In 2017, I was invited to meet the legendary Steven Spielberg and co-producer Chris Meledandri about a movie they wanted me to write. Spielberg had been working on another project and realized he’d never seen a movie celebrating nature from nature’s point of view. He imagined setting the story in the time before dinosaurs, when the world was covered by plants. This sounded intriguing until I learned that during this time, known as the Carboniferous period, the world looked utterly unlike the world today, though there were some insects on land and many creatures in the water, and the plants mostly included mosses, liverworts, horsetails, and many types of ferns. This meant the story would take place in a world that felt alien to ours. I proposed moving the story 232 million years ahead, to the very end of the dinosaur era, called the Cretaceous period. I jokingly said it could be like Jurassic Park, but from the plants’ point of view. The important thing to me was that by the end of the Cretaceous era, the forests resembled modern forests. I knew that a story told from the point of view of nature would need to have a strong environmental message, encouraging everyone to care for our fragile planet. I wanted people to finish the story and find them- selves among the trees and plants they’d just been following. I reached out to Jamie Boyer, a paleobotanist (someone who studies ancient plants) at the New York Botanical Garden. Among other things, he taught me about fossil species, which are plants like ferns, ginkgos, and sycamore trees that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs or earlier. I found this idea very exciting because it would connect the story to today’s world. I decided to make the main characters of my story two sycamore seeds trying to find a safe place to grow. I usually write stories about children separated from their parents who have to make their way alone in the world as they try to find a safe place to grow up. I could see how these two tiny sycamore seeds were related to my other characters, like Hugo, Isabel, Ben, Rose, and Joseph.
Over the next two years I worked on the screenplay for this movie with Spielberg and Meledandri, but when the pandemic hit and the world slowed down, it began to seem as if the movie might never get made. By this point I had fallen in love with the story, and I wondered if there was another way to share it with people. I proposed making a book. Spielberg and Meledandri gave me their blessing and I created what became the illustrated novel Big Tree.