It was a great honor and a challenge to be asked to write a book with the great mime Marcel Marceau. Right away, I knew that we should create a wordless picture book. I came up with the idea of creating a book adaptation of Marcel’s classic “The Cage.” I created a storyboard for the book with pretty terrible stick figures. Luckily, Marcel was very good at seeing what I meant rather than what I had actually drawn. We met at his home outside of Paris to discuss the project and then a month later we shot the book in a Paris studio. Photographer Stephen Rothfeld contributed the perfect lighting and camerawork to capture Marcel’s amazingly graceful movements and expressions.

It’s true, by the way, that when you get a mime offstage, they love nothing better than to talk, talk, talk. Marcel loved to hold court on everything from art and theater to philosophy and politics. He spoke perfect English and had a sly sense of humor. He loved to poke fun at my clumsy drawings and even clumsier efforts to act out the scenes from the book. Then when he took the spotlight, it was remarkable to watch him transform my rough sketches into energetic, joyous life.