In search of the perfect Willy Wonka

The most famous and influential of either of the adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is of course the first of the two films made: 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart and starring Gene Wilder.

As Stuart tells it in Pure Imagination, his account of the making of the film, his daughter Madeline told him she had read it three times and wanted him to make it into a film. “And have Uncle David sell it.” Uncle David was David Wolper, with whom Stuart had already made many major documentary films, such as The Making of the President, 1960 (1963), Four Days in November (1964), Wall Street: Where the Money Is (1966) and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968). It probably takes a 12-year-old’s iron determination and limitless faith to present such a team with the story of a boy in a magical chocolate factory as their next project.

Before Wolper had even managed to read Charlie, he found himself in conversation with an advertising agent who had a client – Quaker Oats – who was looking for a project the food company could use to promote a new chocolate bar they were hoping to sell. A deal was soon arranged. Quaker Oats would provide a $3m budget for the film, Paramount would distribute it, and Roald Dahl would write the script.

Filming, it was eventually decided, would take place in Munich. To help convey the skewed reality of the book, in which normal rules did not quite apply, Stuart wanted all the outside shots to take place somewhere not instantly familiar, somewhere that could seem to exist outside normal time and space. Munich was rarely used as a location (for British and American films at least) and seemed to have the universal storybook quality they were looking for. It also had a gasworks whose exterior, slightly modified by the art director Harper Goff, would make a very handy chocolate factory.

They found Augustus Gloop there too – otherwise known as 12-year-old Michael Böllner, who was suitably rotund and in whose eventual mastery of English the dialogue coach had confidence. Stuart asked him to imagine what it was like to be stuck in a large tube. Böllner said he didn’t know. “I squeezed him like a roll of putty,” Stuart remembered later. “‘You’ll find out soon,’ I said.”

For Veruca Salt, they scoured the stage schools of England (where else would you look for a raging imperialist-to-be?) and Julie Dawn Cole got the part after three rounds of auditions. “I had to read the book – which I hadn’t read before – overnight between the first audition and the recall!” says Cole. “And then I just wanted to see the Chocolate Room. How were they going to do it?” Stuart cast her “because I could imagine her singing ‘I Want It Now!’ and meaning every word”.

At the final audition, Cole – customarily a model of probity and a credit to her mother – lied about how much experience she had, “completely unafraid of getting caught. I thought that if Mel found out … this very Veruca Salt-like behaviour would weigh in my favour rather than against.”

Cole met Roald Dahl when she had to fly out early to do a recording of her song ‘I Want It Now!’. “He was very nice and charming to me but – I think ‘brusque’ would be the word for him. He didn’t particularly make allowances for children – he expected you to come up to his level in conversation,” she remembers. “Oh – and he was very, very tall!”

Denise Nickerson, who at 13 had already been acting for over a decade in theatre and on television, got the role of Violet Beauregarde – partly for her acting ability and partly for her round, baby cheeks. Stuart thought she looked just right for someone destined for life as a blueberry!

“It was my first opportunity to work with kids my age – a true delight, having always only worked with adults before. The set, our hotel – I was living in a real fairy tale!”

Her memory of the author is similar to Cole’s, that he was a fabulous figure from a distance, and he also complimented her on her portrayal as ‘his Violet’, Nickerson remembers, once she had screwed up the courage to approach him.

Ebullient 11-year-old Paris Themmen had acted in commercials and on stage and, although he was young, Stuart thought he had the perfect brattiness for the Mike Teavee part. (The later consensus on set was that this was true. “Four of them are wonderful,” said Wilder in a television interview during filming, “and one of them I’m going to throw through a window tomorrow.” But he was 11. And a great Mike Teavee. And Wilder’s was an appropriately Dahlesque rendering of the situation into one funny – heartfelt, but funny – line.)

Charlie was the most difficult part to cast. Where do you find a child capable of projecting the necessary goodness, of being the still, quiet centre of the Wonka storm and yet not coming across (as Roald put it in a letter to Peggy Caulfield, his agent’s assistant) as a “boring little bugger”? They found him at the children’s branch of the Cleveland Playhouse, Ohio, in the shape of 12-year-old Peter Ostrum. He was told he had the part 10 days before shooting began and he had to set off immediately for five months in Munich.

The all-singing, all-dancing, all-Tony-Award-winning stage actor Joel Grey was the man they first and most seriously considered for the part of Willy Wonka. He could do it all, but eventually Stuart decided that he just wasn’t physically imposing enough for a man he envisaged as a father figure to the children. If any of the child actors had a growth spurt during filming, they could easily end up taller than the five-foot-five star.

They spent another week looking at alternatives. They heard later that Fred Astaire had wanted the part, but he had not approached either Stuart or Wolper. Perhaps the then 72-year-old knew in his heart what Stuart would have said – that he was too old. Difficult too, perhaps, to envisage Astaire, the epitome of gentlemanly charm, mustering the necessary eccentricity and acidity for their version of Willy Wonka.

At the end of that week of auditions, Wilder walked in. His main screen appearances so far had been in a supporting role in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), co-starring in The Producers (1968), which hadn’t yet become the big hit it would be later on, and starring in Start the Revolution without Me (1970). As Wolper and Stuart both tell it, they knew at once that they could stop looking. “His inflection was perfect. He had the sardonic, demonic edge that we were looking for,” said Stuart. “Perfect,” said Wolper in Producer, his autobiography, “does not begin to describe it. The role fit him tighter than Jacques Cousteau’s wetsuit.”

Wolper in vain tried to stop Stuart from betraying his enthusiasm to the actor so that the producer could negotiate a deal on his salary, but Stuart ran out into the hall anyway to tell him that he was Wonka and that he had the part. This is why producers hate creatives.

Wilder signed up on one condition – that his entrance would comprise him hobbling out of the factory and limping painfully slowly towards the ticket winners. At the last moment, he would slip, fall, execute a perfect somersault and end up standing triumphantly in front of them. “Because from that time on,” he explained in his autobiography, Kiss Me like a Stranger, “no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”

This extract is taken from Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory
Original text copyright © Lucy Mangan, 2014