But somehow, the thrill had gone out of his work. "I felt like there was something else I should be doing, but I didn't know what it was."Īt the time, Selznick had what he calls "a very good career" creating illustrations for other authors' books. ![]() "I hit a point where I thought I might not work anymore," he told me in a phone interview last week. ![]() Hugo's wrecked automaton, originally built to draw and write at the turn of a crank, can no longer perform its functions by 2002, Selznick feared the same fate for himself. The specter of failed promise haunts Hugo Cabret, in part because the book was written as Selznick struggled with his own creative and professional frustrations. During World War I, the French government melted down Méliès' archive to make boot heels-a vicious irony for a child of cobbler parents who'd turned to cinema to escape the awl and hammer. His studio closed and his films were only worth the celluloid that they were stored on. It's only one of many ways that Hugo's journey has been as strange, surprising, and delightfully unlikely as a Brian Selznick plotline.ĪS SELZNICK NOTES in The Hugo Movie Companion, his vibrant, behind-the-scenes treatise on Hugo's path from print to screen, Méliès fell into debt and out of fashion late in his career. Hugo Cabret's fictional storyline foreshadows events the real-life book brought about: a talented but hard-up artist (Hugo/Selznick) joins forces with a famed director looking for a new story (Méliès/Scorsese). Oscar Wilde claimed that life tends to imitate art, but in Selznick's case, the parallels are downright spooky. In turn, Hugo helps Méliès, who has renounced his career, remember how to make-believe. In time, Méliès rewards Hugo for his creativity, persistence, and technical skill. He's an orphan who winds the clocks in Montparnasse Station a broken automaton leads him to a disgruntled and disenchanted toymaker who we gradually discover is the filmmaker Georges Méliès. The film's many Oscar nominations has resulted in a redoubled interest in the original since the Academy's announcement on January 24th, Hugo Cabret ranks in the top five of the New York Times children's bestseller list, even beating Selnick's latest offering, the popular and acclaimed Wonderstruck (2011). ![]() Selnick's biggest success to date is The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), which won the country's most prestigious illustrator's prize, the Caldecott Medal, and was the basis for Martin Scorsese's film adaptation, Hugo (2011). In this regard, he's starting to resemble his characters-visionaries who dream big dreams and strive, against great odds, to make them real. Once a well-published but little-known illustrator, Selznick has catapulted to the very top of his profession in recent years. Selznick takes up the real-life wonders conjured by history's big dreamers: the impossible illusions of Harry Houdini the phantasmagoric landscapes of cinema's first auteur, George Méliès the iconic exhibitions in New York's Museum of Natural History. In his lavishly illustrated books for children, author-artist Brian Selznick writes about magic-but not the wand-waving, quidditch-broom kind.
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