Aaron Tracy

There is a kind of honeying of his tone and a kind of softening of even the Wonka character.

I think once you cast Gene Wilder

who is cookie and quirky and kind of out there, but immediately draws you in and is able to sort of ground a kind of crazed energy into something that's intriguing and alluring rather than terrifying, which I think you can sometimes read into the book.

You have a very different story, a story that welcomes you, a story that the music is sort of enveloping you, that kind of wants you to embrace this bizarre world of a chocolate factory that

was created in the 1971 film and continues to speak to a lot of people.

I'm both happy that we have it and then also keep wondering what kind of film would he have wanted for Charlie that maybe needed to be more biting, it maybe needed to be crueler, it needed to be a little bit more childlike and also sort of like an adult.

It's a fascinating curiosity that he so disowned it.

But of course, Dahl didn't hate all of his Hollywood experiences or adaptations.

He loved writing James Bond, and he loved working with Alfred Hitchcock on TV.

David Bean Cooley is an expert on the Hitchcock anthology that adapted Dahl, so I asked him to tell me a little bit more about that.

Six stories of his were done for the Hitchcock show.

Two of them are absolute classics, Man from the South and Lamb to the Slaughter.

And so I think anybody who knows Hitchcock has run into both of those as absolute classics.

And I think that the treatment of them was absolutely perfect.

Interestingly, one of those, Man from the South, was remade by Quentin Tarantino in a movie, Four Rooms, where he wrote, directed and starred in one of the four segments.

And he took the story and renamed it The Man from Hollywood, took the same basic idea and ruined it.

I mean, much as I love Quentin Tarantino, you do not improve Hitchcock or Roald Dahl by just adding 5,000% more profanities.

It just didn't work.

Any thoughts on why Dahl and Hitchcock were such a good match and maybe why he and Tarantino were a less good match?

Sure.