In real life, Tim Burton didn’t get along with his parents. The future filmmaker moved in with his grandmother at age 12 and was living in an apartment by the time he was 16, according to The Guardian. True to Burton’s real life, in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka’s backstory introduces his estranged father, Wilbur Wonka (Christopher Lee), a dentist who forbid Wonka from eating candy to maintain his teeth. While the fictional father and son in the 2005 film have a strained relationship, viewers see that the senior Wonka isn’t totally disappointed in his son. In the final moments, Charlie and Wonka visit the dentist dad so the father and son can make amends. As the elder Wonka inspects his son’s teeth, Charlie notices a wall of framed newspaper clippings that report on his candy maker son’s successful life.
According to a Reddit thread, the scene may quite possibly be inspired by Burton’s final visit to see his mother, Jean, before her death in 2002. The director told Blackfilm during that 2005 interview that he’s “got some problems” stemming from his unconventional childhood, and sometimes remnants of his past come out in his films. “My parents are dead, so the answers will remain unanswered,” he said. “In movies, you try to work out your issues, and then you realize, those kind[s] of traumatic issues just stay with you forever, so somehow, they kind of keep reoccurring. No matter how hard I try to get them out of my head, they sort of stay there.”
