Gene Wilder Willy Wonka Quotes

I found out that Willy Wonka had failed at the box office. It seems strange now to think that Roald Dahl’s morality story wasn’t embraced. I was told that many mothers thought the lessons in the movie were too cruel for children to understand. As the years since have proven, children don’t have any trouble understanding the movie—they crave to know what the boundaries are. It was the mothers who had a little difficulty.

Hodge admired Wilder’s performance but didn't want to reproduce it - for practical as well as artistic reasons. ‘I'm working in a different medium,’ he says. ‘I really admire Gene Wilder's version, but his energy - that druggy, transcendental, gently enigmatic thing - is different from what I require to sing huge songs and fill a theatre full of children. There's a different engine powering a big West End musical.

Wilder's Wonka is, as in the book, the embellishment and excitement round the edges - his batty, barmy, nutty, screwy, dippy, dotty, daffy, goofy, beany, buggy, wacky, loony nature dazzling and drawing our attention but, narratively speaking, remaining decoration.

When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself . . . but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.” “. . . Why do you want to do that?” “Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.

I held my father’s hand on the ride home that night. After about half an hour of cheerful bantering back and forth, he got quiet. Then he said, “I always told you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Since you were a little boy, I warned you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Now I’m glad you did.” What I didn’t have the heart to tell him was that Start the Revolution Without Me and Quackser Fortune had both failed at the box office, and if Willy Wonka also failed, I didn’t know where my next job would come from, or even if there would be a next job.