(from scifi.com)

Charlie’s Wonka Gets A Backstory

Tim Burton, director of the upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, told SCI FI Wire that he has given Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) a new backstory that involves a troubled relationship with his father—a familiar theme in Burton’s movies. “Yeah, I’ve got some problems, you know?” Burton said in a news conference in Nassau, Bahamas, last weekend. “You’ve seen me enough to realize that by now, haven’t you?”

Wonka’s backstory doesn’t appear in Dahl’s book, but Burton said that he felt it was needed for the movie. “We sort of felt that if you have an eccentric character—and it’s fine; it works in the book—we just felt in the movie, you’ve got a guy that’s acting that strange, you kind of want to get a flavor of why he is the way he is,” Burton said. “Otherwise he’s just a weirdo. And you want to at least have a sense as to why he’s acting so strangely and why he’s got some problems. If … your father were a dentist and Christopher Lee, you can see where that might cause you some traumatic experiences in your life.” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory opens July 15.