lowed him to touch on and examine the very earliest
moments of the medium that he has spent his life
working in. It’s also a story about a father and a son,
and that’s something that he said is very close to his
heart. In the interview I did with him, he talked about
his dad, and going to the movies with his dad. And bygreat coincidence, the fi rst movie that Scorsese re-
members seeing was Duel in the Sun, which happened
to be a David O. Selznick fi lm.”
The fi lm version of Hugo opens nationwide on No-
vember 23. // BETH ACCOMANDOJAAP BUITENDJIK ©2011 GK FILMS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.136 SanDiegoMagazine.comNovember2011
BRIAN SELZNICK hails from Hollywood royalty.
“I’m distantly related to David O. Selznick who
produced Gone with the Wind and King Kong. I grew
up seeing my name at the beginning of all his mov-
ies and I’ve always loved old movies, so I think that
might come from the fact that I had what I felt was
this very personal connection to David O. Selznick...
even though he’s from the Los Angeles, movie-mak-
ing side of the family and I’m from the New Jersey
dry cleaning side.”
But Brian Selznick never became a fi lmmaker. In-
stead, he turned to writing and illustrating children’s
books and investing them with a very cinematic
style. His fi rst book was The Houdini Box in 1991.
His most recent work is Wonderstruck, in which one
story, set in 1977, is told entirely with words while
the other, set 50 years earlier, is told only in pictures.
“I’m always interested in the work that the reader
has to do while reading a book,” Selznick says. “I like
to think that the reader is actively engaged in the il-
lustrations and in the reading.”
That’s why when he wrote The Invention of Hugo
Cabret he included almost no description and very
little action instead conveying that information
through drawings. Selznick explains, “My goal was
at the end of the book you wouldn’t remember what
you had read and what you had seen but that it
would all fl ow together into one single narrative.”
Selznick’s illustrations are meant to evoke the feel-
ing of movies, yet he never thought any of his books
would ever be made into a feature fi lm. Then Martin
Scorsese decided to adapt Hugo for the big screen.
“Scorsese’s one of the great fi lm directors of all
time,” says Selznick. “On top of that, he’s a brilliant
fi lm scholar and knows everything about the history
of cinema itself. So to have an artist like him creating
his vision of a story that I made up is really beyond
anything that I could have ever imagined.”
Selznick, who divides his time between San Di-
ego and New York, got to visit the set three times
and has written a book on the making of the movie
called The Hugo Movie Companion that just came out.
For the book, he interviewed 40 people from the fi lm,
from the dog trainer to Mr. Scorsese himself. One of
the questions he asked was what attracted Scorsese
to the material.
Selznick says that Scorsese liked “the fact that
my story is about the history of cinema, which al-❯❯ AGENDA | Screen
Drawn To Movies
Film geek, illustrator, and bestselling author Brian Selznick pencils us
in between a book tour and Hollywood premièreMeet Brian Selznick
WHAT: Warwick’s Presents: Wonderstruck
with Brian Selznick
WHERE: San Diego
Natural History
Museum
WHEN: October 28,
6:30 p.m.
RSVP: Tickets
are $40 through
Warwick’s“I’m always
interested in
the work that
the reader
has to do
while read-
ing a book,”
Selznick says.
“I like to think
that the read-
er is actively
engaged in
the illustra-
tions and in
the reading.”
Asa Butterfi eld, Martin
Scorsese, and Chloë
Moretz on the set of
Hugo, from Paramount
Pictures and GK Films.