11. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory:

This was great fun to work on (I know I’m starting to sound like my 5-year-old talking about kindergarten already with this “fun” stuff), though quite challenging as well.

Long before I began scoring Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, I started coming up with ideas for themes and motifs that might work for songs, and possibly later for the score as I developed it, much like I did on The Nightmare Before Christmas. One of the first ideas Tim mentioned was the “Bollywood” or Indian film inspiration.  He and I were both fans of Indian film music, so this seemed like an interesting way to start. The first idea I came up with was the motif that ended up becoming the “Augustus Gloop” song. But early on, I had imagined it as a theme for all the songs, much as the Oompa-Loompas had their own theme song in the earlier Willy Wonka movie, so I applied it to “Veruca Salt” as well.

Then Tim had the idea of making each of the children’s songs completely different stylistically, each something all to itself. At first I wasn’t sure, but then I jumped in. We talked about many different ways to start, as the entire world of pop music was now open to look at. We thought that maybe Veruca might have a kind of breezy ’60s feel—a little bit of The Mamas & The Papas, The Byrds…I started getting into it…The Association, I thought! And Tim added the final cherry of ABBA into the mix. So, off I went merrily rewriting “Veruca Salt.” After that, it was easier as I understood the objective. For “Violet Beauregarde,” we went to ’70s funk; and for “Mike Teavee,” we went straight to a mix of new wave, metal, and Queen, and—just because I couldn’t resist—a dash of The Beatles (on the little “regarding little Mike Teavee” vocal chorus toward the end).

So, there it was. And needless to say, recording all the vocals for all these songs in my basement studio with a handheld microphone (an average of 20 to 30 tracks at a time) got pretty crazy. I began experimenting with different pitch-altering effects to “munchkin-ize” my voice in various degrees, and I mixed them together with unaltered vocals to get a blend that wasn’t too normal or too affected.  There was a time there when I really was behaving like a mad scientist locked away in his laboratory, night after night, trying to create the perfect mutation.… At last, the very thing I imagined for myself when I was 12 years old!

And finally, we found some bonus tracks from the score and a funny little demo of an early version of the wild “Boat Ride” that didn’t make it into the film. We also added another weird little demo of the Oompa-Loopas chanting during their boat arrival.

—DE