‘Wonka’ director Paul King admits film was a “real challenge”
Anticipation is building for Wonka, the new film directed by Paul King, starring Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka, a role made famous in Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the 1971 film adaptation by Mel Stuart, starring Gene Wilder in the lead part.
In a new interview, King admitted that making Wonka has been a “real challenge”, largely owing to the fact that Dahl’s original novel leaves the famous chocolatier as a mysterious figure with little known about him.
“That’s definitely the challenge of it because he’s a very mysterious figure in the books,” King recently told Games Radar. “He’s shut in this factory, and nobody’s seen him for years, and Grandpa Joe has some stories about him, but nobody’s entirely sure how true they are.”
“But I also felt – maybe misguidedly, but just probably from those childhood readings – that I did know who this person was,” King added before going on to discuss the original 1971 film and how he remembers one of its crucial scenes.
The director continued, “There’s a moment right at the end of the Gene Wilder movie when Charlie returns the everlasting gobstopper and [Wonka’s] like, ‘You did it, Charlie!’ The love and pleasure in Gene Wilder’s face of, like, wanting this kid to be a good kid and wanting to believe that there is goodness in the world, I felt that I understood that in a primal way.”
As to the characteristics of Wonka, King said, “He’s cynical in some ways, and he knows that there are plenty of rotten nuts out there who need to go down the rubbish chute, but, equally, he believes in goodness, kindness, and hope. There was a kernel of that I really held on to. But this is somebody who’s clearly been damaged by cruelty. He’s a certain age, and he’s had the slings and arrows of life, and to dig into that was a real challenge.”
Check out the trailer for Wonka below.
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