While the Dahl adaptations that have ensued in the past quarter-century range in virtue-from Danny DeVito’s winning but thoroughly Americanized Matilda to Tim Burton’s garish Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Steven Spielberg’s listless The BFG -it’s hard to envision Dahl granting his approval to any of them if only for their deviations from his original stories.

“I think Roald would have been delighted,” she said of the 1996 Disney production of James and the Giant Peach, the first adaptation to follow his death and one he fought against during his life. “I may not know as much about making films as you,” Dahl sneered at Roeg, “but I know a hell of a lot about plot…your ending is wrong.”ĭahl died in 1990, shortly after The Witches arrived in theaters, leaving his widow, Felicity, to approve future adaptations of his work. Stuart, he complained, had removed “a good deal of the bite” from his text, while Roeg received a letter excoriating him for allowing the novel’s dark ending to be swapped for a “trite” happier one. What bothered Dahl most, it would seem, was when directors chose to stray from his original work. “He hated people in the movies,” Dahl’s agent, Murray Pollinger, would later recall. In 1971, Dahl deemed Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory “crummy,” and declared Stuart himself to have “no talent or flair whatsoever.” When offered the chance two decades later to give feedback on the screenplay for Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of The Witches, Dahl’s notes were characterized by such terms as “AWFUL” and “STUPID AND USELESS ” the finished film left him “appalled.” Dahl considered removing his name from both projects and used TV and print interviews to dissuade the public from seeing Stuart’s film, a stunt he threatened to repeat with Roeg’s before being placated by producer Jim Henson. “Most directors,” Roald Dahl once said, “are monstrous, beastly egomaniacs with no taste and no knowledge of how to make a movie.”

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