Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

"The Gene Wilder version, yes. There were some differences between the film and book, such as Slugworth becoming a spy, and the additional rooms in the film, like the fizzy lifting drink room. Roald wasn’t necessarily a huge fan of these changes. Although he wrote the final script, there were some changes from directors, as well as from another writer named David Seltzer. I think he just felt like it wasn’t necessarily 100 per cent true to his vision of his book. The book came out and was a great success long before the film was made. I don’t know what made Charlie so much more special or enduring than many of his others. It’s one of his first books. It came just after James and Giant Peach , so he was a new, upcoming but very prominent author, so his novelty factor was at its peak. So, I guess it’s one that people really jumped on, but the story is so inventive. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . His character names are amazing—Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, even Willy Wonka—they all have these fabulous, incredible, ridiculous names that are great to say and very funny. And again, you’ve got this darkness, where the nasty children just disappear. They fall away in various different ways or shapes or forms and you’re rooting for poor little Charlie Bucket. And even the way Roald Dahl describes his characters at the very beginning on the contents page, ending with ‘the boy we like very best of all, Charlie Bucket’—I think that those sentences draw you into the story. And because you believe Roald Dahl and trust him, and because you know he tells a good story, you immediately accept that he’s telling you to root for Charlie Bucket. You think, ‘Yeah, sure. Here we go!’ “I grew up with Roald Dahl, so most of these are based on my memories of what I really loved when I was little and that hasn’t really changed on learning more about them” It’s a story about the hero, Charlie Bucket, and Charlie is just a little child just like you, the reader, going on this amazing fantastical, wonderful adventure to this chocolate factory that would be phenomenal if it was real. I think you can really put yourself in Charlie Bucket’s position. And Roald Dahl speaks about Charlie Bucket with so much tenderness that it makes you feel very tender towards him, too. You want everything to go well for him. Yes, that always struck me as a bit brutal. Very rarely do the wicked people come out on top. In Dahl’s short stories, sometimes the wicked people will do very well. “The Landlady” is one such instance. But in the children’s books, the evil characters tend to get their comeuppance. Miss Trunchbull does, the Enormous Crocodile does. He tends to like the idea that good will triumph. One of Roald Dahl’s favourite books when he was younger was Hillaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales . And they have a character called Matilda, which is where his Matilda came from. He grew up with this notion of horrible children. He thought horrible children were so interesting and so fascinating, but in the end, you don’t really want them to win. It doesn’t make a good story if the horrible children win; we tend to like it when the good guys win—but it was the horrible children who fascinated him most. In the original draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory he had nine naughty children, who all came to horrible ends, with names like Tommy Troutbeck and Miranda Mary Piker. He really let rip when writing about these figures. He really enjoyed writing that draft, but they had to be cut because his editors thought that it was a bit much. I think they were probably right. Four is enough. Yes, he cites The Cautionary Tales quite often, in lots of speeches, as a text he liked, one that inspired his love of books."