My Very First Classics

Hugo Thomas is a French filmmaker. He has directed two feature films, Willy 1er and Juniors, both of which were on Netflix, and is currently working on a third. He lives in Paris with his five-year-old twins, Théodore and Giulia, who are responsible for most of his good ideas and a reasonable amount of chaos.

My Very First Classics began because Hugo was getting slightly bored at bedtime.

He loved reading with his children. He was just less excited about reading random children's stories every single night. What he really wanted was to share the books he loved with them. One evening, he thought: wouldn't it be great if I could read them The Count of Monte Cristo?

So he looked for a version for four-year-olds.

There wasn't one.

That was pretty much the whole business plan.

He made Monte Cristo, then another classic, then another, and discovered something he hadn't quite expected: it was incredibly fun to watch his children start caring about the same characters and stories he cared about. Suddenly bedtime felt less like reading something to them and more like sharing something with them.

And, quite often, Dumas, Shakespeare and Jules Verne turned out to be considerably more entertaining than T'choupi.

There was another advantage. Hugo got to refresh his memory of all the classics while putting his children to bed. As a fundamentally selfish person whose brain is happiest when doing two things at once, he found this arrangement almost suspiciously perfect.

And that's how My Very First Classics began: real classics, faithfully retold for ages 4 to 7, so children and grown-ups can discover, or rediscover, the same great stories together.