Wonka a world of pure imagination

Timothee Chalamet stars in the lavish big screen musical Wonka, which is screening at the Odeon Multiplex. Warner Bros picture via AP

Hugh Grant learned some years ago that if a filmmaker doesn’t make something from the heart, it shows. The films that work best, and are most loved, he’s found, are the ones that the directors really meant.

It applied to his romantic comedies with Richard Curtis as well as Paddington 2. And he’s pretty sure it’s true of Wonka. The lavish big screen musical about a young Willy Wonka — before Charlie, before the chocolate factory — is dancing into theatres this month with its heart on its velvet sleeve.

Like the Paddington movies, Wonka was dreamt up by Paul King, a lifetime Roald Dahl fan and a writer and director whom his collaborators somewhat universally agree may actually be Paddington in a human costume. With a beloved troupe of actors, including Grant, Timothée Chalamet, Olivia Colman, Sally Hawkins as well as newcomer Calah Lane, its vibrant costumes and sets and a contagious “let’s put on a show” energy, Wonka feels like a modern homage to classic MGM productions of the 1940s.

But King wasn’t so sure about Wonka at first. He worried that like so many other “brands”, a young Willy Wonka movie was something devised in a boardroom with visions of “12,000 movies and a TV show”.

Then he went back to the book, which he’d read so many times as a child that the pages fell out of the spine. This time he found not just a great character in Willy Wonka, an unapologetically flamboyant dreamer whom Dahl also seemed a bit obsessed with, but also a breakthrough about his work.

“I realised how informative Dahl had been to everything that I love about family movies. They’ve got these great heightened characters, but there’s a real beating heart to them,” King said. “It was like, oh this is the mothership.”

And, with his “Paddington 2” co-writer Simon Farnaby (of “stop that stunning sister” fame), he would spend years toiling over what they’re calling a companion piece to the Gene Wilder “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.

Chalamet, the wildly popular Oscar-nominated actor of “Call Me By Your Name” and “Dune”, wasn’t technically a song and dance man (though his digital footprint from his teen years contains some evidence to the contrary) when he signed on to play Wonka. But King was convinced that he was the perfect person to balance “sincere” and “ridiculous” thanks in part to his memorable (and “hella-tight”) performance in Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird”.

This was a little baffling to Chalamet, who only learned this at the premiere in London. But for him, “Wonka” was a chance to do something a bit different, on a grand scale. He also understands audiences being a little sceptical of any spin-off of a beloved character, but he takes comfort in something Gerwig said while they were making Little Women.

In addition to Pure Imagination and the Oompa Loompa song from the 1971 film, Neil Hannon, frontman of The Divine Comedy, wrote six original songs, while Christopher Gatelli (Hail, Caesar!) oversaw the choreography.

Though Chalamet grew up surrounded by dancers (his sister, mother and grandmother included), and had done musicals at his performing arts high school, he didn’t fully appreciate the exhaustive rigour of it. He’d trained for Wonka for months, but he was still not fully prepared for how taxing take 13 of a large-scale dance number would be.

Perhaps the most inspired twist of Wonka is Grant, an actor made world famous for his good looks and charm and romantic leads, who is playing an Oompa-Loompa. King had already introduced Grant to a new generation of youngsters having him as the washed-up actor Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2. When he was re-rereading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory he found “Hugh’s voice” coming into his head for the devious little workers.