- There are times when the actors that work with you
make it easy for you to elicit the kind of response
that they want from you.
If there was one film set you could be set free into
as an 11 year old, that was a good one.
- Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
the chocolate room.
- When the door opens up for the very first time,
I was astounded.
It was huge.
I'd never seen anything like that.
- Yeah. But Peter was being diplomatic there
because normally, he throws me under the bus at this point,
because you said that was the first time we saw it,
which is not true in my case, because actually,
I'd had a sneak preview from Harper Goff,
who showed me around and said "Did I want to see
the set before it was finished construction?"
So I saw it underway.
And then we got the message from Mel Stuart, our director,
who was quite intimidating, that under no circumstances
were the children to see this set
because he wanted to film their original reaction.
Too late, I'd already seen it.
Anyway, Veruca always goes first, so what the heck?
And so I just kept quiet and I didn't tell him
that I'd already seen it.
And I did my very good acting surprise, "Oh, oh."
That was pretty good. That was my Oscar winning performance.
I didn't tell Mel that I'd actually seen it
until many, many years later,
around about the 30th anniversary or something like that
when he was telling the story again.
And I had to come clean and say, hands up, I saw it.
And he was quite put out.
- Of course, first, I was very impressed.
The chocolate room with a real chocolate waterfall
But then there comes the big disappointment,
it was not chocolate. It was black, stinky water.
- When I auditioned for the film,
they didn't have a script yet and so
we read scenes from the book
and there were illustrations in the book.
So I knew even before I went to Germany,
that this was going to be the big, amazing set.
So I was building it up in my own head
and it was in a huge soundstage with high ceilings
and they had the boat running and everything was going.
It was very, very, very impressive.
But the thing is, we're making our way down the stairs
and as a viewer, there's, I don't know,
the first 20 seconds or something like that,
before we're down the stairs and in the room running around.
Now, we've been told that everything in there is edible.
And so we're looking anxiously to see,
'cause we know at some point they're going to release us
like zoo animals into the room to go and eat
whatever it is that we want to eat.
But it's two or three days for us
by the time we get to the bottom of the stairs
and then they did release us.
I went to the gum tree, et cetera, et cetera.
But no, it was all that you might imagine it to be.
If there was one film set you could be set free into
as an 11 year old, that was a good one.
- Voulez-vous entrer le Wonkatania?
♪ There's no earthly way of knowing ♪
- He's singing.
♪ Which direction we are going. ♪
- We saw the lines on the page but we didn't know
what Gene was going to do with it.
They sort of warmed us up by showing us
a bunch of flashing lights and chopping chickens heads off
and things crawling, so they've got you all warmed up
and then they hit you with the Gene monologue.
♪ Is it raining, is it snowing ♪
♪ Is a hurricane a-blowing ♪
- It's easy, at that point, as an 11 year old, certainly,
to play and suspend your disbelief and go with it.
He made it easy and it was actually fun to be scared by him.
- Yeah.
Gene, that was kind of the magic of Gene,
is that he never revealed exactly
what was going to happen next.
And so, it definitely caught us off guard
and the reactions that you see on our faces,
that was the real deal because Gene is
basically losing it there for a period of time
and just him spraying with spit as he's yelling.
- And they're certainly not showing
any signs that they are slowing!
- It was a little frightening, to say the least.
- Yeah, it was also rather tedious
because once we were in that boat,
which was actually put up on ladders,
up 20, 30 foot in the air,
so they can back project all that horrible stuff behind us,
we were up on this boat, we were stuck there for
hours on end, stuck in this boat.
So I just remember being in this boat for,
what felt like ages, days
and thinking "I need to go to the bathroom,
but I've got to climb all the way down and they've got to
get a ladder in and get me out of this boat somehow."
So it was tedious, actually, that scene.
The first time around, seeing Gene do it was crazy
and frightening and then after that, it's like,
how long are we going to be stuck up here?
- I wasn't at the boat,
I preferred the tube
and that was scary enough.
- Yeah, that is true. That is true.
He liked chocolate. I like chocolate.
So that was kind of like dessert coming back from lunch,
back to the set to do the afternoon, evening's shoot.
Gene became a close friend of mine during that film.
And so it was fun to work with people that you really like.
And so he was my mentor.
True story.