Peek into our Wonka Collection Cabinets…

The screenplay for the 1971 film, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, went through numerous rewrites. Pictured above is Roald Dahl’s 2nd draft, which laid the foundation for the vast majority of the film. Much like with his novels, Roald Dahl continually reworked the script. What he didn’t know however, was that the producers had quietly brought in other writers to address certain ‘problem areas’.

During the 3rd rewrite, a young writer named David Seltzer was flown to Munich and effectively locked in a hotel room for two weeks to do additional work. Although Dahl remained the only credited writer, he later learned that Seltzer had been ‘writing behind him’. This left Dahl furious and deeply demoralised. This was likely one of the reasons why Dahl was somewhat disgruntled with the final product.

Very late in production, the team also decided they weren’t totally happy with the ending Dahl had written for the screenplay. Reached via a communal phone outside a remote cabin in Maine, David Seltzer came up with the final Wonka and Charlie exchange in just a few minutes, giving the film its memorable closing note. This was another example of the production crew undermining Dahl and deviating from his original script.

Due to the very complex nature of the Nut Room scene, the 1971 film skipped it entirely, replacing the squirrels with golden egg laying geese. However, 30 years later Tim Burton’s version brought it to life by combining live animals, animatronics and digital VFX.

Senior animal trainer Mike Alexander, a frequent Burton collaborator, initially found the prospect of training nearly 100 squirrels “inconceivable” due to their difficult nature. Despite the challenge, Alexander spent 19 weeks preparing a core group of 40 real squirrels for their on-screen debut. The rest were made up of the hyper-realistic animatronic squirrels you see in the Museum’s collection. All in all, there were 88 squirrels in the scene – the result was a seamless blend of live-action animal work, puppetry and CGI.

The iconic Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were portrayed by actor Deep Roy. The original plan was to have body doubles dancing with Roy to play the majority of the Oompa-Loompas. However, because of his 4’4” stature, the crew struggled to find enough people in proportion. In the end, Roy volunteered to do it all himself, playing 165 Oompa-Loompas! This led to Burton describing him as “the hardest working man in show-biz”.

For some of the more complex scenes, the production crew had to enlist the help of some animatronic Oompa-Loompas. This is one of 54 that were created for the film’s Candy Boat scene. They all featured a built-in mechanism that allowed them to be drawn forward by the vessel’s motion, creating the illusion they were rowing it. All in all, the boat took 20 weeks to build.

The river itself was another feat – Tim Burton preferred using real effects rather than CGI. As a result, VicLabs FX were recruited to develop a non-toxic fluid that would look and feel just like chocolate. The product also needed to be stable for 10 weeks and safe to dispose of – no easy task! All in all, the final amount of liquid required was 1.25 million litres! In a rather unfortunate turn of events, one of the crew’s $540,000 cameras plunged into the faux chocolate river during filming, destroying it and delaying production.