Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret is set to hit the silver screen as Martin Scorsese is in talks with GK Films to direct a film adaptation of the 2007 best-selling children’s book. Graham King, producer of Scorsese’s The Departed, is expected to independently produce the film, and John Logan, who wrote Scorsese’s The Aviator, has already adapted the screenplay.

Hugo, which won the 2008 Randolph Caldecott Medal for ‘the most distinguished American picture book for children’, centers around a 12-year old orphan who sleeps in a railway station, working to repair his late father’s broken clockwork figure. The book takes place in 1930s Paris, and is described 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.” The author, Selznick, is a distant relative of the famous David O Selznick, who produced The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.

The Oscar-winning director’s latest film, Shutter Island, opens Feb.19. He is currently planning a saga about “two Jesuit priests adrift in 17th-century Japan”, is in the editing process of his documentary om the late Beatles’ member George Harrison, and is said to have biopics of Theodore Roosevelt and Frank Sinatra lined up. With so much planned, where will Hugo fit in?

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