MAY 2024 | EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT
AS YOU MIGHT expect of the men who co-wrote Wonka, Paul King and Simon Farnaby have spent the morning in thrall to a Warner Bros. prequel about an eccentric young orphan who uses his incredible talents to galvanise an entire city. “We’ve been watching Batman Begins,” confesses King, sitting next to Farnaby in his London office. “We didn’t see it before [making Wonka],” jokes Farnaby. “Or we’d have had loads of gruff-talking BS.”
Hardly. Wonka, the glorious confection starring Timothée Chalamet as Roald Dahl’s kooky chocolatier, is as far removed as you can get from the Dark Knight, and shows that King (who also directs, of course) and Farnaby are more than capable of recreating the magic they conjured up on the beloved Paddington 2 back in 2017; their take on Willy Wonka ploughs a similar warm-and-fuzzy storybook furrow, but connected with audiences worldwide in a way even a kind and polite bear couldn’t, becoming the big hit of the festive season and putting a whole ton of silver sovereigns in their pock-a-lates. Now, as it hits shiny discs and streaming, Empire sits down with King and Farnaby, who’ve worked together previously on the likes of The Mighty Boosh and Bunny And The Bull, to talk about how their writing partnership has evolved and endured.
I don’t know if you’re keeping track, but as we talk, Wonka is at $553 million worldwide, and will crack the $200 million mark in the States this weekend. That must be beyond your wildest dreams in many ways.
Paul King: It’s lovely. But I mean, my dreams are enormous.
Simon Farnaby: We have really wild dreams.
King: My dreams top out at about $558 million. So it’s not beyond my wildest dreams.
Farnaby: I’m sure some filmmakers don’t look at box office, but we do. It’s just politeness, isn’t it? It’s really gratifying that people go and spend their money.
King: It’s quite odd making films because you don’t get a huge amount of connection with the audience. My daughter’s been very enthusiastic about this, so I’ve actually seen it three times in the cinema over the Christmas break, which was a complete joy. And people sent me pictures of posters in other countries, and it brings it home what an extraordinarily huge thing that is. Those sort of slightly meaningless numbers begin to feel a bit more like real people actually seeing the film you spent a lot of effort on, and it’s really lovely when you hear people laughing or sniffling into their hankies.
Noel Fielding in the Mighty Boosh 2008 stage show, directed by King;
Star Timothée Chalamet with director Paul King on the set of Wonka;
Edward Hogg and Simon Farnaby in Bunny And The Bull (2009).