Children’s author and illustrator Brian Selznick | Interview: Part 1

We predicted in December that it wouldn’t be long before Brian Selznick was a household name. The author-illustrator, acclaimed for his stunningly detailed drawings, had just released a new book, Wonderstruck, around the same time that Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s big-screen version of his 2007 Caldecott Medal winner, hit theaters. That little movie scored big this week with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose members nominated it for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. (It received more nominations than any other film this year.)

The storyteller talked with us about working with Scorsese when he visited Chicago in November, to meet with Chicago Children’s Theatre about its stage production of another Selznick best-seller, The Houdini Box. To learn more about that story, stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview with Selznick.

The movie Hugo evolved in a really amazing way. Can you tell us about it?
It was very unexpected. I wrote and illustrated The Invention of Hugo Cabret in 2007, and before it was even published, I got a phone call that Martin Scorsese wanted to direct the movie version of [the book]. He had gotten an advance readers’ copy and, yeah, it was just amazing.

That must’ve blown you away.
It was thrilling to know that he had read my book. I read some drafts of the script and I was really excited about where it was going. Then sets were being built, the script was being finished, and I got to visit the studio in England while they were filming. That’s when I first met Scorsese. I thought an intern was just going to open the studio door and show me everything, but Dante Ferretti, the Oscar-winning set designer who did the sets for Hugo and has done every movie of Scorsese’s since The Age of Innocence­, took me on a personal tour. It was really incredible, ’cause everything looked just like my book, except bigger and more beautiful than I ever could have imagined myself.

That’s saying something, coming from someone who illustrates his own books. You must’ve been at least a little worried about the way the film looked.
Well it was Scorsese, so I can’t say I was worried one way or another. But it was a thrill to see that they used my book very, very closely. Everywhere I looked, there were details that I saw taken directly from my drawings.

Like what?
In my book, there’s a metal grate in the wall that Hugo climbs to go through the walls, and that’s something that doesn’t exist in real life. I made that up. I saw it in real life, in the set of the train station, made of real metal. I said, “Dante, that looks just like the metal grate I drew in my book!” He said, “It is the metal grate in your book. I made it exactly!” Wherever they could take things from my drawings, they used every detail.

I went to Dante’s office and one of the things he had on the door were blow-ups of drawings from the book. When I went back to visit the set in November, everyone there on set, the crew and the cast, said they had never seen a director stay more faithful to the source material. Scorsese kept a copy of my book with him the entire time. He was constantly referring to the book to solve problems, and to show actors and crewmembers what he wanted a scene to look like.

Do you know why Scorsese wanted to make a film based on your book?
I asked him that exact question. I knew, of course, the fact that it’s about the history of the movies would be important to Scorsese, because, besides being one of the most brilliant directors of all time, he’s also a scholar of film history. He talked about the fact that [Hugo] is a story about a father and son, and that was something [Scorcese has] explored in a lot of his movies. He talked about his relationship with his father, and how his dad used to take him to the movies every week. As it turned out, the first movie Marty saw, when he was about five or six, was produced by David Selznick, who’s a relative of mine.

You say that the film’s team brought your illustrations to life. Do you feel the same way about how it captured your writing?
The plot of the movie is exactly the same as the plot of the book. The arc of the story is exactly the same. The screenplay is filled with my original dialogue from the book.

They made the station inspector into a larger part, because he’s played by Sascha Baron Cohen. The other difference is that screenwriter John Logan added a lot of dogs. The station inspector has a dog, two other characters have dogs, but it all works. All the changes that they made really worked onscreen. So even though it’s essentially the same plot, a lot of it had to be told differently, because a big part of the book is about what happens when you turn the pages.

I was doing something that was supposed to be an homage to film, but still, it’s really about book-making and what a book is. So they had to make some changes, to adjust to the way you tell a story on screen. It’s beautiful. If you go to the movie knowing the book, you won’t be disappointed. It will really surprise you, how close the movie is, not just in the plot but in tone—the way the book has a sort of mystery. I wanted to try to tell a story that felt magical, without there being any real magic. Scorsese was after the same thing, something that felt realistic, but something that also felt like a fable. In the movie, the colors are little bit more intimate, the sets are a little bit larger, everything is just a little stronger than it would be in real life. It’s a very emotional story, a very emotional movie, that Scorsese made.

Sounds like this is going to be a tough experience to follow.
[Laughs] Well, I definitely started at the top. I’m aware of that.

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See how many of 11 potential Oscars team Hugo takes home during the 84th Academy Awards on February 26. Chicago Children’s Theatre’s production of The Houdini Box, based on the book by Brian Selznick, runs January 27–March 4 at the Mercury Theatre (3745 N Southport Ave, 773-325-1700, chicagochildrenstheatre.org); and March 14–25 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts (9501 Skokie Blvd, Skokie; 847-673-6300, northshorecenter.org).