For the uninitiated, "Charlie" is the story of Charlie Bucket—a boy with a loving family so poor that they live on cabbage soup—who, along with four other kids, wins a tour of a chocolate factory belonging to the famed, reclusive genius Willy Wonka. Inside is a wondrous new world, with a chocolate river and mysterious little people called Oompa-Loompas. That's not to say that life is sweet. The four other children—Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet and Mike Teavee—are punished in thrillingly bizarre ways for (respectively) gluttony, greed, gum-chewing and obsessive TV-watching. Charlie, meanwhile, is not handsome or rich or smart, but simply honorable. "The whole point of Charlie is that he's not really that special," Burton says. "He's like most of us, who no one would remember from school."

Burton is a visionary in the plain, old dictionary definition of the word: he actually has a vision. His movies—"Batman," "Edward Scissorhands" and "Sleepy Hollow," among them—are utterly distinctive, not just because they're often paeans to eccentric, deeply sensitive loners, but because they're so visually rich and minutely imagined. When Burton took "Charlie" on, he wanted to remain as faithful to Dahl's book as possible (with a few tweaks, of course), and ordered up a new screenplay from John August, who'd just written his film "Big Fish." "I have always been obsessed by 'Charlie'," August says. "In the third grade I actually wrote a fan letter to Dahl, and I got a postcard back from him. I still have it."

Now all Team Charlie needed was a star. Depp had met Liccy Dahl years earlier at a fund-raising dinner held at the country home of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. (Depp had been invited at the last minute by a Warner Bros. executive. "We twisted some arms to get his security check done in two days," says Liccy. "Actually, I wasn't certain they would let him in. He had a slight reputation, you know.") Liccy had also been intrigued by the thought of casting Daniel Day-Lewis or Kevin Spacey. But Depp had a long history with Burton and, after years of being a critical darling but a box-office deadbeat, had suddenly become bankable after "Pirates of the Caribbean." "It was the first time I didn't have to talk a studio into him," Burton says. "It was like he'd landed on the planet for the first time! He's been doing f---ing great work for years, but ... whatever. I guess it's all box office for them." To offer Depp the part, Burton invited him to dinner without telling him why. "I think I let him finish half a sentence," Depp says, laughing, "and I just went, 'I'm in. I'm there.' I hadn't even seen a script."