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Hot Chocolate with Peanuts, Burton and Depp
by Resa Nelson
Transcript by Deppraved

Johnny Depp provides the eye candy on the set of the reinvented CATCF.

Forget Dr. Phil. Send Nanny 911 packing. Ill-behaved kids ain't seen nothin' yet because....heeeeere's Johnny!

"Johnny Depp, who may be the biggest star in the world today, thanks mostly to the Caribbean picture, is an actor who takes chances, will go way out there, as he did in Pirates, and explore a character that other actors would shy away from," says Richard Zanuck (Reign of Fire, Jaws), producer of CATCF, due in theaters on July 15 from Warner Brothers.

Depp plays world-renowned chocolatier Willy Wonka, a man who loves candy and seems to love children, but doesn't hesitate to let them succumb to apparently horrible demises when they misbehave.

"We have Johnny Depp at his best," Zanuck says. "Willy Wonka has always been a very eccentric character, but you put Johnny Depp in his shoes and he becomes even more eccentric."

The movie is based on Roald Dahl's book by the same name, first published in 1964. Gene Wilder starred in the musical version in 1971, renamed Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which follows Dahl's book fairly closely. Although not commercially successful in theaters, it's one of Warner's biggest sellers on video and DVD. So why remake such a popular film?

"The book has been translated into dozens of foreign languages and has been a hit for a long, long time," Zanuck says. "It presents itself with a world that's very ripe for the imagination of (director) Tim Burton. What he did is go back to the Dahl book. It's practically identical to the book, with very few changes. It's not a musical."

WARNING! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ ANY SPOILERS!!!!

The story begins with Charlie Bucket, a boy who lives in a two-room house with his nearly destitute family. Charlie and his parents sleep on mattresses on the floor in one room, while all four of his grandparents squeeze into a double bed in the other room. Ironically, the Buckets live in a town that's home to the most famous chocolate-making factory in the world. It's a mysterious place, because no one ever goes in and no one ever comes out - and yet it's obvious there must be workers inside the factory to keep it going. Legend has it that when Willy Wonka learned some of his employees were actually spies from other candy companies, he shut his factory down and locked the gates. But years later, his factory began producing chocolate again. How, no one knows.

One day, Wonka announces he will open his doors and give a personal tour - and a lifetime supply of chocolate - to the winners of five golden tickets. Each ticket is hidden inside one of Wonka's candy bars. Everyone all over the world scrambles to buy Wonka candy, frantic to win a ticket. The winners include a German boy who eats candy all day long, a British girl who screams until her parents give in to whatever she wants, an American gum-chewing girl who's rude to everyone, an American boy who does little more than watch television - and Charlie. When they go on the tour of the chocolate factory, each child's fatal flaw is exposed, and the consequences are both funny and deadly serious.

Screenwriter John August (Big Fish, Titan A.E.) had worked with Burton before, but he describes this script as his dream project. "When I was in third grade, as a class assignment we had to write a letter to a famous person. Everyone else wrote to the president, and I wrote to Roald Dahl, because CATCF was my favorite book. So Roald Dahl sent a postcard back. It was a dream to get to work on the movie version of the book that inspired me so much."

August was invited to join the project early, when Burton had committed to direct and Depp had signed up to play Wonka. "When I first thought about how I was going to adapt it, I thought back to my memories of the book," August says. "And, weirdly, it wasn't about the amazing chocolate factory. It was about Charlie Bucket. I remember thinking I wasn't very sad for Charlie - I was actually happy for him, because he lived in this little house with everyone he had ever loved. I remember thinking he was really lucky to be surrounded by so many people who cared about him. That was the important thing I wanted to bring out in the movie version. Charlie Bucket doesn't succeed because he's the most clever or the most talented or the most witty. He succeeds because he has this really amazing family."

About the screenplay, August says, "It follows the book incredibly closely. It was important to Tim and I to incorporate all the things in the book that we love so much. Even the really difficult stuff, like the scene with the nut-sorting room, where Willy Wonka has trained all these squirrels to open up walnuts. I knew Tim would somehow find a way to pull that off."

In the chocolate factory's nut-sorting room, spoiled brat Veruca Salt decides she must have one of Wonka's squirrels for her own. When she tries to grab one, all of the squirrels in the room pounce on her, pin her to the ground, and then toss her down the garbage chute after deciding that she's a bad nut.

"Tim's vision is to do things reality-based and not rely on CG," Zanuck says. "For six months, we trained squirrels. Nobody ever thought we could train a squirrel - it's like training a fly - but we did it. They do a great job."

"We do enhance it a bit with CG, because there's supposed to be 200 squirrels, and we trained 50. But they actually do run and pull the little girl down and take her to the chute and throw her down - of course, we find out later she's not injured. None of the kids get injured. They get surprised."

The producers built the chocolate factory and the town around it by using every set at Pinewood Studios. But the greatest task of all was creating the chocolate river inside the factory.

"It was an engineering feat," Zanuck says. "We built the machines to make the chocolate and had to fill huge tubes to pour it in and keep it moving and recycle it. We had tens of thousands of gallons of the substance that had the consistency of chocolate that we made there at the studio in water-tank vats."

"We used the old James Bond set, which I think is the biggest set in the world, and the river ran from one end of it to the other. The 80-foot waterfall is at one end. It was made so we could turn it off and on. When you see the picture, you'll swear it was all CGI, but 90 percent of it was all right there - if you had come to visit the set, you would have seen it."

In addition to making the sets as realistic as possible, the filmmakers wanted to flesh out the role of Willy Wonka, because Dahl's book reveals so little about him, and so the movie expands on how Wonka got to be who he is.

"Very few actors will take the chances that he will in portraying a character," Zanuck says about Depp. "That's what makes it fun. It's what audiences expect when they come in to see a Tim Burton-Johnny Depp picture. They expect to see something that's a little bizarre and a little off-center. In this case, that's what they're going to see. The whole picture is fun and unexpected and wild and very visual."

While August worked to stay true to Dahl's spirit in writing the script, he has a great appreciation for the Burton touch. "Tim brings a wonderful un-Disney sensibility, which is that all the rough edges of the world aren't immediately smoothed over, and little precocious kids don't succeed. I'm most excited about the tone of it. I think what will surprise audiences is how emotional the movie is. There's an expectation that Tim's going to get really dark. Or whenever you have a story involving kids, it's going to be saccharine-sweet. Tim is able to bring a subtle and clever down-the-middle way of doing it. You feel warm to the movie without it ever being cloying or saccharine. For a movie about candy, it's not a guilty pleasure."