LOS ANGELES — Tucked in the back of a lush garden exploding with flowers, Cornelia Funke’s study is a wonderlandof books. Her desk is cluttered with tomes about fairy tales, which are stacked next to those about mining, alongside travel guides for Spain, France and England. A sliding ladder leads to an upper tier of titles, next to a closet that is also chock-full of hardcovers and paperbacks.
Much like Meggie and the other characters in her “Inkworld” trilogy, the 51-year-old author of fantasies for middleschool students is a self-described book maniac, whose writing room is ringed with the works that have helped her research - and the string of books that research has helped yield: Dragon Rider, The Thief Lord and now Reckless, which was released last week. With an initial worldwide print runexceeding 1 million copies, Reckless is the first in a series for readers 10 and older about two brothers lured through a mirror into a world populated with dwarves and fairies and gargoyles.
Most significant, Reckless is the first time Funke has collaborated on a book. An interdisciplinary super duo of the most fantastical kind, Funke, who has sold more than 15 million books worldwide, partnered with Lionel Wigram, executive producer of some of the blockbuster Harry Potter films and former Warner Bros. vice president of production, to write the new series.
“I would never have looked at a movie producer as a creative writing partner. I never would have thought I’d work on a novel with somebody. I’ve done quite well without it so far,” said Funke, a native of Germany who, since 2005, has been living in Beverly Hills in a house formerly owned by Faye Dunaway.
Funke met Wigram at a dinner in 2006. The two started working together the following day. Funke had just lost her husband of 27 years to cancer. Wigram filled the void creatively when he asked Funke to collaborate with him on an adventurous interpretation of The Nutcracker. But after eight months of almost daily “intellectual pugilism,” in person whenever the two were in the same city and via Skype the many days they weren’t, that project came to an end when they learned a musical,big-screen version of The Nutcracker was in the works.
“I’m not used to projects dying,” said Funke, who had a hard time letting go of the world they had created. “ Suddenly, one day, I almost felt Jacob Reckless was standing behind me in my garden.”
Reckless is the main character in the new book - a complicated hero on a quest to save his younger brother’s life in the mirror world. Funke told Wigram she wanted to write abook about the Reckless boys, presuming Wigram wouldn’t want to be involved. Instead he said yes.
Family, Pages 31 on 09/22/2010