Googoogaga Hong Kong 兒童發展及教育資訊網站

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet　9 July Stride Adventure

The first Jean-Pierre JEUNET’s 3D film, screenplay and adaptation by Jean-Pierre JEUNET & Guillaume LAURANT is based on the novel “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” by Reif LARSEN. A Franco-Canadian coproduction by EPITHETE FILMS – TAPIOCA FILMS – FILMARTO, and in coproduction with GAUMONT – FRANCE 2 CINEMA. Produced by Frédéric Brillion – Gilles Legrand – Jean-Pierre Jeunet – Suzanne Girard.

Story written with His Mind

After Micmacs, Jean-Pierre Jeunet didn’t feel like writing an original subject again. He like alternating my pleasures... He asked a “reader”, Julien Messemackers, to let him know about any books he thought he might find interesting. Julien called and said: “Listen, you’ve got to sit down and read this first novel by a young American author, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen.” He sent Jean-Pierre Jeunet a copy and he took advantage of jet lag to read it in just a few nights. I was thrilled by the awesome character, by his moving story, by the wealth of detail and also by the ambience, the trains, Montana, the wide open spaces…

The first time Jean-Pierre Jeunet met Reif Larsen he told him: “When I saw Amélie, I felt like someone had been rummaging through my head!” There was an immediate kind of complicity between us, despite the differences of age and background. They must be part of the same family: they have the same tastes, the same obsessions, the same enthusiasms, the same attractions. He’s me 30 years ago! He followed the project all the way to the end, he came on set, and he even did some work as an extra. They’ve been exchanging e-mails ever since we met…Jean-Pierre Jeunet immediately wanted to adapt his book. Hesaw it as an opportunity to make a movie that was part of my own universe, but at the same time very far away – if only because of the language, the wide open spaces, the American landscapes, and the use of 3 D…

Shoot an American Movie Produced in Paris

The novel is enormous – it’s over 400 pages! – It was practically impossible to adapt and… that’s what made it so exciting!They mainly took out entire passages. They focused on T.S.’s story, removing many of the subplots that punctuate the book – his grandmother’s biography, the history of a sect …Jean-Pierre Jeunet had him win the Baird Prize for inventing a perpetual motion machine – that was an idea of Guillaume’s - instead of for the virtuosity of his geographical maps, drafts and drawings, because it was more visual. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his production team put his brother back at the center of the story, they assigned an essential role to the mother, who hardly exists at the end of the book, and they united all the various stages of T.S.’ promotion into one TV extravaganza … It was a lot of work, but at the same time it was fairly simple, because they were building on a stock of awesome material. That’s always easier than starting out with a blank page. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. Jean-Pierre Jeunet took the book and began coloring it: He colored everything he liked a lot or thought indispensable to the story in red; he colored what he liked moderately in yellow; and I colored what he didn’t like at all in green. Jean-Pierre Jeunet cut out the pages and divided them up into folders, and on that basis, in a way I reconstructed the story, never thinking twice about mixing up the pages. Then they really sat down to write.

The movie is in English. He’s made some progress since Alien, he don’t even need an interpreter on the set anymore! But the thing to which he attaches considerable importance has a name: “freedom”! In France, they are lucky enough to have a law that protects us and gives them the final cut. And so the idea was to shoot an American movie produced in Paris. The idea was to do a coproduction, not with Americans, but with Canada… to shoot in Quebec, in our language, and also in the province of Alberta, where Americans themselves go when they need to shoot sequences that are supposed to take place in Montana, like for Brokeback Mountain… and maintain control over our film.

Kyle Catlett is… Prodigious

Jean-Pierre Jeunet worked with a fabulous Quebecoise casting director who had worked with Denis Arcand, for example: Lucie Robitaille. They set up talent searches in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles and London. His team don’t know how many kids we saw, but be that as it may, none of them were very interesting. He was starting to get worried. So he asked to see Scorsese’s second and third choices for Hugo Cabret and Lucie told me… that they had already seen them and passed! Panic. And then, one day, she showed me a kid’s test, he was ten times too small. He was 9 but looked 7. But still, there was something there! Something strange, compelling, unique, it was Kyle. Jean-Pierre Jeunet was like: “This can’t be, he’s way too small for the role …T.S. is supposed to be 12”, but he couldn’t get him out of my mind. They set up a meeting with him on Skype. He gave them a big spiel: “I can cry on demand, I’m tough, I’m strong, I’m the world champion of martial arts for kids under 7!” So there was this extraordinary kid who, suddenly, seemed just right and who understood the comic scenes perfectly… so much so that, as soon as Jean-Pierre Jeunet arrived in Canada, he left for New York to do some tests with him. He hemmed and hawed for two days, but Kyle Catlett was so awesome that I decided he would be T.S. Spivet in spite of his height. And then they announce that just the day before he had signed to do an American series, The Following ! His agent had lied to us, telling us he had no other offers and was available. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his team hesitated, but Kyle was too perfect to pass by. They took the risk and hired him. The series kicked off a little later, half way through our shoot, and… that’s when the problems started!

Because they counted on the producers of the series to facilitate our task – conflicts with actors’ dates are normal in the movies, but you always wind up sorting things out. Here on the contrary they didn’t lift a finger to help us. Luckily, he was shooting in New York and not Los Angeles. Kyle travelled at night, he left in a helicopter, the team worked weekends… But none of that kept him from being extraordinary! Once, when he thought the series was going to prevent him from doing the film, he broke down in tears. He said: “But I want to do T.S. I am T.S. I really want to do this movie…”

SYNOPSIS

T.S. Spivet lives on a remote ranch in Montana with his parents, his sister Gracie and his brother Layton. A gifted child with a passion for science, he has invented a perpetual motion machine, for which he has been awarded the prestigious Baird Prize by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

He leaves a note for his family and hops a freight train to make his way across the United States and receive his prize.

But no one there suspects that the lucky winner is a ten-year-old child with a very dark secret…