Although the filmmakers were hired to make their "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" a faithful adaptation of the book, there were certain elements added to flesh out the film. One of the biggest was the creation of Dr. Wilbur Wonka (played by Christopher Lee), helping Burton delve into Willy Wonka's backstory. The movie depicts Dr. Wonka, a dentist, as a domineering father who disapproves of his son's dream of being the world's greatest candy maker. At the film's conclusion, Willy and Dr. Wonka reunite and resolve their issues in a heartfelt sequence.
In an interview with Blackfilm in 2005, Burton explained that this story element was inspired by his strained relationship with his parents.
"In movies, you try to work out your issues, and then you realize, those kind of traumatic issues just stay with you forever," Burton said. An interview with The Guardian in 2012 goes into more detail about Burton's difficult childhood, in which he described his parents as "a perfect nuclear family."
Another detail from the film extracted from Burton's own life experience was the scene in which Dr. Wonka's office is filled with framed articles about his son's success; when the director visited his estranged mother before she died in 2002, he found that she had framed posters of Burton's films on her walls.
"It was quite horrifically touching in a way," he wrote in the second revised edition of his autobiography, "Burton on Burton" (as per u/FionaWalliceFan in a Reddit thread). "We couldn't really connect, but at the same time she was certainly following what I was doing."
