Dear people of the world:
I, Willy Wonka, have decided to allow five children to visit my factory this year.
The vision from the film has come from Tim Burton.
The language of the visuals starts with a language that Tim has come up with.
And that's in response to how he and Roal Dahl's version kinda come together.
Action!
Sounds impossible.
It is impossible.
Sorry.
It's descriptive but then it still allows you to interpret it.
I always thought that that was quite interesting and that's something that we tried to retain.
It sort of- to set it at its own city and not really describe where it really is.
The interpretation that Tim and Alex McDowell have given this is beyond anyone's imagination.
Tim made it really clear, the way to produce this film and the way to tell the story was practically with as much real set-building as possible.
It's the detail that Tim and the production designers have put into it.
It's fantastic. It's fantastic.
When we started the overall design, the very first thing to do was to establish the polar opposites of the environment.
One was the town and one's the factory.
The factory looms over it and in a direct line from that way down the bottom of the hill...
...is the little crumbling Bucket house which is also a unique structure in the town.
All the rest of the town in between the Bucket house and the factory is basically identical generic housing.
It has both an American sensibility and a British sensibility, it's interesting cause...
...you don't really know where it takes place, it gives it its kinda fable-like quality.
It was something that really helped us in building the backlot town cause we literally cast the houses out of plaster.
That translated very nicely into building the miniature because they built them in the same way.
We were giving them all the big wide shots to establish the scale and immensity of the factory.
And it gives them reverse angles back down through the town to Charlie Bucket's house.
Evening Buckets.
Evening.
Hi dad!
Our little cottage that we live in is just incredible.
Let's try one.
The end result, I think, was wonderful, really, I mean this house is about to fall over.
They haven't got any money, they can't afford doing anything with it.
There's not a straight line in it and the set is quite lethal.
I mean you need sort of almost extreme sport working on a set cause you can easily do an ankle...
...but we get used to it.
It was a very tiny set. Twenty foot by fifteen, very tiny.
Soup's almost ready, darling.
Here is a very mean and meager kitchen.
The whole thing was totally impract but it worked.
Good night.
Night, Charlie.
Sleep well.
Part of the beauty in the book is the texture of feeling of sort of depravation and then going to this amazing chocolate factory.
Who are you?
He's Willy Wonka.
Really?
If I asked people, "Well what does Willy Wonka look like?", they go, "Well he's got a purple coat" or...
"He wears a top hat".
But, you know, it's a bit vague and I kept wondering myself like well how important is that?
Oh boy, do I.
Willy Wonka's outfit was taken in part from the iconic image from the Roal Dahl books of...
...a frock coat and a top hat which is something that Tim wanted to keep and Gabriella wanted to keep.
So basically an edwardian dandy type costume with several updates because it's a Tim Burton movie.
Willy Wonka seems to be somewhat vain in the way he dresses so it was a certain kind of particular quality to him that we wanted to do.
I'm sorry, I was having a flashback.
There are many sets and many costumes but they all have a distinctive look that Tim and Alex and Gabriella figured out.
I'm closing my chocolate factory for ever.
I'm sorry.
One of the things that we wanted to do was contrast the exterior factory, the town, black and white colour scheme.
I remember The Wizard of Oz when it's like black and white and then you go into colour, it's an amazing moment.
The Chocolate Room is amazing.
Action!
The first thing I remember is the chocolate river and the waterfall just thundering the whole time and it was so thick and gloopy.
Do be careful, my dear children.
Don't lose your heads.
Well the first thing that hit me when I went into the Chocolate Room was the actual- the vastness of it.
We built the chocolate waterfall river set on the James Bond stage. I'm sure there's visitors that thought,
"What kind of a James Bond movie is this?".
The set is almost all made of foam blocks built up on wooden platforms but...
...the entire surface is foam.
It's as if we were in a giant ice cream tub where machines can scoop out spherical dish spaces...
...and therewith reveal chocolate.
It was so cool, this huge chocolate river and these big candy trees with lollipops on them.
We actually have a confectioner who's making sugar grass.
We'll be able to go in close and see the kids pluck at need.
In the Chocolate Room, I got to eat this big mushroom.
It was a marshmallow tree, I think.
With lots of cream that dripped down my face but it was fun to do, yeah.
Eww.
When Wonka takes them through the chocolate river ride and through the tunnels,
you as the audience are going on with the kids, unsure when he's gonna stop.
The factory itself is like walking through Wonka's brain.
Complicated, strange, fun, disturbing, outrageous, you know?
Without really knowing what the machines were gonna look like, we grabbed piles of junk from the aeronautic industry of old jet engines and things like that.
We started picking things out of the piles and then assembling the machines to just basically fit the kinda profile of what we wanted them to do.
We never really had construction drawings.
We only had the vaguest idea of how it would all go together.
Really nobody, including my own team, we knew what that...
...set was gonna look like until about two weeks before shooting.
I like this room because it's more high tech.
You just wanna know what's in the machines and what's making everything happen.
The Nut Room feels more like a hospital, it's got this very repetitive...
...plastic finish, sterile colours.
Turned out that most of the sets in the factory have fully enclosed the action.
You went into the set and that was the full environment on each of the sets so that was great,
which I loved too 'cause it meant less visitors on the set.
And the other thing about these sets is that they're a pain for all the crews 'cause you always have to wear boots that you don't damage the floor...
...and that keeps even more people out of the set and Tim, I think, likes the fact that he has a lot more privacy.
The TV Room is actually the first set we really conceptualised that Tim liked and it was...
...really straight from the book.
The thing that this set is great for is showing the scale of the Oompa-Loompas and this little prop that I particularly like is the Wonka-Oompa...
...telephone so that you have both scales.
First off,
the acoustics in there were fantastic, you could stand on one side of the room and whisper to someone.
Someone on the far side of the set was like, "Pardon?".
As we had pre-lit the set, basically by putting big lights on top of those cylinders there...
...and because the walls were white it was already lit.
I had nothing to do.
Bring in the chocolate!
When I went to Pinewood and saw the whole of the Pinewood lot covered in Wonka,
I knew if Roal had seen that he would have just said,
"This is what I had in my mind".
It's a treat just to walk around in,
to behold the scope and the scale of this.
In any film you try and give the audience a unique world to inhabit.
That, in the end, is what matters, I think, and we can have all the fun we want with these challenges and logistic issues and design issues but...
...if the film is this classic enveloping environment then that's what the audience has to look forward to hopefully in this film.