[Upbeat music playing] If you’re a fan of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” then stick around
because you’re about to discover 15 behind the scenes facts about the 2005 remake of Roald Dahl’s novel.
[Film clapper sound, upbeat music continues]
Real and fake chocolate bars were used in the film.
Nestle provided 1,850 real chocolate bars for the movie
and an additional 110,000 plastic ones were packaged in Wonka wrappers.
The town where the movie takes place was actually a model built to 1/24 real scale
and it took over 6 months to construct.
The marionette machine was both amazing and awful to work with.
60 marionettes were made for this sequence.
30 of them were flame resistant, but the other 30 were made out of wax gelatin so they could melt.
The crew spent so much time shooting this scene that the song got stuck in everyone’s heads
and they all couldn’t wait to burn the machine to the ground.
Wonka’s snide remark about Veruca’s name is true,
because "verruca"–spelled with two R’s– is another name for plantar’s wart.
Another interesting connection about her name is that “Veruca Salt” is an anagram for “A Vast Ulcer”.
The colors in beginning of the movie were muted on purpose
to create a rush of color when the characters enter the chocolate room,
which was a direct callback to the change in color from “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Augustus” wasn’t really obese.
The German actor, Philip Weigratz, was actually wearing a fat suit,
and it was specially designed to avoid soaking up liquids and to prevent leaks
so the actor wouldn’t sink down to the bottom once he fell in.
The chocolate river was real,
and it did have chocolate in it, but it also contained thickening agents and colorants.
They experimented for months to find the right texture,
and it took five days to fill the chocolate room set with more than 50,000 gallons of the mixture.
Most of the chocolate room set was edible,
but the fake parts were so convincing that the actors had to constantly ask what was safe to eat.
In the beginning the actors were all very excited to eat candy on the set,
but after a few days they all got pretty sick of it.
Deep Roy probably had the hardest job in the movie.
Filming the musical numbers required the actor to perform up to 60 takes per song
to create all of his duplicates in one shot.
On top of that, they had to stop and check the timing of the choreography after each take
to see if Deep Roy’s dance steps and vocals were in sync with all the previous takes.
The baby in the stroller was Tim Burton’s son Billy,
which the director said was his first and only movie appearance.
Real make up was going to be used for Violet’s transformation,
but ultimately the decision was made to do it all with CG
so Violet’s size and shape would match the huge scale of her transformation in the book.
The 200 sorting room squirrels were filmed using a combination of CGI, animatronics,
and 40 trained live squirrels.
The real squirrels were trained for months,
which was reportedly a very difficult process
because it took at least 2,000 repetitions for the smartest squirrels
to learn how to put a nut in a bowl.
The glass elevator was real.
It didn’t travel around, but they did build a big glass box,
and it scared Johnny Depp to be inside of it
because the actors were filmed while being suspended 50’ up in the air.
This version is intentionally darker than the original movie
because Tim Burton said he didn’t want to be politically correct by softening the demise of each kid
in order to be faithful to the book’s darker tone.
Wonka’s backstory wasn’t in the book and it was inspired by Tim Burton’s real life.
And just before his mother died Burton went to her house
and saw that she had posters of his movies hanging up on her wall,
which nearly brought him to tears.
Click a video on the screen to discover more facts about other G to PG-13 movies
so you can keep learning more fun facts about your favorite films.