Showing posts with label Gene Wilder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gene Wilder. Show all posts

Sunday, May 6, 2007

This Much I know / Gene Wilder / 'What if I’m not funny? What if I fail?'




THIS MUCH I KNOW

Gene Wilder: 'What if I’m not funny? What if I fail?'

The actor, 73, on when he gets nervous, reading Freud, and his first meeting with Mel Brooks

 Gaby Wood
Sunday 6 May 2007
When I was young, my mother was very ill, and the doctor said to me: “Don’t ever get angry with your mother, because you might kill her.” The only other thing he said was: “Try to make her laugh.” So he did an evil thing and a good thing with just one breath.
I get nervous at the strangest times. Why? I don’t know, except that when I was 10 or 11, my mother had a heart attack – her second – and when she came back she said to her friends after dinner: “And now, my son will entertain you.” My heart was racing. I thought: what am I supposed to do? So I sat down at the piano, as if I were about to play, which I couldn’t. I said: “I will now give my imitation of a little boy going to bed.” And I walked out as fast as I could.
If there’s an audience, I think they’re going to expect me to be funny. But what if I’m not funny? What if I fail?
I went to military academy at 13. When I came home for Christmas and my mother saw all the bruises where I’d been beaten up, she started to cry. So I went back to my old school.
Whatever simplicity I’ve achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I’ve read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I’ve forgotten what the point was.
In 1956 I was drafted to the peacetime army. At my request I was sent to Valley Forge army hospital in Pennsylvania. I chose the neuropsychiatric hospital, because I thought: that’s the closest thing to acting. I had to help administer electroshock therapy there. I’d see the patients watching Amos ‘n’ Andy every morning – one boy would stand right in front of the television set, blocking the view, kneel down and start to pray. I said: “Now, that boy is sick. But not that much sicker than I am.”
I’ve read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.
Sex? I thought about it, but not when my mother was alive. When she died I was 23. It was both terrible and liberating. I thought: I’m free to act normally. And I became more normal.
I didn’t know what love was – I knew what falling in love was, but lust is not loving, it’s falling.
I first met Mel Brooks one night after a performance of Brecht’s Mother Courage, a play I was doing on Broadway with Mel’s girlfriend, Anne Bancroft. He had on a beautiful black Russian marine pea jacket. He said: “They used to call it a ‘urine jacket’, but they didn’t sell.” I thought: Oh, God, this is the guy for me! He read me the first 30 pages of a new movie he was writing, and he said: “Do you want to play Leo Bloom?” And that’s how The Producers happened.
What I learned from Mel Brooks was audacity – in performance as in life. Maybe you go too far, but try it.
People think I’m a Francophile, but I’m not: I’m an Englishphile. I like cream teas, I like the Tate Gallery, I like the theatre. I think London taxis are the best in the world.
I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had a stem cell transplant seven years ago. I asked my doctor recently: “What if people say, ‘How are you doing, Gene?’ Apart from ‘swell’, what do I tell them?” He said: “Say you’re in complete remission.” I said: “What if they don’t understand that? Can I say I’m cured?” He said: “Just tell them that if you outlive your doctor, you’re cured.” I thought the best way to secure that would be to get a gun and shoot my doctor. But I love my doctor, so I can live with complete remission.
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Saturday, September 11, 2004

Sweet like chocolate / Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory






Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film.
 Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.


Adaptation of the week

Sweet like chocolate: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Andrew Pulver
Saturday 11 September 2004
Author: Roald Dahl (1916-1990) began his prolific writing career after being invalided out of the RAF during the second world war, and being posted to the US. His first book, The Gremlins (1943), became a Disney film. In 1960 he moved back to England, and started writing in earnest, with James and the Giant Peach (1961) becoming his first significant success. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - inspired, so he said, by being used as a test consumer by the nearby Cadbury’s factory while at school in Repton – was published first in the US in 1964. A string of successful children’s books followed, including Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Danny: The Champion of the World (1975), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983) and Matilda (1988). He died of leukemia in 1990.
Story: Dahl’s children’s fantasy tale is set in an un-named town that’s recognisably English (and still suffering the after-effects of war and rationing). Poverty-stricken child Charlie Bucket is one of five winners of a competition to visit the chocolate factory run by the mysterious Wonka. The factory tour introduces them to a string of bizarre confectioneries (Everlasting Gobstoppers etc) as well as the Oompa-Loompas – the pygmy-sized workforce. But the fairy tale becomes a cautionary one as Charlie’s fellow competition winners are consigned to humiliation for indulging in Dahl’s pet hates - eating too much, chewing gum, being grasping, and watching TV. Charlie is then handed ownership of the factory by Wonka as the “winner”.
The film-makers: Mel Stuart (b 1928) was originally a TV documentarist, and was told about the book by his 11-year-old daughter. The $1.8m budget was raised from Quaker Oats, who were planning to market a chocolate bar around its release. Dahl wanted Spike Milligan to play Wonka, but he was considered too much of a risk for the US market. Gene Wilder, hitherto best known for his role in Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968), was cast instead, opposite a group of unknown child actors. Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse wrote the songs.


How book and film compare: The film is first and foremost a children’s musical, with catchy tunes such as The Candy Man Can and Oompa Loompa. Though the setting remains physically similar, the film is considerably more transatlantic than the book, with most of the principal cast being American. (Augustus Gloop, the glutton, is German; Veruca Salt, the spoilt kid, is English.) The film added two significant plot elements: the sinister figure of Slugworth, who tries to persuade each child to tell him the secret of Everlasting Gobstoppers; and Wonka’s threat to expel Charlie along with the other children after he samples the Fizzy Lifting Drinks. The film transforms Dahl’s story into a classic of pop-art kitsch, with costumes, design and lettering all contributing to an extravagantly imagined work. But the author was vocal about his unhappiness with Stuart’s changes.
Inspirations and influences: The success of previous children’s musicals like Oliver! (1968) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) - on which Dahl had worked - meant that a market for this movie appeared assured. But it failed at the box office, and it wasn’t until the advent of video in the early 1980s that its bizarre stylings were rediscovered. Director Tim Burton was particularly affected: he is currently directing a remake of this film, having produced an animated adaptation of another Dahl book, James and the Giant Peach, in 1996.



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