‘Wonka’ Production Designer On Building a Whimsical City Based on Nostalgia: ‘You Can Connect With an Audience That Way’
variety.comJaden Thompson Four-time Academy Award nominee Nathan Crowley grew up in England with his mother reading Roald Dahl stories to him.
So he reached a full circle moment when, decades later, he was asked to serve as the production designer on Paul King’s “Wonka,” which offers a heartwarming origin story for Dahl’s iconic chocolatier. “Obviously, the film when I was a young kid was unbelievable — Gene Wilder!” Crowley tells Variety. “How old was I, seven?
It was just magic. It was part of my youth. So to get to do a ‘Wonka’ film, why wouldn’t you do that?” In “Wonka,” the eccentric candymaker is not yet the jaded success story audiences know from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” in which he teaches brutal lessons to spoiled children.
Willy (Timothée Chalamet) is just starting his career and has the singular goal of realizing his childhood dream of making and sharing chocolate with the world — an aspiration he expressed to his mother before she died.
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