With less than a month left until the release of his film Shutter Island, director Martin Scorsese is already hot on the trail of a new project.
Scorsese is currently in talks to direct a screen adaptation of the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which follows Hugo, an orphan living in a train station, as he seeks to finish a project of his father’s by “solving the mystery of a broken robot.” The film would be the director’s first attempt at a movie aimed towards kids.
Although a picture book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret likely has more than enough material for the film to work with. Unlike other children’s books that have recently been made into movies, such as Where the Wild Things Are and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Hugo is no quick read.
Rather, The Invention of Hugo Cabret weighs in at a whopping 533 pages–of which almost 300 are pictures. The pictures are accompanied by the verbal story, but the images are what caught the attention of the literary world. In 2008, the book won the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children, and a write-up in The New York Times described the pictures as being similar to movie storyboards.
The screen adaptation of the book will be done as a live-action film, so it will be interesting to see how Scorsese chooses to translate the images from the book onto film.
If Scorsese signs on to direct the film, he’ll be working with at least two familiar names. Graham King, who produced Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed is also set to produce The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and the screenplay for the film was adapted by John Logan, who wrote the script for Scorsese’s The Aviator in 2004.
It’s not an impossibility that we could see a third familiar Scorsese collaborator work on The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Leonardo DiCaprio starred in both the aforementioned films, and is also the lead in the upcoming Scorsese thriller Shutter Island, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the director found a spot for the star in Hugo as well.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret will be independently produced by GK Films.
