Brian Selznick Visits Warnsdorfer School

When Brian Selznick was a student at the Warnsdorfer School, he didn’t like sports.

“I used to draw all the time when I was in Warnsdorfer,” Selznick told a group of elementary school students earlier this month in the very same gymnasium that he disliked spending time in. “My teacher was named Mr. Jones, and I remember he had really nice feathered hair. He used to wear clogs – it was the 1970s – and I really loved the art projects that I used to do with him.”

On Wednesday, April 6, Selznick shared this memory and many others during Author’s Day at Warnsdorfer School. Selznick, who graduated from East Brunswick and attended Warnsdorfer and other district schools, had his first book “The Houdini Box” published in 1991 while working at the children’s book store, Eeyore’s, in New York. His latest book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” won the Caldecott Award in 2008 and is being made into made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley and directed by Martin Scorsese. In between the two books, Selznick illustrated “Frindle” by Andrew Clements, “The Doll People,” by Ann Martin and Laura Godwin, “Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride,” by Pam Munoz Ryan, and “The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins,” by Barbara Kerley, which also received the Caldecott Honor.

Selznick showed drawings he did during his time at the school and told stories that, hopefully, might inspire just a few of the students to draw, write or pursue whatever dreams they have.

“I also loved to draw monsters, and I used to draw monsters that looked like this (see accompanying photo) and sometimes I’d get in trouble because my teachers didn’t always think it was a good idea for me to be drawing monsters all the time even in class because that was the main thing I wanted to do,” he told the students.

Throughout the presentation, Selznick described the creative process and the sequential art aspect of the novel Hugo Cabret, which contains tons of illustrations and is about a 12-year-old boy who lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station. But suddenly, his world interlocks with an eccentric girl and the owner of a small toy booth in the train station. 

 He also talked a bit about the upcoming movie, which he says is slated for release in November.

“It was the most incredible thing I saw,” he said about visiting the set, “because they took all of my drawings and built everything in real life.”

Afterwards, in between talks and while having lunch with his mother, who attended the event, Selznick talked about how exciting it was to return to his old school – that it had changed very little since he last wandered its halls - and to visit with the students.

“I have to say, the kids at Warnsdorfer asked some interesting and intelligent questions,” he said. “It was really fun and just a nice circle of time where I was this kid sitting there.”