Variety is reporting that Martin Scorsese is set to direct an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s best-selling children’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
The novel, which won the Randolph Caldecott Medal in 2008 for the most distinguished American picture book for children, focuses on an orphaned boy who secretly lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station and looks after the clocks. He gets caught up in a mystery adventure when he finds a discarded automata (clockwork robot) left by his dead father.
The book is a strange mix of text and images with nearly 300 pages of pictures within the 500+ page book. Selznick himself has described the book as “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.”
Ice Age helmer Chris Wedge had been previously attached to direct the film, based on a script from The Aviator scribe John Logan.
Sony and Paramount are in talks about distributing the film which is scheduled to start shooting in London on June 1st.