>> Good afternoon. And I hope you've been having a wonderful time at the National Book Festival. I'm Carla Hayden, the Library of Congress, and I am so excited -- ^M00:00:15 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:18 To introduce our next writer and illustrator-- ^M00:00:23 ^M00:00:26 Of so many amazing books. You know who I'm talking about, don't you? Because he's right here. Mr. Brian Selznick. And I think that deserves a big hand before I say all these other wonderful things. ^M00:00:42 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:46 Now you know that his books have garnered countless accolades around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He is the Caldecott Medal winning creator of the number one New York Times best sellers The Invention of Hugo adapted into an Oscar-winning movie and Wonderstruck. I think we need more, more, more. This is -- because it gets better. He's also written the New York Times bestsellers the Marvels and Baby Monkey, Private Eye, one of my favorites. So it has been 20 years since the first Harry Potter book, and we are celebrating the anniversary, the 20th anniversary, with the publication by Scholastic of a new edition and series with covers by our wonderful illustrator. Now he's going to tell you all about it, and if you haven't read the series yet, please do. If you want to re-read it, please do, because Brian is marvelous, and he is going to be interviewed today by Barrie Hardymon, MPR's Weekend Edition book editor, also someone that lived in my hometown of Baltimore. So she's going to interview him and please join me in welcoming Brian Selznick. ^M00:02:25 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:27 >> Wow. Thank you. >> I have to tell you, I'm a little starstruck. >> Can we have a round of applause for Dr. Hayden, please? ^M00:02:36 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:39 Thank you. Making the Library of Congress accessible to all of us, everyone in the country. Thank you for all of the work you do opening up the doors and making us feel welcome here at the greatest library in the world. ^M00:02:54 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:58 So thank you all so much. I'm going to do a brief presentation about the making of the Harry Potter books before we sit down and have our interview together. So -- I don't have that much time, so I just started -- I want to start when I was 10, so we have 42 years to get through. I always drew when I was a kid. These are some drawings that I did when I was young. I used to like to copy famous artists. This is a copy of an angel that I did by da Vinci. I also liked to draw monsters. I got in trouble sometimes for drawing monsters when I was a kid, but all of these things were always a big part of my life. And eventually I got a job at Eeyore's Books for Children, which some of us remember as one of the best bookstores anywhere, and that's really where I learned how to be a children's book illustrator and how to make books for children. I used to paint the windows for different holidays. This, of course, was our Christmas window. And my first book came out while I was still working at Eeyore's Books for Children, The Houdini Box, and then I went on and I made many other books, some of which were set here in Washington, DC, like Walt Whitman, Words for America, and Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride. And I was living in Washington DC with my husband, David Serlin, while I was making this book, and he had a fellowship at the Smithsonian. And so I went on from there to make these three books, which formed a kind of trilogy, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wonderstruck, and The Marvels, which are books that tell stories with a combination of words and pictures. And so when I got the call to illustrate the new covers for Harry Potter, I -- well, immediately I was terrified, like my first response was complete terror, because the entire world loves Harry Potter. But I, myself, was a fan of Harry Potter. I had read the books for the first time two years prior to getting this phone call, and I really fell in love with them. I was so moved by the characters, by the relationships between everybody in the books, by the battle between good and evil, especially by Dobby. Dobby was my favorite character. I'm a Hufflepuff, by the way. I don't know if we have any Hufflepuffs in the house. And so while I was talking to Scholastic on the phone, and they were offering this incredible opportunity to me, I was told that I had two weeks to design all seven covers and hand in the sketches in order to get approval, and if I get approved, then I could go ahead and do the artwork. And while I was on the phone, I had a vision for what I wanted the covers to be. I wanted them to be black and white, and I wanted them to all line up so that they would tell a single story from the first book to the last book, like JK Rowling does, of the story of Harry Potter, his growing up, and his battle with good and evil, and his friends and family. And so when I was working on Hugo, because one of the things I wanted to say was that all of the things I learned making all of my books up until Harry Potter, went into helping me make the Harry Potter book covers as good as I possibly could. And so one of the things I did when I was working on the Invention of Hugo Cabret, was I illustrated a dream sequence in the story that I did as one long drawing, and then I divided that one long drawing up into five spreads, so that when you get to the book, the dream sequence feels like it's flowing from one page into the next. And I remember doing that single drawing and I thought, that is what will be my inspiration for the Harry Potter covers. And so the first thing I did was I sat down and I drew out seven little book covers next to each other and I started drawing lines, because I wanted to figure out how to connect all of them and I thought like a swirling line would connect them. And I realized that that swirling line looks like a snake. And that reminded me of Nagini, and if you're a fan of the books, you know that Nagini is connected with Voldemort and it represents evil. And I thought that would be how I could represent the battle of good and evil is that snake could wind all the way through the books, from Book One to Book Seven, where the snake is -- where we see the snake's head on Book Seven, and we have an intimation, a hint, of what happens at the end. Because one of the challenges when you're doing book covers is you want to make covers that are interesting to the fans, that they can identify with, but it also has to bring in new readers, so you don't want to give away the ending. So I took that first sketch, I started adding more details, and I handed in my first sketch in one week. I did this in less than a week. I got approval from Scholastic, we got approval from JK Rowling's entire team, and then I spent the next several months working out all of the details for these covers. So if you look at these sketches, as we look at the detailed versions, you'll see some things that change, you'll see some things that stay the same, but you'll notice that the seventh book is the one that changes the most. So notice here I have Harry grown up, holding the head of the snake, and then that changes. Now you can see he's got his two friends, but I've got more details worked in. And you can see I'm labeling some of the characters, because I knew for the fans I wanted to have lots of little Easter eggs where you would be able to recognize things from the books that if you haven't read the books, you might not know what they are. And I had to draw this giant snake. And so I wanted to make sure that the scales for the snake all lined up in the correct way, so I did one giant drawing. This drawing is actually this big, to make sure that I got all of the loops of the snake correct. And then I began working out what I wanted each of the covers to look like, in detail, and these are four different versions of that final cover, where you can see me working towards the one that eventually became the cover that I ended up using. And I don't really do very much work on the computer. I draw everything by hand. I have a Xerox machine, a copy machine, in my studio and I do print things out or take a digital photograph and print it out and I will then I'll photocopy a drawing and then I'll enlarge it or shrink it on my photocopier like it's 1997, and then I will cut things out and rearrange them and move them around. ^M00:09:57 And so you can see on the wall of my studio, one of the drawings I did of Harry as a kid, one of the ones that I did of him a little older, so that I could move the elements around a little bit, the way people who work on the computer might do that with Photoshop, I literally cut and paste everything together. And so here you can see a cut and pasted version of the cover of the books, the big mural, and I'm beginning to find the places where each of the details are going to work together. And so I got to go to Harry Potter World in the middle of all this to meet 75,000 Harry Potter fans, and let me just say that completely freaked me out in terms of the pressure and the expectations. But what they reminded me, ultimately, was that we're all Harry Potter fans, and I'm a Harry Potter fan offering other Harry Potter fans my version of this world. But I got to meet someone who had Dobby with her, and so I got my own Dobby, and me and my husband now live with Dobby. We're very happy. I think Dobby's very happy. And so then I began doing the drawing. And so that became the final image for the covers. And I started at the first drawing and worked my way left to right, and I put on an audio recording of Harry Potter read by Jim Dale, at the beginning of this drawing, and I listened to all seven of the books while I was doing the drawings, and I actually was keeping pace with the story as I was working my way across the covers and I have a magnifying glass that was helping me out. And this actually didn't help at all. ^M00:11:40 [ Laughing ] ^M00:11:42 And so by the time I got to the end and I was drawing the final battle of Hogwarts, I was actually listening to the Battle of Hogwarts in the stories themselves. Hold on, I just have to do one thing. My computer froze. I'm just going to move ahead this way and then go back. And so I had the finished artwork finally, and then we were able to choose colors for each of the titles that were representative of something from the book itself. And so I'm going to now tell you a few little secrets from each of the covers. Harry Potter's glasses are actually glasses I wore in the movie version of my book Wonderstruck that was directed by Todd Haynes, starring Julianne Moore. And so those are Harry Potter -- those became Harry Potter's glasses. And so Aragog, there, the spider, was inspired by a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, who likes to make giant spiders that are inspired by her mother, because she sees spiders as very nurturing. These figures, the Dementors, are inspired by these grieving monks, these sculptures that I saw at the Met, which were also inspirations for graveyard figures in the movie version of Hugo. ^M00:13:05 ^M00:13:08 And Fleur Delacour in the Triwizarding Competition was directly inspired by the movie star Veronica Lake. And this centaur was inspired by one of the sculptures on The Parthenon. And I had to draw what, for me, was the most horrifying villain in the entire series, Dolores Umbridge, because she's a bureaucrat, she's a hypocrite, she says she's doing good, but is actually doing evil. I think we can all make parallels to people in our world. ^M00:13:41 [ Applause ] ^M00:13:44 And because she's the one who, to me, is the most realistic and the most recognizable, she's also the most terrifying. So I had to find someone to represent this embodiment of evil. So, of course, I turned to my husband. ^M00:13:59 [ Laughing ] ^M00:14:07 Dumbledore is Michelangelo's Moses. And then I got to do the box set, so I got to do these quick little sketches about what I wanted the box to look like. I got to redesign all of the house crests, which was very exciting. And then this is the exterior of the box, Harry Potter, but I love how Harry has some of Voldemort in him, Voldemort has some of Harry in him, good and evil are -- it's a very, very complicated game that's played. It's a very, very complicated dance as good tries to win out over evil. So when you take out all of the books in the box set, this is what you find inside. So there's Voldemort waiting for you inside. So as we put all of them together -- ^M00:14:55 [ Music ] ^M00:15:14 That became the series. Thank you very much. >> That's okay. >> Thank you. Hi. >> Hi. >> How are you? >> I'm well. So since we only have five minutes, I'm going to ask you the thing that I'm going to talk about the thing in this picture that just moves me the most, which is that -- and I heard that you loved to draw babies, and there are two babies in this, and I want you to talk about both of them. So at the beginning, you have little baby Harry being left on the doorstep. At the end, well -- >> Yeah, so because I wanted to draw the whole story and encapsulate it as best I could, the beginning we see Harry when he's abandoned and he's being rescued at that moment. He's actually in the hands of Dumbledore after Hagrid has taken him and rescued him. He's in the hands of Dumbledore. But then, at the end, Harry has experienced so much loss, but one of the things we learn through JK Rowling's incredible story is that it's the power of love that saves Harry that you begin to feel will save us, and so I wanted to have a glimpse of the love that Harry had as a baby from his parents. So we end with a vision of him as a baby with his parents and that cameo of love. >> And you can see their cheeks are next to his cheeks. Actually I can barely talk about it. It is so beautiful. >> Oh, thank you. >> And also right underneath, you can see -- I'm looking at it right now. There's this sort of -- the train sort of -- >> Yep. >> Still moving. And I love that the Hogwarts Express is actually on the cover of the last book. >> Yes. >> Because it makes the reader feel like we can all go to Hogwarts. >> We can all go to Hogwarts together. >> Yeah, the books aren't over. >> Yeah. And in the coda, when we move into the future with the series, and we've got other children going to Hogwarts -- >> Yeah. >> I wanted us to always be moving forward, and that's why ultimately I decided that Harry and his friends should be facing into the future. And so they're facing into the future, Hogwarts Express is moving into the future, because I feel like the stories leave us with that kind of hope. >> And with a -- >> With a forward motion. >> Propelled forward. I also -- I'm surprised to hear you say that you discovered these books only two years before you got the assignment, because there are so many themes that I feel like are yours, orphans and love and loneliness and finding these -- you must have felt a real kindred, like, oh, these are my people. >> Yes. Most of my stories, the children are orphans. >> Yeah. >> I find that in a story, having a kid who doesn't have any parents has a kind of agency where they have to go out into the world and create their own family. >> Right. >> So a lot of times I'm trying to write stories, that no matter what you situation is, we can create our own families. We can surround ourselves with people who we love. And so -- and I knew, of course -- I mean, I knew a lot about Harry Potter over the years, and so I knew that he was an orphan, and I knew about some of the general plot points, and I knew that there were a lot of themes that overlapped with things that I cared about. So I think you're right. When I finally listened to the story, and I was able to really immerse myself in what JK Rowling had created, I felt very much like Harry and Hugo Cabret and so many of my other characters. They're all cousins to each other. >> Yeah. >> In some way. >> Yeah. So before -- I know that we want to take audience questions, but I do want to ask, the final illustrations are so rich and they have so many details, Firenze, and the Patronus and all of these -- what's your favorite? Is there some tiny Easter egg that you want to let people -- or do you want everybody to find their own? Is there one favorite moment in this? >> I mean, it was really fun going through and making lists of everything that I wanted to put in the cover, so I do actually have written lists. >> Oh, I would love to see that list. >> Of all of my favorite moments, all my favorite characters, and then trying to figure out what was going to fit where was -- like I knew I wanted to draw Hagrid with the golden egg, with that egg, the dragon egg, and I knew I had to get Dobby in there, since he was my favorite character. And then the labyrinth and the Triwizarding Tournament, there's a labyrinth that they have to go through, it's in right -- >> Oh, right, yes. >> Over there, yeah. And so -- >> You stumped me. >> And then getting to draw my vision of Hogwarts as well was really fun, which is actually based on the train set at the New York Botanical Gardens, their Christmas display. They have all of the buildings in New York made out of bark and twigs and branches and leaves and acorns, and so that was one of my inspirations for Hogwarts. >> Oh, wow. >> So trying to get all of that in was really fun. ^M00:20:00 >> And it must have been helpful that you've never had to consult another vision of this in your head, because you hadn't really -- because we have -- we are bombarded with these images, be they Disney or -- >> Yeah. >> Etsy, but wonderfully. >> Yeah. >> I mean all of these different -- but you never had to -- this arrived fully formed. >> Yeah. >> To [inaudible]. >> Even though I hadn't read the books, of course, Mary Grandpre's images are everywhere. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> They're beautiful and they're iconic. >> Yeah. >> So -- and I had seen some of the movies. I had seen some parts of the movies, and everything is designed so brilliantly. >> Yeah. >> It's all so beautiful, but ultimately when I had to sit down to do my version, it really was -- it wasn't that it was easy to put all that aside, but -- because I was very aware of it, and loved all of it, but it wasn't mine. >> Right. >> And what we all have in common is what JK Rowling wrote. So the movies come from the books. >> Yeah. >> The parks come from the books. Mary Grandpre's images come from the books. All the images come from the books. So, like, if any of us, anybody here was asked to draw their Harry Potter, we'd all have our own, so that's what I got to do. >> That's right. Well, on that note, let's take some questions from the audience and hear about your own Harry Potters. Mr. Incredible? ^M00:21:16 ^M00:21:20 Oh, wait. I'm sorry. >> We have a microphone. >> You've got to go to the microphone. >> Can you jump over to the microphone? >> I work in radio and I actually skipped the microphone. Sorry. ^M00:21:29 ^M00:21:33 >> All right. >> That's right. ^M00:21:35 ^M00:21:38 >> So in your making of the book, box I mean, how come you didn't decorate part of it with Death Eaters? >> With Death Eaters? Oh, the question is how come I didn't decorate part of the box with Death Eaters? One of the challenges I -- is that I could've decorated the box with anything, but one of the things I wanted to do was try to have Harry as the focus on the back, that hidden Voldemort inside, and then I thought it would be interesting if each of the sides could represent the different houses. So every choice means something doesn't get done, but I thought it would be interesting to work on the house crests. >> Everything's hard. >> Yeah. You have a question over here? Okay, who has the next question? >> Yeah. >> I was going to do one more. On your drawings for the black and white covers, I was wondering, you should've included like just one Death Eater on each cover. >> Oh. Where were you? Where were you a couple months ago? I could've taken that note. >> Everyone's a critic. >> But I'm glad that you like the Death Eaters so much, because I really did have fun drawing them, even though they were so scary. Yeah? >> So in terms of Wonderstruck, do you, like, do all -- because there's like two stories that are like interlacing with each other. Do you do like all the words and then all the pictures or something like that? >> The question is about Wonderstruck, which tells one story entirely in words and then a different story that's 50 years earlier all in pictures. And I actually wrote both of the stories at the same time. I wrote what I wanted the picture story to be, even though I knew it was going to be pictures, and then I decided what pictures would tell that story, and then wove them together from there. So I worked on them simultaneously. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. >> What would you do if a new book came out and you were asked to -- >> What would I do if a new Harry Potter book came out and I was asked to illustrate the cover? I think I would have all the same feelings. I would get really nervous again, and then I'd feel really honored again, and then I would sit down and figure out what would be the best way to tell this story. But having told the entire series, of the seven series, I feel pretty pleased with what I have there. Can we get another question? Yeah. >> What is your favorite Harry Potter book? >> What is my favorite Harry Potter book? >> Good question. >> That's a really good question. I really do look at all of them as a single story, because when I'm asked what was my favorite moment or what was my favorite part, I don't remember which book it happened in. I remember that it happened in the lifetime of Harry Potter, but I do remember the Triwizarding event was particularly exciting. The battle itself became one of my favorites, and sort of the story art with what happened with Dobby was one of my favorites. >> Yeah. >> I think we can get in maybe one more question. >> Hi, yeah, so early on in your talk you mentioned that you decided very early on that the covers would be in black and white, and I was hoping you could elaborate a little more on that and which parts of the Harry Potter story made you, led you to believe that black and white was the right choice. >> Yeah, no, I love drawing in black and white and I think that black and white is a very mysterious way to make an image, because it asks you to use your imagination, because the world actually isn't in black and white. So when we see something in black and white, it might remind us of an old movie or an old photograph, and then we, in our minds, fill in what else might be there. So we might see a black and white drawing of a landscape, and in our minds we might be aware that the sky is blue and the grass is green, even though that's not actually what we're seeing. So there's something else happening in our mind that's adding to what's there, and that process where the viewer has to bring something else to the image is exciting to me. And I thought because there's so much happening in these books and they're so mysterious, that it might be nice to do it in black and white so that the reader can add parts of their own imagination to finish the images. So that's why I wanted to do it in black and white. >> I think that's where we have to leave it. But thank you so much, Brian, and could we have a great big hand -- round of applause for him. >> Thank you. >> Yea. And look very carefully at this. It's so wonderful. Thank you.