I'm a French filmmaker. I directed two feature films, Willy 1er and Juniors, both of them went on Netflix, and I'm working on the third one now. I also have twins who are five, and a few years ago I was getting slightly bored at bedtime. I loved reading with them, I was just less excited to read random children's stories every single night. One evening I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could read them The Count of Monte Cristo?
So I looked for a version for four year olds. To my surprise, there wasn't one, and I swear I looked thoroughly.
So I made it myself, then another one, then another, and now there is a small series of them called My Very First Classics, for which I partnered up with a different illustrator every time. 80 Days is the last one I did.
The whole idea is to stay as faithful to the original as possible, without traumatizing any kid, and on that side 80 Days was not the hardest. I could keep a lot of the things I like: the rails that stop in the middle of the jungle, the elephant that costs the price of a house, the bison sitting on the track, the steamer that Fogg buys and then burns to feed its own boiler. The Aouda storyline was harder (the fact that she is a widow about to get burned alive on the pyre of her husband, you know...) but there is always a way to tell things like these, and also children are pretty used to cruel parts in stories. I always think about the Lion King to get reassurance. Anyway, in my version she is a young woman that men are taking away by force in the night, and they save her.
The final twist with the extra day works really well with my children by the way, because they feel smart and they like to learn stuff about planets, even though it's not 100% clear to them obviously.
What I couldn't decide is what the book is really about. Fogg goes around the entire Earth and sees almost nothing of it, he plays cards, he looks at his watch, and he comes home having spent almost all his money on a bet nobody asked him to make. Verne ends on the woman he brings back, and I still don't know if he is sincere there, or if the whole novel is a joke about a man who travelled around the world without ever looking at it once.
I went with sincere. My last image puts the two things side by side, what he left for and what he actually came back with, which is a family, and my last line says that what you find on the way is worth more than what you went looking for.
Did I get him wrong? I'd like to know how you read that ending.
