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CONFECTIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
By Mark Salisbury/Premiere July/August 2005
Transcribed by Herestoyou

***SPOILER ALERT-Several parts of the movie are discussed********

Johnny Depp has revealed himself to be master of almost anything he turns his hand to. But what he can’t do today is say his lines without tripping over them. Here at Pinewood Studios west of London, playing candymaker extraordinaire Willy Wonka in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Depp stands before the factory’s foreboding entrance, ready to greet the five lucky children who have come, Golden Tickets in hand, for a tour of this hitherto top-secret facility. The day will end with each child having undergone some kind of radical transformation, be it physical, emotional, moral, or financial. But that’s for later. For now, the five, along with their guardians, are regarding their host with some suspicion. And with good reason. "Good morning, starshine," Wonka says in a high, childlike voice, giggling nervously, reading from a set of cue cards, and apparently quoting from the musical Hair. "The Earth says.....hello! My name is Willy Wonka."

This page has a ½ pic of Wonka (Johnny) and the squirrel nut room. The caption: Working with Depp "is an organic process," says Burton. "We talk about inspirations and never try to get too specific. That’s part of the fun of it."

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There is something not quite right about this man with the thick, bug-eyed sunglasses, lavender latex gloves, and transparent cane filled with candy. Something strange and, perhaps, a little creepy. "We always thought of Willy Wonka as the Citizen Kane or Howard Hughes of candy," says Burton about his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic. "Somebody who has problems connecting with people. (He’s) sad and slightly sinister. But not bad." As Charlie’s Grandpa Joe(played by 75 year old David Kelly), a former factory employee, asks if Wonka remembers him, the candyman turns, hissing: "Were you one of those despicable spies who every day tried to steal my life’s work and sell it to those parasitic copycat candy-making cads?" Even on the page that last bit’s a tongue twister. "I really hate that line,"Depp says with a grin after one slipup, and sighs after another, "I’m so happy, Tim." Later, in his trailer, he elaborates: "I was going to put the cards in my jacket pocket, (but) I couldn’t find it because I can’t see a thing in those glasses. I dumped them on the ground, started the speech and knew it was a train wreck. In pretty much every film there’s (a line) that you’re destined to battle with." For Burton, who is also dealing with the weather, misbehaving pyrotechnics, and noise from planes overhead, it is "one of those days where you’re amazed anything gets made at all." He looks to the sky, head in hands. Mostly, he paces the set. And paces. "We gave him a pedometer to see how many steps he walks in a day," says Freddie Highmore, who plays Charlie (and who worked with Depp in Finding Neverland). "We found he didn’t need to go to the gym."

PIC: p. 98-SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS: (pic of the whole group sailing down the chocolate river on the Viking boat.) Wonka and his visitors are ferried down the Chocolate River by Oompa-Loompas. "Tim and I agreed that the chocolate looked inedible in the 1971 film," says production designer Alex McDowell, 'so we went to look at pouring chocolate. Tim was absolutely driving it to be a physical effect, a visceral thing."

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You can tell Depp’s trailer not just because it’s the biggest, but because of the skull and crossbones flying from it. Inside, he serves coffee and likens Willy to a lonely, scared, socially inept child. "I think this Wonka is probably hypersensitive, hyper-germophobic. He has clearly spent too much time alone." When he and Burton brainstormed the character, they talked about children’s TV show hosts such as Captain Kangaroo and the Pancake Man. "Even when you were a child, they were weird," says Burton, who put Depp into a Beatle’s wig, lilac contacts, and sparkling white dentures to play Wonka.
Charlie marks the fourth time the pair has worked together. (This fall’s stop-motion-animated Corpse Bride, for which the actor voices a character will make five.) Yet it’s the first time, the director says, he didn’t have to fight studio execs to cast him, a result of Depp’s elevation to the A-list courtesy of Pirates of the Caribbean. "Suddenly Hollywood people, the upper echelon, liked saying my name," Depp notes modestly. "But even then, I wasn’t sure Tim didn’t have to fight for me because I know there were a couple of names being shook around, and I felt they were going to go for some big star." (Burton says Depp was his only choice.) Published in 1964, Dahl’s book was first adapted for the screen as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, with a screenplay by Dahl and Gene Wilder as Wonka. Although the film is considered by many to be a kids’ classic, Burton doesn’t share that feeling; neither did the author, according to his widow, Felicity (known as Liccy) Dahl. After his death, in 1990, Warner Bros. began pursuing a new version. "In the end we said if we had screenplay, director, and main-actor approval with Warner Bros., we might consider (it)," says Liccy, who ended up being one of Charlie’s executive producers. The project passed through several hands (Seabiscuit’s Gary Ross was once attached as director; The Interpreter’s Scott Frank took first crack at a script) before reaching Burton, who brought in screenwriter Pamela Pettler(Corpse Bride) and then, to begin anew, Big Fish’s John August.
Burton and Dahl seem like a marriage made in creative heaven, two idiosyncratic, inventive minds with a similarly dark, macabre attitude toward children. Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Charlie’s mother (and has an 18-month-old son, Billy, with Burton), recalls watching a documentary on Dahl and being struck by the parallels. "The lack of p.c.-ness and his black, black humor couldn’t be more Dahl," she says.

P. 98-(more pics with just captions of who’s in the pic, these have been seen on this site before) "Every time I go (to the set), I almost burst into tears and think, ‘Blast, why isn’t(Roald) here to see this?’" laments Liccy, who first met Burton when he produced an adaptation of James and the Giant Peach. "I think Tim saw the magic and the eccentricity and the genius that Wonka has. He has that wild imagination and dares step a little further. He’s Wonka, really."
Burton was determined to remain true to Dahl’s book and its fablelike quality: "Make the grandparents look old, make the family look undernourished, make Charlie thin, not some blond-haired kid that looks like he’s just has a nice lunch at the commissary." In previous drafts of the script, he says, there seemed to be a desire to make Charlie proactive—"You could see the thought process: ‘There are all these other kids, and this kid is just sort of boring, from a movie point of view’"—and to get rid of his father and have Wonka be more of a father figure. "It’s like, ‘No he’s not.’ In some ways he’s more screwed up than some of the kids." What was required was a backstory that would give a foundation for Wonka’s eccentricities. So we see Willy as a boy whose dentist father (Christopher Lee) insists on clean teeth, forcing him to undergo horrendous orthodontia. It’s something Burton is familiar with. "I had every kind of brace imaginable, (even) the ones wrapped around the head," he says. "I can still feel the throbbing" It was Depp who suggested Highmore, then 12, for Charlie. "I hadn’t seen Neverland, but in just meeting him there was no question he was the one," says Burton, who adds that Warners needed a little persuading. "The reason I wanted him was the very reason Warners was worried about the character. (He’s) a person who, like ninety percent of us in school, people don’t remember. We’re kind of wallflowers." Rounding out the cast of kids are Because of Winn-Dixie’s AnnaSophia Robb as bad-mannered bubble-gum fiend Violet Beauregarde and newcomers Julia Winter, Philip Wiegratz, and Jordan Fry as (respectively) spoiled daddy’s girl Veruca Salt, greedy German guzzler Augustus Gloop, and video-game fanatic Mike Teavee. As for the Oompa-Loompas, the tiny inhabitants of Wonka’s factory who provide a musical accompaniment and moral message as the children get their just desserts—and who were played in the 1971 film by dwarves in green wigs and orange face paint—Burton’s solution was to have four-foot-four Deep Roy play all of them, and shrink him even further digitally. "He’s got a strange nobility I felt was right," says Burton, who spent a lot of time determining the correct size for his Oompas onscreen; he finally decided that 30 inches was "the least creepy and most strange." Originally asked to tackle five Oompa roles, Roy, who appeared in Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake and Big Fish, ended up playing hundreds of them, performing each of the film’s four Danny Elfman-scored musical numbers in a different style: Bollywood, hippie, rock, and funk. "I learned how to play the drums, guitar, bass, and keyboards, plus I was lead singer," says Roy, who also plays an Oompa chef, newscaster, psychiatrist, and even a female named Doris. Adds Burton, "He worked his arse off."
In this computer-effects-happy era, Burton prefers to keep things real wherevee possible. For production designer Alex McDowell (Minority Report), that meant building sets rather than using blue or green screen. He even resorted to such old-school techniques as oversize props to let the Oompa-Loompas interact with Wonka. To Burton, as well as his actors, it makes all the difference. "Being in the real place gives you things to play off of," says Depp, "In a way we have the opportunity to do what they did all those years ago on The Wizard of Oz, to really be in that (world)." The Emerald City of Charlie would have to be the magical Chocolate River set, which filled Pinewood’s largest soundstage. "It was definitely the hardest set, trying to find that balance of something that the audience would recognize as edible and organic plant life," says McDowell. "As much as we could, we used real plants." Like the film’s other interior sets, it is a completely enclosed environment and the scale as well as the detail is extraordinary. It features three 30-foot-high, windswept red-and-white candy trees; pink, purple, and yellow-orange marshmallow plants; lollipop trees hung with real lollipops; and candy canes growing out of the river, which, unlike in 1971, looks like chocolate. "We wanted to give it a texture, a real chocolatey feel, as opposed to brown water," says Burton.
The director steered McDowell to the ‘60’s sci-fi movie Danger Diabolik as inspiration for the other factory spaces, with the result that the rest of Wonka’s interior world has the feel of "the Russian space race: not quite polished, not quite NASA," says McDowell. The factory exterior is all hard edges and fascist overtones, surrounded on two sides by a town set that includes some 80 houses (Charlie’s ramshackle abode among them) and a dozen or so shops. It’s a deliberate mixture of times and places: part northern England, part industrial Pittsburgh, part 1950s, part 1970s. "A lot of (the book) is open for interpretation in terms of where it’s set," says Burton. "That’s part of the weirdness and the charm; it’s sort of in its own place." It was in the Nut Room that Burtont’s zeal to ground Wonka’s fantastical world in reality reached its apex. For the scene in which Veruca and her equally odious father(James Fox) are set upon by dozens of squirrels, animal trainer Michael Alexander and his team spent four months teaching 20 of the animals to run up Veruca’s body and pin her to the ground, and another 20 to sit on stools and shell nuts. "Squirrels," says Alexander dryly, "are really difficult to train. It’s not that they’re not smart, they’re just so incredibly wild and fidgety."
The fact that they did what was required of them was little short of a miracle. The sequence does include some animatronic squirrels as well as digital replication to swell their numbers, but the key actions are performed by the real thing. "It made it easier and quicker to shoot," Burtons insists. "And if you add (up) the cost for a certain amount of CG shots or the time it takes to train a squirrel to kick a guy in the arse, you’re kind of saving money." With four months to go until the film’s July 15 release, Burton appears relaxed as he sits in his London office, where he’s overseeing editing of both Charlie and Corpse Bride simultaneously. His son, Billy (who appears briefly in Charlie, being pushed in a pram), has just paid a visit, and Burton called a time-out on this interview to play with him. He says he’s amused that people are asking him whether fatherhood will have an impact on the kind of films he makes. "The feeling I have is absolutely not," he says. "I feel more inclined to make a horror movie or a porno movie."
Of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn’t likely to be a typical kids’ film. Not with Depp’s trippy; psychedelic performance and Burton pulling the strings. Although there has been speculation as to just how strange and scary the movie might turn out to be, Warner Bros. president of production Jeff Robinov insists that neither the film nor Depp’s performance should be viewed as creepy. "It’s sweet," he says. "It’s unique."
Burton says he didn’t encounter any problems from the studio over the movie’s tone, either while he was shooting or after showing them an early cut. "Most of the discussions came before shooting," he says. "Warners haven’t said one word (since), which is great. Maybe because they don’t know what to say." He shrugs his shoulders. "But it remains to be seen what people find creepy or not creepy."