Why Roald Dahl is still too hot for Hollywood to cancel

A few weeks ago, Roald Dahl’s own museum condemned him on its website for “undeniable and indelible” racism and for his “antisemitic statements”. In February, his novels were tinkered with to remove their offensive language. If he was a character in one of his children’s stories, you can imagine how he might be portrayed: as a grumpy old curmudgeon with stinky breath, hair growing out of his nostrils, and enormous red bunions on his feet. Illustrator Quentin Blake would have a field day with him.

Often, when authors become tainted by scandal in the way Dahl has in recent months, they are instantly spurned. Their name drops out of the cultural conversation. With Dahl, though, the reverse has been happening. At the moment, Hollywood simply can’t get enough of the work of the author of The Witches, The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Some 33 years after he died aged 74 in 1990, the bestselling writer is more popular than ever with filmmakers.

The Venice Festival later this month has the world premiere of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Wes Anderson’s new Netflix-backed short in which Ralph Fiennes stars as Dahl – and in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Henry, a wealthy gambler with magical powers to see without using his eyes and to peer into the future.

The new film follows on from last year’s Matilda the Musical, another big screen Dahl adaptation notable for Emma Thompson’s bravura performance as the terrifying headmistress, Miss Trunchbull.

In recent weeks, UK newspapers have been full of stories about Hugh Grant as a dancing, pipe-playing Oompa Loompa, one of the diminutive protagonists in Paddington director Paul King’s new feature Wonka (due out just in time for Christmas). Grant has been heavily criticised for taking a “dwarf” role but that hasn’t stopped the anticipation building for a movie that is expected to do Oppenheimer and Barbie levels of business at the beleaguered British box office. Heartthrob Timothée Chalamet stars as arguably Dahl’s most famous character, Willy Wonka, seen here as a young, daydreaming artful dodger-like entrepreneur with a passionate ambition to open a chocolate shop.

Big-name directors have long been drawn to Dahl’s work. Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, Nicolas Roeg, Steven Spielberg, Wendy Toye, Danny DeVito, Quentin Tarantino, Matthew Warchus and Robert Zemeckis are among the heavyweight talents who’ve made films or TV dramas based on Dahl stories.

In 2021, Netflix paid a king’s ransom for the rights to the entire catalogue of Dahl’s works and announced plans for multiple films, TV dramas and stage shows, proving that recent rumpuses about Dahl’s political views haven’t stopped the stream of planned new projects inspired by his stories.

“Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy,” was one of Dahl’s most famous slogans. Kids love the humour, anarchic cruelty and whimsy of his fiction. Adults are drawn to its darkness and subversive undertow – and no one seemed, until recently, to talk about those moments when the author put a foot in his mouth and said things he simply shouldn’t have.

“I let my imagination go further than most people dare,” Dahl once acknowledged, hinting at why he was always likely to overstep the boundaries of taste, decency and political correctness.

Dahl’s qualities aren’t always easy to bottle up in a movie. That’s why so few of the screen adaptations are truly satisfactory. Some are warped to the point of perversity, while others are either whimsical or disappointingly bland.

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The first feature film adapted from a Dahl story was the thriller 36 Hours (1965), about Nazi attempts to trick a US army officer (James Garner) into divulging the secret details of the D-Day Landings. The Germans brainwash their subject and try to convince him that he is an amnesia victim. They tell him that it is now 1950, not 1944, and the war is long since over. “The most bizarre spy adventure plot ever conceived,” the film’s own trailer proclaimed.

As Storyteller, Donald Sturrock’s 2010 biography of Dahl, revealed, MGM initially tried to hide the fact that the movie was based on Dahl’s 1944 story, Beware of the Dog. His agent threatened to sue and he ended up getting $30,000 and his name on the credits.

This was far from the author’s first foray into cinema as 20 years earlier, he had collaborated with Walt Disney on a planned screen adaptation of his 1941 story, Gremlin Lore, written when Dahl, a former fighter pilot, was a military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington. It’s about little creatures with horns who are continually creating mischief for RAF flyers and their machinery.

When Disney came calling, the then 26-year-old Dahl was given three weeks’ leave from his job in Washington, “whisked” off to California, put up in a luxurious suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and invited to work every day at the Disney studios in Burbank.

The feature, which was intended to combine live action and animation, was never made but a book was published in 1943 with illustrations from top Disney animators. “Nothing much came from the film. They spent, I don’t know, a million dollars on it and scrapped it,” Dahl told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1979. Nonetheless, this early brush with Hollywood helped set him on his way as a writer.

It is strangely fitting that, early in Dahl’s career, both Disney and Alfred Hitchcock were so drawn to his work. He is the one novelist who comfortably straddles the very different worlds, light and dark, that these two giant figures of 20th-century popular culture inhabited.

In Hitchcock’s TV drama Lamb to the Slaughter (1958), adapted from a 1953 Dahl story, a jealous wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) murders her husband with a leg of lamb. When he tells her he is planning to leave her, she takes the meat out of the freezer and wallops him on the head with it, dealing a fatal blow. She then cooks the lamb and later feeds it to the police who are combing her house for the murder weapon. They feast on the succulent flesh, little realising that they’re eating the evidence.

This was one of several Dahl adaptations Hitchcock made for the television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It’s less than half an hour long but has all the elements of the best screen versions of Dahl: ingenious plotting and comedy with an undercurrent of violence, sexual jealousy and some very vivid characterisation.

Strangely, though, just as in 36 Hours, not much credit was given to the writer. This was Hitchcock’s show. He introduced the episodes, appeared at the end and gave every impression he was the creative genius behind them.

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A similar rule applied when Cubby Broccoli recruited Dahl to script the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice (1967). No one saw this as a Roald Dahl movie. He was there simply to service the Bond brand. He later wrote a droll account of his experiences making the film for Playboy in which he deconstructed the 007 formula.

“‘You can come up with anything you like so far as the story goes,’” they told me, “‘but there are two things you mustn’t mess about with. The first is the character of Bond. That’s fixed. The second is the girl formula. That is also fixed.’”

The writer was told to include “three different girls”. The first was to be pro-Bond and would be bumped off by the enemy early on. The second was to be anti-Bond. “She must capture Bond, and Bond must save himself by bowling her over with sheer sexual magnetism. This girl should also be bumped off. Preferably in an original fashion.” The third was to be “violently pro-Bond” but he was not allowed to take “any lecherous liberties with her” until the final reel.

You Only Live Twice was by far the most enjoyable time Dahl had on a movie. “That was the only one I’ve had any real fun doing,” he told the BBC’s Roy Plomley. Flying around in a helicopter in Japan and watching Sean Connery strut his stuff was very different from his wretched experiences on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), also produced by Broccoli and which he co-scripted, or on Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971 and starring Gene Wilder as Wonka). “I am not in love with cinema directors, let’s just put it that way,” Dahl later observed.

This is one of the paradoxes about the author. He was married to a movie star, Patricia Neal (a Best Actress Oscar winner for Hud in 1963) and film producers swarmed over his work the very moment he started writing it – and yet he seemingly had little interest in cinema. His biographer Donald Sturrock writes of how “tedious” he found it watching Hitchcock shoot one of his short stories and claimed that Dahl “contemplated film and television work only when he needed money”.

It didn’t help that his movies often seemed to land him in trouble. Sturrock revealed that he was paid a then whopping $300,000 for writing the screenplay for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory but was dismayed when the US National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People deemed the original novel to be racist because of the Oompa Loompas. In the first edition of the book, they had been Black pygmies but by the time they reached the screen in the 1971 movie, their skin was orange and their hair was green. Dahl felt powerless. He didn’t like the changes to his script or the fact that the producers cast Wilder when he had wanted either Peter Sellers or Spike Milligan.

All sorts of Dahl adaptations have been made since then. Tarantino directed The Man from Hollywood, based on Dahl’s story Man from the South, as part of the 1995 portmanteau picture Four Rooms. Jeremy Irons starred in a rustic version of Danny, Champion of the World (1999); there was the kitsch and enjoyable eccentric Tim Burton adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) starring Johnny Depp; the well-received Danny DeVito film of Matilda (1996); Wes Anderson’s gently subversive animated film of Fantastic Mr Fox (2009); Henry Selick’s James and The Giant Peach (1996) combining live action and animation; two versions of The Witches, by Roeg in 1990 and Zemeckis in 2020, and Spielberg’s good-natured but surprisingly tame stab at The BFG in 2016.

Almost all of these movies have their admirers but none are classics. Filmmakers are drawn to Dahl because he was such an offbeat and savage writer – but that is precisely what makes his works so hard to adapt.

According to the author’s website, a new Dahl book sells every 2.5 seconds. His antisemitic comments haven’t yet put off the buyers. Nor are filmmakers backing away. Matilda the Musical has been one of the most watched new films on Netflix in recent weeks and exhibitors are already talking up Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka as potentially one of the year’s biggest hits.

“Things happen to films,” Dahl confided to Plomley on Desert Island Discs. “That’s why it’s so much nicer, if you are an ordinary writer, to stick to writing books and stories – and nobody can screw around with them, can they?”

But filmmakers simply wouldn’t leave him alone – and the more light they have shone on his work, the less wholesome it has often seemed.

‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ screens out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, 30 August to 9 September. ‘Wonka’ is released 15 December