Devastated, she runs home in the driving rain as flashes of lightning tear through the sky. She comes out of seeing a movie at her local theater in Hoboken, New Jersey, to find that the building has just been closed for sound installation. Rose was born deaf, and, in the 1920s, early on in the book, she is present for the change from silent films to talkies. I thought this could be beneficial in telling the story of someone who is deaf.” With all this in mind, he crafted the story line of Rose. “When you are reading in your head, you can hear the words but at a picture, words shut off. The way the story is told would then echo the way they live.” It also occurred to him that when hearing readers reach pictures, everything becomes quiet. “Maybe,” he mused, “I could tell the story of a deaf person just with pictures. He wanted to tell two stories, one in words and the other entirely through images, but “I needed to find a story that made sense being told just in pictures.” He remembered a line from Through Deaf Eyes “about how the deaf people are the people of the eye and that sign language is a language you must see in order to understand.” Selznick, says that “films have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.” After school, he would watch old monster movies in black and white and the silent versions of The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.Īs he mulled over possibilities for his next book, Selznick knew that he wanted not simply to illustrate another written story. Selznick, whose grandfather’s cousin was the Hollywood legend David O.
The story, set in 1920s Paris, is also dotted with references to silent movies. Selznick shifts between written text and illustrated action, depicting characters frame by frame in atmospheric pencil drawings-zooming in, panning out, and achieving many other effects. Like Wonderstruck, it is highly visual, cinematic even.
Hugo lends itself to that flickering medium. The NEH-supported film helped to inspire Selznick’s new book Wonderstruck , which tells the stories of Ben and Rose, children growing up deaf two generations apart and who each run away to-and one day by happenstance meet in-the island that enchants them both: Manhattan.Īt the time Selznick saw the documentary, he was working on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which won the Caldecott Medal in 2008 and has been turned into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese.
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