WONKA
Where There's A Willy There's A Way
A WORLD OF PURE IM AGINATION AWAITS IN PAUL KING’S WONKA
"DID I WATCH WHAT, SORRY?” director and co-writer of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory prequel movie Wonka Paul King asks. “I don’t think I know what ‘Statistics’ is.”
SFX is discussing music with King because his new leading man – not Paddington Bear this time – brings a bit of experience to his latest film.
“Ah, I have seen the rap video,” he says of Timothée Chalamet’s viral internet school musical offering. “He showed me the rap video, I think just to make fun of himself. It was entirely social. Maybe he just hopes that I was the person who was really going to help him break out into that world. He chose the wrong person!”
It was another of Chalamet’s performances from LaGuardia’s School of Music and Performing Arts in New York that brought the Dune star to King’s attention.
“I saw his high school musical, which is on YouTube, which I think was Company. I watched that and went, ‘Oh yeah, he can definitely sing and dance and he’s very, very talented.’ But there was no call for rapping in the movie,” he deadpans. “I think he’s a truly extraordinary performer,” he says of Chalamet, having first seen him in Homeland, then later Call Me By Your Name – but not realising it was the same actor.
Of the latter King says “It completely blew me – me and the rest of the world – away. I thought he was completely mesmerising and completely his own thing and able to access extraordinary depths of emotion very, very delicately, and that does not come along too often. So when we started thinking about this, it wasn’t too much longer after that that I was like, ‘Well, he’s very young…’ But it takes a while for movies to come together and maybe he could be right.
“Then in everything I saw him in after that, I just thought he was so extraordinary. By the time we drafted the script together, it had really just become him in my head. He’s so funny in Ladybird. He’s also very good at being a stupid character as that sort of ridiculous fool. But he’s also completely emotionally present. He can really do it all.
“I really just watched his high school musical because somebody went, ‘Oh, there’s this thing online, he’s singing and dancing.’ I thought I should check that out before I get on the phone, but he was amazing and the best collaborator you could ever hope for. I think he’s brilliant.”
Gene Wilder’s performance in 1971’s Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory is “deeply embedded in my memory,” King says.
“There’s definitely moments where we wanted to pay homage to that. There’s little moments where we want to go: this is like a companion piece. We can just about see how this pers
