The exact kind of “junk” that made Gene Wilder quit movies in 1991: “Can’t they just stop and talk?”
Gene Wilder quickly came to dominate the silver screen after his screen debut in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, starring alongside Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Eugene Grizzard, with an array of comedic roles to reach Hollywood icon status.
Of course, his collaborations with Mel Brooks on The Producers, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles played a major part in boosting his star power, with Wilder bringing an eccentricity to each role that was easy to fall in love with.
His approach to comedy was genius because he took these bizarre characters and turned them into something simultaneously theatrical and larger-than-life, but also profoundly human, and one of his greatest roles was his leading part in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, a fantastical journey that blurred the lines between being a fun kids’ film and a much darker, adult-appropriate vision of consumerism and morality.
Roald Dahl’s story was adapted once again in 2005 by Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp taking on the role, and while this version is pretty great, few people would argue that it’s better than the bizarre Wilder version, which really can’t be topped.
Wilder continued to act in various comedies over the coming years, including various collaborations with Richard Pryor, but in 1991, he made his final film performance in Another You, and before passing away in 2016, he spent the remaining years taking on the occasional television or theatre role, as well as writing a few books and dedicating himself to charity work, which leads one to wonder what stopped him from working in Hollywood.
He admitted multiple times over the years that he just didn’t enjoy working in the business, but he wasn’t opposed to getting back to movies if the right part came along. “If something comes along that’s really good, and I think I would be good for it, I would be happy to do it,” he told Robert Osborne, “But not too many came along. I mean, they came along for the first 15, 18 films, but I didn’t do that many.”
The problem was that Wilder didn’t like the way in which Hollywood was changing. He emerged before the dawn of huge blockbusters, and by the ‘90s, that was the industry’s go-to kind of filmmaking. There were more special effects being used, and gimmicky technology that he felt simply stripped away the very core of what makes filmmaking so special.
“I didn’t want to do the kind of junk that I was seeing,” the actor explained, “I didn’t want to do 3D, for instance. I didn’t want to do ones with bombing and loud and swearing, so much swearing going on. Someone said, ‘Oh, go fuck yourself’. Well, if it was coming from a meaningful place, I would understand it.”
Another issue was the fact that movies were becoming less and less about conversation and more about action, it seemed. “But if you go to some of the movies, I don’t want to say which ones, can’t they just stop and talk? Once in a while, it comes in handy, but not running all the way through the film, and that put me out a lot,” declared the unimpressed Wilder.
