PURE IMAGINATION
AS PADDINGTON’S PAUL KING SPRINKLES HIS MAGIC ON WONKA, HE REVEALS THE SECRET INGREDIENTS HE’S USED TO WHIP UP A CHOCOLATEY CONFECTION
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
Pile in! Willy Wonka’s chocolate dream is a go
Olivia Colman embraces her inner villain as Mrs Scrubitt.
Film directors and chocolatiers have a lot in common. And not just because we need them to have a lot in common in order to make this intro work. Both are in charge of incredibly complex confections, where the slightest misjudgment — a dash too much sugar here, a touch too much bitterness there — can render the whole damn thing indigestible. So, when Paul King — director of both Paddington movies — took on the task of bringing Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka back to the big screen in a prequel called, simply, Wonka, he had to blend his vital ingredients just so. Starting with…
THE HEART OF A BEAR
Not literally, of course. That would be awful. Especially when the bear in question is the kindest, gentlest, noblest ursine to ever don a duffel coat. King was, in fact, putting the finishing touches to Paddington 2 in 2017 when his producer, David Heyman, whispered sweet nothings in his ear. “We had just done our last visual-effects review,” recalls King. “We got into a taxi together and he went, ‘I do have a vague idea for something next.’”
That was, of course, Wonka, the origin story of the eccentric recluse who, in Dahl’s original novel, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, and Mel Stuart’s 1971 classic film, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, was renowned as the world’s greatest chocolatier, despite being several wafers shy of a Kit-Kat. It had been quietly in development at Warner Bros. almost since Tim Burton’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (2005), in which Johnny Depp’s Wonka was decidedly wonky. Yet it had never quite picked up the golden ticket. Perhaps there was inherent scepticism about a prequel filling in the blanks of an unpredictable character who, it could be argued, worked precisely because we knew little about him. If King ever felt that way, it was only fleeting. “When David said, ‘Young Wonka,’ I went, ‘Oh, that sounds good,’” he recalls. “It sounded like the sort of film I might want to see.”