As compelling as The Invention of Hugo Cabret is on its own, an interview like this one at the NYT really gets me jazzed. Consider author Brian Selznick's fascinations:
On a recent tour of the funky duplex apartment that Mr. Selznick, 41, shares with his partner, David Serlin, a professor at the University of California, San Diego (the couple also rent an apartment in La Jolla), he pointed out many treasures on display. In a bathroom, the walls were covered with movie stills and sketches for a puppet theater piece that Mr. Selznick had based on the life of Christine Jorgensen, one of the first people to undergo a sex-change operation. In the studio upstairs, a collection of more than 50 snow globes clustered on shelves beneath a grandfather clock.
Mr. Selznick, who is tall and lean and has wavy brown hair, wears round black-rimmed glasses that make him look like a grown-up Harry Potter. He eagerly excavated items he collected while researching “Hugo�: a small chest of drawers packed with 19th-century pocket watch parts bought at a flea market in Paris; two sketches of Cupid riding in a chariot that had been drawn by an actual automaton housed in a Philadelphia museum.
“While I was working on the book,� Mr. Selznick said, “there were people who said, ‘You’re doing a book about French silent movies and clocks for kids? That sounds like a very bad idea.’ � But, he said, his editor told him, “If these elements are important to the main character they will be important to the reader.�
The best news of all? He's working on another book written in the same illustrated style.
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January 29
2008
08:00 PM
Want to see the snowglobes.
Want to see the next book.
Hoping next book HAS snowglobes.