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.