Caldecott Honor–winning illustrator and New York Times bestselling author Brian Selznick graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with the intention of becoming a set designer for the theater. However, after spending three years selling books and designing window displays for a children’s bookstore in Manhattan, he was inspired to create children’s books of his own.

His books have received many awards and distinctions, including a Caldecott Honor for The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins and a Robert F. Sibert Honor for When Marian Sang.

Brian Selznick travels extensively to research his books. He spent six months in Washington, D.C., for Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride, he travelled to England for The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and he visited Walt Whitman’s childhood home in West Hills, New York, for Walt Whitman: Words for America. More recently, Brian visited the city of Paris three times to research his latest book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Here he talks to Alec Gamble about the inspiration for The Invention of Hugo Cabret and provides an insight into his creative process.

I really enjoyed reading The Invetion of Hugo Cabret. It has an unusual storyline following the adventure of the young boy, Hugo, and his passion for his automaton. What inspired the storyline?

I had seen the Georges Méliès film A Trip to the Moon, many, many years ago and I thought it was really great. I loved how everything was handmade; you could tell that someone had sculpted and painted the sets. And all of  the special effects were created by the camera. For instance, to make something look as though it had disappeared Méliès would film the image than stop the camera, move it somewhere else and start filming again. He was a magician originally, which interested me as well. I thought it would be really cool to write a story about him but at that time I didn’t have a plot.

Well, a couple of years ago I read a book called Edison’s Eve, which is about the history of automata, the wind-up mechanical figures. That’s where I learned that Méliès had a collection of automata that he had donated to a museum at the end of his life. Tragically, they were destroyed and thrown away. I imagined a kid finding one of those broken machines and trying to fix it. An image of a kid climbing through the garbage just, came into my head like a little gift, and I knew that that was the beginning of the story.

There are all sorts of things the kid could do with a broken automaton: he could steal it, he could try to fix it, it could write a message. However, I didn’t have any idea who the kid was, or why he was interested in automata. What was he doing going through the garbage? What was his name? So basically, I started writing the book by trying to answer all of those questions.

There are a lot of references in the book to magic and magical performance is that something that you’re interested in?

I’ve always loved magic. I tried to do card tricks when I was a kid but I’m a very bad magician. However, I remain a fan of magic. I’ve also had a long time fascination with Harry Houdini The first book I wrote was about a kid who is obsessed with Harry Houdini and wants to be a magician.

What counts as magic must change over time. It seems to me that magic is moving into a more psychological realm. Would we still be entranced by the magic that was performed 100 years ago?

Well, my guess is that the underpinning of what counts as magic at any given time period is the same. The basic idea is seeing something happen in front of you that you know cannot physically happen. As a result you experience a weird feeling that something else is going on which is somehow connected to spirituality or in some cases religion.

If we could go back in time and see magic from 100 years ago, we might not experience it the same way that the contemporary audience experienced it. Likewise, if we had visitors from 100 years in the future they might not experience our magic shows as magic at all. However, a lot of the magic tricks that are performed today have a very long tradition, so I think we are probably still seeing a lot of magic tricks that were done 100 years ago. The difference is the way they are presented on stage. The idea of cutting ladies in half, for instance, has been around for a very long time. What Houdini did was to take classic tricks like this and make them so psychologically compelling that you couldn’t look away. Houdini always said that he wasn’t doing tricks but his magic was so powerful that many people believed he could turn himself into smoke and escape through the wooden slats in a crate. He made it seem that he was escaping death itself and that’s what everyone wants to be able to do.

Coming back to Hugo Cabret, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using words and pictures to tell the story?

That’s an interesting question. I didn’t start with the idea of using words and the pictures together in this way. The way of telling the story grew out of what the story was about. Hugo finds a broken automaton and meets George Méliès. So I started thinking about the way the cinema uses visual clues to tell the story. Frequently it does that by what you see and not what hear. I thought it might be interesting to try to tell Hugo using both words and a visual narrative in a style that echoes what the movies can do. I don’t think every story would work in this style but for this book I ended up feeling that really was no other choice.

 I suppose a disadvantage is that it takes a long time to produce a book like this.

Different viewpoints are presented in the words and pictures. Although the text is a third person narration, it is focalised through Hugo’s point of view. In the pictures the reader is usually observing Hugo.

The point of view does change in the pictures. Most of the time we see Hugo but there are sequences where we see what is happening from Hugo’s point of view. For instance, when the automaton is finally wound up and starts to draw, I imagine that we’re seeing it from his point of view. I can do that with the pictures. The words are in the third person but I made a conscious decision that I wanted it all to be from Hugo’s point of view.

 In film today you rarely have a first person viewpoint. A voice over narration might be used, perhaps at the beginning of the film but it isn’t usually sustained through the duration.

 In film there might be sequences where the camera will become the point of view of the character. It’s always a little disconcerting when someone on a movie screen looks at you and talks to you. The most obvious example is the psycho killer point of view that might be used in a scary movie. You hear the heavy breathing and the camera’s jittery and you can see through the trees, the poor person who’s going to get killed because it’s the killer’s point of view.

But it gets very tiring for the audience if you try and sustain that viewpoint.

Yes it wouldn’t really work so you have to cut back and forth.

Why not tell the story exclusively with pictures?

The reason that the words that are there are still there is because they express something that I couldn’t draw, a thought, conversation, a spell, a sound. You can’t see a sound so I had to leave all that in text. Of course there is a lot you can get across in pictures: at the end there is a scene where Hugo is leaning against the wall and you can see he’s catching his breath and you can imagine him breathing hard. Even though I don’t write the words “Hugo breathed hard” hopefully you can imagine the sound. Taking out the words would be like making a silent movie - I’d like to try that.

The way in which you frame your illustrations is reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s work, particularly Where the Wild Things Are. Is Sendak an important influence for you?

I think Where the Wild Things Are is the greatest children’s book ever. If you want to learn how to make a picturebook you only need to look at Where the Wild Things Are because it does everything so beautifully: the design, the story, the pictures, everything works together to tell Max’s story. Sendak uses words and pictures until the point of the wild rumpus where the drawings take over completely, eventually you need words again and finally there’s a page with words and no picture. I was thinking about when I was creating Hugo’s story.

With regard to the opening of my book, which starts with a little drawing moving through a sequence of increasingly larger drawings, I was thinking about sitting in a cinema and getting closer to the screen, until the movie screen is filling the book. So I suppose that does have something in common with the opening of Where the Wild Things Are.

The overall feel Hugo book is very filmic. You use the convention of moving from establishing shots through mid-shots to close-ups when you open a scene.

Do you always work in black and white? And in pencil?

No, mostly black and white but it depends on the subject or sometimes finances. Hugo had to be black and white because of the black and white movies. I’ve produced some picturebooks in colour, watercolour paintings and acrylics. I’ve done some pen and ink work, but I think pencil is my favourite.

The book is beautifully designed with these smart black-edged pages. How much input did you have to the design process?

I was a co-designer with David Sayler, the Art Director at Scholastic US, and his partner, Charles, who’s a really amazing designer. The three of us collaborated very closely. Originally I just thought black edged border around each page would look nice. When I received my copy of the book I realised that it made every page look like a movie screen, which is very appropriate. It made more sense than I had realised. We considered every single design element of the book. We even had to find a special binding because of its thickness: 550 pages. When you open a thick book, usually there is usually a deep gutter in the centre where the pages come together. You can lose an inch of space in the gutter but if you open Hugo, you’ll see that it opens flat. We had to find a special binding that allowed us to do this; it’s a loose thread binding that works independently of the spine.

Can you tell us more about the research you did for the book?

I carried out research on the history of automaton. I found one like the one I had imagined at a museum in Philadelphia, which was about two hours from where I live in New York. I went and visited that museum and so that was really incredible. I went to Paris three times to research the locations, and I watched lots of movies; those were the main ways that I got into the world of the Hugo.

And then I also contacted experts in the fields of clockwork, automata, and movies and there were people who showed me around Paris, which was fun. I wanted to make sure that what I was writing was accurate because even though it’s a work of fiction, there’s so much non-fiction in it. If I wasn’t going to be accurate, I wanted to be aware of what I was changing and why.

The image of the moon at the beginning and end of the story makes a direct reference to Méliès. The moon does seem to hold a special place in the human imagination. Do you have any thoughts about that?

 Well it is magical, strange, beautiful and poetic thing glowing in the night sky. But in 1902 when Méliès made his filmm it was 67 years before the first moon landing. I was intrigued by all of that. I was born at midnight and I’m a Cancerian, so I think I have a natural affinity with the moon.

You open with the full moon and at the end you emphasise the dark side of the moon. The use of the black page is perfect here. To me that suggests the idea that there are still mysteries waiting to be discovered.

That sounds great. I think one of the nice things about making something is that it seems right for the story and then others tell me things which make me understand why I had done it. I made the moon fade out at the end because it was the end of the story. I wanted it to lead us out of the story with a visual sequence. Did I think about the idea of the dark side of the moon and its mysteries? No. I can’t say I did. But I’m thrilled that you see it like that.

 I have a friend who’s an artist and he always says that it’s not the artist’s job to decide what the work is about. The artist’s job is to make the artwork and then it’s the viewer or the reader’s job to figure out what it means.

One of the themes in Hugo is time. To quote: “Time can play all sorts of tricks on you”. Can you tell us something about that?

It means a few things to me. It goes back to the idea of magic in the Melies film. You can play with time in a film by slowing or speeding the film up. Movies are about how you use time to tell a story. Time was very important to Hugo.

The book is actually structured like a clock. It’s divided into two sets of 12 chapters. I was imagining a clock going around twice during the course of a day, so that time and all of that seemed very central to the story.

I’m also interested in the different ways in which kids and adults experience time. When I was a kid, I remember my Grandfather telling me how fast time went and I remember thinking that’s so weird, because the days just stretched on endlessly. And the summer seemed to stretch into eternity. I’m 41 right now, I feel like I experience a week the way I experienced a day when I was a kid.

Can you tell us about the process you go through when you are drawing?

Yes, the pictures like the story go through a huge number of changes and sketches and early drafts. For this book I did months and months of sketching. I went to Paris. I researched automata. I watched movies. Then I photographed models to pose for the characters in the book. Then I worked on the finished drawings that I knew were going to appear in the book. I was able, on average, to do two drawings a day. The drawings are originally one quarter size from what you see reproduced in the book. They’re blown up to fit the spread and that breathes a little bit of air into the lines and makes the pencil a little looser. It took a total of about nine months for the art work.

You have illustrated other people’s books as well as your own stories. How much autonomy do you have when illustrating other people’s work?

Well, sometimes, a writer will put in parentheses, “Here we see a double page spread of this”, or “Turn the page here.” Usually when I get a manuscript to illustrate, I cross that out because I don’t want to know what the author thinks I should draw. I need to start from their writing and my own thoughts about it. Later I might go back and see what they have written and I might change things on that basis. Ultimately, it’s a collaboration with comments and notes being passed backwards and forwards. It all gets mediated through the editor who helps decide what the best ideas are.

As an illustrator, you always want to add something to the story. That’s the reason the pictures are there. There’s a book in America called Oh, Brother by Arthur Yorinks and Richard Egielski. The story is about two very mischievous twins at the turn of the century, and the first line of the book is “It was a sorry accident at sea”, but when you open the book, you see this big cruise ship, like the Titanic, on the end papers. You turn the page and you see the title Oh, Brother and a big painting of the twins sneaking down into a storehouse on the ship. Then you see all the boxes that are labelled fireworks and explosives, and they’re holding a lantern. You turn the page and the read the dedication. You see the twins argue and they leave the lantern behind. You see that the lantern is catching fire and when you turn the page again there’s a giant double page spread of the ship sinking with fireworks filling up the sky and people clinging onto life rafts and bits of wood. You turn the page once more and the story opens, “It was a sorry accident at sea” It’s perfect. When I asked the author he told me that the whole pre-story with the fireworks was entirely the idea of the illustrator.

 Do you ever get writer's/artist’s block? And what do you do to overcome it?

Usually I feel frustrated at the conceiving stage., when I’m figuring out what I need to draw, how I need to draw it, and what position I need to draw from. For instance, will the angle I take be from above the room or below the room? Often I feel that I can’t draw at this stage. Once I have worked out those problems, I’ve done my research, posed a real person, looked at the lighting effects, sorted out the clothes and decided on the character’s expression, then I’m just ready to draw. When I sit down to work on a finished piece of art I’m in a very different mindset because the ideas have already been solidified. Once I’m doing the shading it becomes almost mechanical. At that point I can like listen to the radio but I have to be in silence for the conception.

What do I do to overcome the block? The main thing I do is I go to sleep. I don’t like napping during the day, but when I get so upset that I can’t do anything else, that’s what I do. I often wake up with the right idea. Sometimes I’ll go to a museum or get out of the house.

Where do you work? Do you have a studio?

I live part-time in New York and part-time in San Diego. In New York I have a separate studio just for my work, where I have my desk and a whole big cork wall on which I can pin research and the finished the drawings so that I can see them altogether. I have a view of the Empire State Building from my studio, which is really nice. In San Diego, in California, I have a little apartment that’s right on the water and I work there. If I’m working on a book it has to be at one of those two desks.

What have you found most rewarding about writing this book?

I learned a lot while I was making the book. I’m conscious of wanting to learn or try something new with each book. I feel that the leap that I made in terms of what I was doing before this book is much bigger than with anything that I have done before. Hugo, in a way, is the accumulation of what I’ve learned from all my other books The drawback is that unfortunately it doesn’t carry over to the next book. So now I’m back where I started with Hugo. I don’t know what the next thing will be or how I’m going to make it work. But hopefully it will come together when I start to think about it.

Thank you Brian Selznick for talking to Write Away

2008-01-16