famous, ‘Pure Imagination’, is reprised here — tell the story, but the story is not sung. King wanted the same for Wonka, hiring The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon to pen new songs. “He’s one of the very few contemporary songwriters who has that combination of heart and humour, and I feel there’s a lineage from that Bricusse-Newley world to Neil,” he explains.
While the look of Wonka — a mix of European flavours conceived by production designer Nathan Crowley at Leavesden Studios — was inspired by the 1971 film’s German locations, the musical numbers were influenced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. “As somebody who loves that era of musicals, it was nice to work backwards from ’71 and go, ‘If he’s 20, 25 years younger, we’re in the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, or one of them,’” King says. “They’re so inventive, especially the Fred Astaire ones, with the way they approach dancing. And because Gene Wilder sings in the original so beautifully, it feels like his inner world. That felt like an incredibly useful tool to go, ‘Willy Wonka sees the world as musical.’ When you see in [his] head, it’s Technicolor, it’s extraordinary, it’s vivid and full of song and dance.”
And then there’s Paddington 2 villain Hugh Grant, here playing the diminutive, orange-skinned, green-haired Oompa Loompa. “In the book, they have pages and pages of verse,” says King. “Again, I’d forgotten how witty those songs are. They’re so biting and sarcastic and take gleeful pleasure in the demise of all the ghastly children. As I was reading them, I was thinking, whose voice is that? Hugh’s just seemed like it would be so funny. And what if the Oompa Loompa looked like Hugh with green hair and orange skin? It seemed too funny to be avoided.”
Warner Bros released Wonka in the UK and 36 other international markets on December 8, grossing $43m on opening weekend, and expanded to 41 more territories including North America on December 15. King passed on Paddington 3 to take on the film, but jokes he will be back “for 4 through 12”. For now, though, he is “currently unemployed — but there are a few irons in fires”. One of which is an Astaire biopic starring Tom Holland. “We’re working on a script and Tom’s fantastic, but it’s early days.” A Wonka 2 is “but a glint in the chocolatier’s eye. Hopefully, by Christmas, this will be a multi-billion-dollar smash,” King laughs. “Seriously, I think there is room for it, and we’ve left room for it. And I’d love to do more with the Oompa Loompas.”
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