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When Tim Burton proposed the role of Willy Wonka to his friend and
frequent collaborator, two-time Oscar nominee Johnny Depp,
he was barely able to get the words out. As Depp
relates the conversation, “We were having dinner and he said, ‘I want to talk to you about something. You know that story,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Well, I’m going to do it and I’m wondering if you’d want to play….’ and I couldn’t
even wait for him to finish the sentence. I said, ‘I’m in. Absolutely. I’m there.’ No question about it.”
“To be chosen to play Willy Wonka in itself a great honor,” says Depp, a long-time fan of Dahl’s
work, “but to be chosen by
Tim Burton is double, triple the honor. His vision is always amazing, beyond anything you expect. Just the fact that he
was involved meant I didn’t need to see a script before committing. If Tim wanted to shoot 18 million feet of film of me
staring into a light bulb and I couldn’t blink for three months, I’d do it.”
Before long the two were poring over Burton’s preliminary sketches, discussing Wonka’s
look and the themes of the story, falling into a
familiar creative rhythm that began when the director cast Depp as the lead in the
1990 poignant fantasy Edward Scissorhands. They subsequently
re-teamed for the critically acclaimed Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow and are currently working together on the
stop-motion animated feature Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.
“Johnny is a great character actor in many ways,” says Burton – “a character actor in the form of a leading man.
That’s what struck me about him from the very beginning and it’s what makes him such an intriguing actor – the fact
that he’s not necessarily interested in his image but more in becoming a character and trying different things. He’s
willing to take risks. Each time I work with him he’s something different.”
“He’s a tremendously insightful actor,” adds Grey. “He came to the project with respect for the book and also a
sense of how he could do something very special with this character. I can’t think of anyone we’d rather have in the
role. Sometimes the right magical combination comes together and I believe that’s what we
have here: Roald, Tim, and Johnny.”
Above all, Depp approached the role with “a great sense of affection for Wonka.”
Forced to open his beloved factory for the first time in 15 years to
find an heir, Wonka is uncomfortable with the unfamiliar human contact.
As Depp suggests, “he puts on his game face in front of people but underneath he has a great anxiety about actual
contact or closeness. I believe he’s a germophobe, which is why he wears gloves, and in addition to the gloves it’s as if
he’s wearing a mask. There are moments during the tour when we catch Wonka acting, and acting badly, literally
reading off cue cards. I don’t think he really wants to spend any time with these people. I think he’s struggling, from
the first second, to put on an act for them and keep a smile.
“At the same time,” Depp continues, “a part of him
is genuinely excited about being the grand showman, like P.T. Barnum, pointing
out everything he’s created and saying, ‘hey, look at this! Look
what I’ve done, isn’t this wonderful?’”
“Willy Wonka is an eccentric,” notes Zanuck. “He’s odd, he’s funny,
he’s aloof yet terribly vulnerable; it’s an interesting composite, both childlike and deep at the same time. No other
actor could give this character the kind of depth, range and spin it requires. Johnny has an incredible gift.”
Burton and Depp worked with Academy
Award-winning costume designer Gabriella Pescucci (The Age of Innocence,
Van Helsing) to arrive at precisely the right look for Wonka, which resulted in a total of 10 different
plush jackets and overcoats. In keeping with the timeless
quality of Dahl’s tale, wardrobe was, Pescucci says, “contemporary, but with some old-world styling.”
Regarding Wonka’s hair and other small but significant details, Depp
made some deliberate choices. “The hair was one of those
elements I saw clearly very early on,” he says. “The top hat was easy,
because that came right from the Quentin Blake drawings, but the hair
I imagined as a kind of Prince Valiant do, high bangs and a
bob, extreme and very unflattering but something that Wonka probably
thinks is cool because he’s been locked away for such a long time and doesn’t know any
better, like the outdated slang he uses.”
Based on the book’s description of Wonka’s sparkling eyes, Depp
selected a pair of violet-tinted contact lenses for an effective dimension of color,
and drawing from the story of Wonka’s childhood orthodontia, decided
he should flash remarkably perfect teeth. Add to that a distinctly pale skin
tone from years of living indoors and an image of Wonka
emerges as an extraordinary figure of outlandish but expensive tastes, with a
style of speech and presentation as unique as his lifestyle.
As Pescucci exclaims in her native Italian, “Willy Wonka é la persona fantastica!”
Starring as Charlie is Freddie Highmore, who rejoins Depp
after sharing the screen with him in 2004’s acclaimed drama Finding Neverland. Twelve
years old when Charlie began production, Highmore had already
carried leading roles in the family films Five Children and It and Two Brothers, and portrayed
young King Arthur in the TNT miniseries The Mists of Avalon.
As Grey attests, “He brings
great emotion to the role, but you don’t
see any of the strings – you don’t see him working. He really is well
beyond his years to have that kind of skill.”
Expressing the consensus of opinion from all who have worked with him, Burton
marvels at how “completely natural and genuine” the young actor is.
“He has such gravity, without ever being false, which is very difficult to do,
even for an adult actor. He has the ability to convey emotion without speaking or trying too hard. That’s not something
that a director can tell someone to do; they either have it or they don’t. This is why casting Charlie was crucial.”
To Highmore, Charlie’s appeal is based on his being
“a normal boy. He doesn’t have any special talents or
superior qualities. In fact, he doesn’t have much of anything at
all, except for his family, but he’s always thoughtful and really nice to
everyone. So when his wish comes true and he goes to the
factory, I think people are happy for him because he’s so deserving.”
In that respect, says Zanuck,
“Freddie conveys an air of purity and goodness” – yet, he doesn’t take
it too far.
“Goodness can be so boring on screen,” quips Helena Bonham Carter,
who first worked with Highmore in the 1999 British comedy Women Talking Dirty.
“Essentially, Charlie’s a good soul with the right values. He’s not spoiled, which
sets him apart from the other four children. But what’s great about
Freddie is that he doesn’t make Charlie a drippy boy, which is always the danger with a role like this.”
As Charlie’s home is dominated by the Wonka factory looming just behind it, so his imagination is dominated
by thoughts of what might be inside. Still, unlike his privileged
companions on the tour, he is content with his
life as it is. Says Highmore, “Even though he has cabbage soup
every night and wears a sweater that’s threadbare, Charlie has a loving family. He
seems to have nothing, but he’s actually got everything already.”
When Charlie comes home with the precious golden ticket it
revitalizes old Grandpa Joe, played by Waking Ned Devine’s David Kelly.
“You can see it in his walk, you can see it in his talk,” says Zanuck.
“Grandpa Joe used to work in the factory years ago before Wonka shut the town out, and
those were his glory days. The opportunity to get
back into the factory literally gets him out of bed and makes him come alive again.”
“When David walked in, that was it,” Burton recalls. “He was Grandpa Joe. What an
amazing actor, and what a deeply expressive face, like a silent movie character.”
Kelly appreciates how Dahl highlighted the special
relationship between Charlie and his grandfather, noting that the author saw value in the whole spectrum of age.
Not having had the good fortune to know his own grandparents, who died before he was born, the
actor enjoys the connection his children have with his parents,
and asks, “Is there anybody in the world who doesn’t feel a very special grace for their grandparents?”
Kelly compares the production to “being inside Tim Burton’s head, which is a rewarding place to be. The man is a
standard-setter, truly brilliant. When people asked what I did, I’d say ‘well, I was being rowed by 50 Oompa-Loompas in a
pink candy boat down a chocolate river with Johnny Depp.’ The sets are wonderful – hand-painted, handmade, the kind you
rarely see anymore. Going to work every day was endlessly jaw-dropping and magical.”
Cast as Charlie’s loving parents are Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor,
both of whom, says Burton, “shine in relatively small roles that bring warmth and credibility to Charlie’s family
unit. The house and their living conditions are so extreme, almost surreal, that
without the right actors it just wouldn’t have worked. We were lucky to have
Noah and Helena; they truly made it feel like a real family.”
Bonham Carter, whose starring role in the 1997 romantic drama The Wings of the Dove
earned both Oscar and BAFTA nominations, describes the emotional balance she and
Taylor keep as Mother and Father Bucket.
“Like Grandpa Joe,” she says, “Charlie’s parents are accustomed to
disappointment. We’ve had a hard time with life, used
to being the underdogs, so when the golden ticket contest
is announced of course we haven’t the slightest
expectation that Charlie has a chance of winning. The odds
are tiny. We adore our son and don’t want him to be hurt
so we try not to get his hopes up. He’s always been our main
source of joy but when he finds the ticket, suddenly,
he becomes the embodiment of hope and life and future for the whole family.”
Taylor (Shine, Almost Famous, The Life Aquatic) sees Mr. Bucket
as “not the kind of man you’d call successful. He’s probably from a
long line of people who aren’t particularly rich or clever or
well-connected, but he’s clever enough to keep his family
together and bring up a sweet child, and that, I think, is one of the greater accomplishments you can have in life.”
For Taylor, Dahl’s message, as illustrated by the Bucket
family, is that, “you don’t need money or status to be a good person.”
Yet, “it’s not the sort of moral that’s thrust down your throat; rather, he allows you to discover it for yourself.”
Cast as the four children who join Charlie on the factory tour are
AnnaSophia Robb as Violet Beauregarde, Jordan Fry as Mike Teavee,
Julia Winter as Veruca Salt and Philip Wiegratz as Augustus
Gloop. Like their fictional counterparts who vie for a
Golden Ticket to Wonka’s factory in a global contest, the
four talented young actors of varying backgrounds and experience were chosen from an international pool.
We’re not saying they’re bad, these four Golden Ticket winners, but as
Zanuck diplomatically puts it, “they’re not the kind of children you’d be proud to call your own.”
Violet Beauregarde is a ferociously competitive and self-assured
little hellion who boasts of a roomful of
trophies back home and is currently working on the world’s
record for non-stop gum-chewing. Ignoring Wonka’s warning,
she seizes a piece of experimental chewing gum with a
blueberry flavor from the Inventing Room and within
moments is turned blue and blows up like a giant blueberry-hued beach
ball and must be removed to the Juicing Room. Violet
is played by 11-year-old American AnnaSophia Robb, who
recently starred in Wayne Wang’s family feature Because of Winn-Dixie
and The WB’s 2004 television movie Samantha: An American Girl Holiday.
Robb says her Charlie experience “made me feel like a
little part of history because everyone loves the book so much. Being on
set was like a fantasy too, having a rooms full of candy that
you get to play in and eat. Really cool.” Her preparation for the
role included martial arts training with
teacher and stunt professional Eunice Huthart, for an
introductory scene in which Violet is seen
mercilessly knocking down her rivals in a karate competition.
Know-it-all video game addict Mike Teavee, played by 12-year-old American Jordan Fry, scoffs rudely at
another of Wonka’s inventions, an attempt to transport a chocolate
bar via electromagnetic waves through a television screen. Teavee
interrupts the experiment by inserting himself into the middle of it with some very unexpected results.
Newcomer Fry happily found himself flying across the set on wires for the sequence. “The hardest part,” declares
stunt coordinator Jim Dowdall, “was keeping him from laughing in
sheer delight at the experience because in the scene he’s supposed to appear rather frightened and unsettled.”
Gluttonous Augustus Gloop is unable to resist the lure of the
factory’s luscious chocolate river and breaks from the
tour to get taste of it, despite cautions from his
mother and Wonka. He promptly falls in, mouth-first, and is sucked up through an intake pipe that transports the
chocolate to other parts of the factory.
Gloop marks the professional acting debut of 12-year-old German-born Philip
Wiegratz, who wore a fitted prosthetic body suit and calves for
the role of the greedy youngster. Even more of a challenge, says Dowdall,
was that “Philip couldn’t swim when he came to us. We had to get
into our wetsuits and show him how to do it, but he learned very quickly, even with the encumbrance of all that padding.”
Meanwhile, hopelessly spoiled Veruca Salt has problems of
her own. Upon seeing Wonka’s squirrels at work in the nut room
she demands to have one and storms the assembly line. The
squirrels examine her as they evaluate all nuts,
determine she is a bad nut and dispatch her down the garbage chute with the other rejects.
Veruca is played by 12-year-old Londoner Julia Winter,
a member of the children’s drama group Allsorts Drama, in her professional acting debut.
“I couldn’t get the hang of lying on the floor fighting
off the squirrels so Tim lay down on the
floor next to me and demonstrated,” Winter offers. “There we were, both of us,
kicking our legs and screaming at the top of our lungs,
swatting away imaginary squirrels. It was great fun and we must have looked absolutely ridiculous.”
The parents of these beastly children represent the worst
imaginable child-rearing skills, hilariously evident as
they chaperone their horrible little brats through the factory.
Missi Pyle (Big Fish, Dodgeball, Bringing Down the House)
as Mrs. Beauregarde appears more manager and coach than mother
to young Violet, an obnoxious girl bent on winning every
conceivable prize and contest in the world. “Mrs. Beauregarde wants
her daughter to have everything she didn’t,” says Pyle. “A self-proclaimed winner,
she has instilled in Violet her own competitive sprit to the
exclusion of any other thought. The two
of them arrive at the factory – in matching outfits, of course – fully
expecting to go home with the grand prize,” whatever it may be.
Veteran actor of both film and television, BAFTA Award nominee
James Fox (A Passage to India) stars as the beleaguered Mr. Salt,
father to the colossally spoiled Veruca, a girl with no thought for
anyone or anything but herself. “He’s very anxious that
his daughter have everything she wants,” says Fox, who
slyly describes Veruca Salt as “lovable, adorable, sweet and talented, the perfect
child,” before adding, “as long as her father meets her demands. Immediately.
If he doesn’t, she’ll scream until he does.”
Fox believes the tour ultimately proves
beneficial for all the children. The lessons
meted out to the rude, selfish and inconsiderate
are quite valuable, “and Wonka serves somewhat as a judge. He discerns
the children’s motives and their characters and he
wants to change and correct them. He wants to make them better people.”
Adam Godley (Love Actually, Around the World in 80 Days) as Mr. Teavee
and Franziska Troegner (nominated for the German Film Award in her
native country for 2001’s Heidi M) as Mrs. Gloop fare
no better. Mr. Teavee is sadly not immune to his
son’s sarcastic bullying and poor Mrs. Gloop seems not
only unable, but uninterested in controlling Augustus’ rampant gorging.
Deep Roy, whom Burton appropriately calls “the hardest-working man in show business,” took on the
daunting task of starring as an entire community of Oompa-Loompas, the factory’s sole
work force. Rescued by Willy Wonka from their harsh life in distant Loompaland, they
now cheerfully live and work inside its walls and feast on their favorite food: cocoa beans.
Having worked with Burton in Planet of the Apes and Big Fish, Roy
was happy to renew the association when contacted about the
part. But there was a catch, as the actor
relates with a laugh. “The first time Tim mentioned the idea he said ‘There
will be only one Oompa-Loompa and it’s going to be you.
We’re going to create hundreds from you.’ Then he thought perhaps
I would be doing as many as five in close-up. The next time
I saw him in London, five had become nineteen! In the end, it didn’t
matter to me if it was 19 or 20 or 50. It’s been an absolute blast.”
The production team managed to populate the screen with
scores of the diminutive and industrious factory workers
through motion and facial capture technology, creating
duplicate yet individual Oompa-Loompas in computer image from Roy’s
multiple performances and then scaling them down to size. For Roy, it meant months of
rehearsal and choreography. If a scene called for numerous Oompas to join in a narrative
song and dance, Roy would perform the steps for all of them, each
from a slightly different starting mark and each with
subtle distinctions of expression and movement, so that when the
images were joined he became an entire troupe.
“The audience may think it’s all computer-generated,” says Roy, “but
that’s not the case. If you see 20 Oompas, I did all 20 performances.”
Additionally, state-of-the-art photo-realistic and animatronic Oompas were modeled
from Roy to supplement the action and serve as physical focal points in the scenes.
“Deep did a heroic amount of work on this,” Burton acknowledges. “Considering how to
present the Oompa-Loompas there were a number of possibilities, one of which
was full computer animation, but I think this was the
way to go, to give it that important human element and keep it true to the spirit of the book.”
Bringing to life the role of Willy’s father, the dentist Dr. Wilbur Wonka, is
Christopher Lee, conjured up by Willy’s memory in a series of
flashbacks to his childhood. Well-respected worldwide, the
British actor’s career spans nearly 60 years, first catching fire with the
memorable Hammer horror films in the 1950s (of which Burton
was an avid fan) and encompassing a wide range of feature and television productions
including starring roles in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars sagas and
1998’s critically acclaimed Jinnah.
Lee sees the elder Wonka as “not a
bad father, certainly, just overly stern and
unable to show his love.” Dr. Wonka was acutely
concerned with oral hygiene and overly protective of
his son’s teeth, to the extent that he forbade
the youngster from eating sweets. “It’s not exactly parental
abuse,” Lee suggests, “as he does it for
the best of motives. But he’s
very strict and therefore comes across as a rather alarming figure to a little boy.”
“Not only is he a great actor, whose
work I grew up watching and admiring,” says Burton,
“but Christopher Lee is simply a powerful presence
in every sense of the word.” As screenwriter
John August avows, “He’s completely intimidating in just the right way.”
Lee, who worked with Burton and his Charlie
co-star Johnny Depp on Sleepy Hollow
and re-teams with them on the upcoming Tim Burton’s
Corpse Bride, says, “Tim is a director
of vast enthusiasm. It comes at you in waves
of encouragement from behind the camera. He’s amazingly
inventive and has a brilliant mind.”
In fact, Burton was so
tirelessly
active on the set and covered so much ground each
day that Helena Bonham Carter gave him a
pedometer as a joke. “She wanted to see how many
steps he took in a day,” says Freddie Highmore, who
cannot recall the official count but says “it turned out he
didn’t need to go to the gym because he walks enough at work.”
Once inside the factory walls, offers Zanuck, “the
children discover an entire world complete with a
chocolate waterfall and chocolate river, edible trees
and unbelievable machinery that only a mind such as
Roald Dahl, interpreted by a mind such as Tim Burton,
could possibly imagine. It’s fantasy, it’s fun,
it’s completely outrageous and awe-inspiring. You don’t know where to look first.”
In creating the landscape of Wonka’s world,
the filmmakers began at the source, to tap into, as Burton
describes, “the textural, visceral quality of Dahl’s images and the scope. We tried to keep
as true to the book as possible in creating specific
places like the nut room and the TV room. Still,
there is a lot of room for interpretation,
which is the wonderful thing about doing
an adaptation like this. Each room has its own flavor and possibilities.
“Instead of relying too much on blue or green screen
effects we tried to build as much of the settings
as possible,” the director continues. “We built most of
the sets at 360 degrees so the actors are
really enveloped in the environment.”
It was a huge compliment to the production when Felicity Dahl
first stepped onto the Pinewood soundstages to
examine the work in progress and enthusiastically
declared, “it’s magical! I know that if Roald had
seen it, he would have loved it. He would have said this is exactly what he had in mind.”
What Dahl had in mind proved no small
task to construct. His Chocolate Factory contained
cavernous rooms wherein whole environments
were housed, like the one in which the Oompa-Loompas
both worked and lived beside a chocolate
waterfall and flowing chocolate river, where candy cane trees grew,
giant peapods produced Wonka gobstoppers and
even the grass was edible. Unwieldy one-of-a-kind machinery
pumped out Wonka’s fanciful confections while
in other rooms equally outlandish contraptions
were engaged in experiments to create even more
exotic and delicious candies. Traveling through
the factory meant navigating the river
in a translucent boat of spun pink sugar or
climbing aboard a glass elevator that sped
not only up and down but, as the text declares, “sideways and
longways and slantways and any other way you can think of,” including
blasting up through the roof at rocket speed.
Production utilized seven stages and much of the back
lot at Pinewood Studios in the UK, including the
famous James Bond stage, which houses one of the
largest soundstage pools in the world. Says
Production Designer Alex McDowell
(Art Directors Guild Award winner for The Terminal and nominee for
Minority Report; Fight Club, The Crow), “We pretty
much took over the studio lot – lock, stock and barrel.”
Because Burton preferred to accomplish as much
as possible with practical effects, a great
deal of what appears on screen was created physically
with prosthetic and special effects coordinated by
Special Effects Supervisor Joss Williams, whose previous
collaboration with Burton, Sleepy Hollow,
earned him a BAFTA nomination.
“When those reached their natural limitations, we took
over in the digital realm,” says Visual
Effects Supervisor Nick Davis
(AFI and BAFTA nominee for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone), who oversaw the integration of
advanced motion capture technology and CGI
“for anything that could not be achieved practically on set.
It was a collaborative effort among multiple departments
and it all began with Tim, who had all these ideas
and kept producing drawings to show us what he wanted.”
Early pre-planning and ongoing communication were key, since
images morphed instantly from one process to another
and back again in the same scene. Sets were built
and used simultaneously on the back lot, in the
computer and in 24-scale miniature models.
“I spent a lot of time in pre-production working
with conceptual artists and Nick Davis, so
that everything was cohesive,” says McDowell.
“From a design standpoint, there’s no
difference between a physical and a virtual set and
Charlie was a film that required a total
design sensibility, from Oompa-Loompa hand
props to the vast CG world that the boat and elevator travel through.”
Citing the example of the spun-sugar boat,
he says, “the boat travels from the chocolate river
into a white tunnel rapids ride. It’s a
physical entity in the chocolate room but
inside the tunnel that’s a fully CG environment. The boat
goes onto a gimbal platform and is shot
against a blue screen. It also has to be
replicated and made in CGI. You have
actors in the physical boat with
prosthetic Oompas and CG actors
with scaled-down Oompa-size CG versions of Deep Roy
at the oars in the CG boat. I spent
a couple months in close collaboration
with the CG and miniatures companies, designing alongside the 3D and physical model makers.”
The glass elevator posed design
challenges of its own, as McDowell outlines.
“It has to be self-supporting, with doors
that open and close and it has to be strong
enough to hang from a rig and
crash through a set. It has to fly.
But how to shoot it? How do you put a
camera into a glass elevator?” Ultimately, adds Davis, “The
elevator was a mixture of practical pieces on
rigs or completely CG elevators with CG characters inside,
depending upon the complexity of the shot. We
used either hand-held cameras on cranes, with
the actors inside, or motion control cameras
where we could have the elevator moving
up or falling 30 feet in the air. Sometimes
it was actors standing on blue boxes and we
added the elevator around them afterwards, in post.”
Issues of lighting the
unusually vivid environment drew Oscar-winning
cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (A River Runs
Through It) into pre-planning discussions as well, as Davis describes.
“Tim wanted vibrant lighting, primary colors. Turns
out, bright and colored lights don’t
mix well with chocolate. It was tough for us
to keep the chocolate from turning
grey or the boat from turning into a muddy mess. It was a real
balancing act, to focus white light on some things
while not detracting from the primary-colored walls and
other props. Philippe and his team worked with us in
pre-production and we worked out the
lighting scheme one sequence at a time. Some of it could
be done digitally and some had to be lamps on stage.”
“The most important thing Tim said about the chocolate river,”
recalls Joss Williams, was “‘make it look good
enough to eat,’ and that’s how we approached it, to look as yummy as possible.”
For the effects supervisor, that meant
managing “viscosity, looks, color testing and safety issues,”
not to mention logistics, quantity, transportation and storage.
The option of making the chocolate off-site
and bringing it in via tanker was quickly
dismissed, as calculations estimated a need for
40 tanker trucks. It seemed a better plan to
manufacture and store the stuff on site. As for
mixing it, conventional cement mixers proved inadequate.
They needed a vessel that could mix three or
four tons at a time, which they found, ironically,
in the form of commercial vats designed for
mixing toothpaste, that could blend as many as 12 tons at a time and store 20,000.
Altogether, production required a constant supply
of more than 200,000 gallons of flowing
chocolate; approximately 32,000 for the
waterfall and 170,000 for the river, which
measures 180 feet long by 25-to-40-feet wide,
and is nearly 3 feet at its deepest point.
Without revealing the exact recipe, Williams
acknowledges experimenting with mixtures of
water and dietary cellulose, with various
food dyes to achieve the right look and texture.
“Color to the eye is different than
color on film,” he explains, “so we tested
through a whole pattern of shades to get
exactly the right one.” Once prepared, the mixture
was constantly cleaned and tested
daily by a local laboratory “to make sure it was
safe for the company to work with and eat.” Only
half-joking, he adds, “we had to keep the
bugs down to an acceptable level. There’s
about as many bugs in it as you’d find in an airline sandwich.”
For the scene in which Augustus Gloop tumbles
into the chocolate river and is subsequently sucked
up through an intake pipe to another part of the
factory, young Philip Wiegratz was slowly
conditioned to the unusual sensation of
floundering in melted chocolate. “We started Philip in a
small tank in the workshop” says Williams. “Then we tested him
in the fat suit that he wears as Augustus; it couldn’t
be too buoyant or he’d float, and it couldn’t absorb
the mixture and become an enormous weight around him.
Probably worst of all, from his
perspective, was that once this stuff gets into your ears you can’t hear very well.”
As the scene progresses where the
camera cannot follow, the practical
set gives way to a CG rendering of
events, with a virtual Gloop
being squeezed into the narrow space and then
spat upwards through the tube – all of which
involved Nick Davis and
his team with their own issues
of color and viscosity, not to mention
duplicating “liquid dynamics” in the computer.
Taking a big-picture approach, Davis
maintains that, “software can help you
break down the physics. You can plug in the
known parameters – melt speeds, drip speeds,
pour speeds, mass and weight,
which helps a lot. But at the end of
the day there’s always a human, artistic side to it,
where you just look at it and say
‘hmmm, that’s too fast’ or ‘that’s too shiny.’”
Crew >> Cast >> DVD Release Date >> Bringing Roald Dahl’s Classic Story to the Screen
>> Casting Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket and the Bucket Family
>> The Four Rotten Children
>> The Oompa-Loompas and Dr. Wonka
>> Building Wonka’s World: Inspired Production Design and State-of-the-Art Practical & Virtual
Effects Combine for an Unparalleled Atmosphere of Wonder
>> The Chocolate River
>>
The Oompa-Loompas
>> The Squirrels
>> Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Marks the 11th Collaboration between
Tim Burton and Acclaimed Composer Danny Elfman >>
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The IMAX Experience
>>
About the Cast >>
About the Filmmakers
IN DEPTH
| GALLERY
| BRIEF NOTES
| OFFICIAL WEBSITE
|
Links
{ A D V E R T S }
Taken from the 2005 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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