Actors Emily Mortimer, left, and Asa Butterfield (who stars as orphan boy Hugo) listen to director Martin Scorsese on the set of 'Hugo'. Photo / AP
Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's long-time editor, warmly greets a reporter outside their Manhattan offices ahead of a screening of Scorsese's new 3-D fairy tale, Hugo.
Around the corner is Schoonmaker's editing bay, where she and Scorsese keep Turner Classic Movies running silently on a nearby screen while they work. Inside is a screening room where Scorsese often runs old films, familiar classics and newfound gems. Large movie posters dot the halls: The Third Man, Black Narcissus. Directions to the bathroom are given as "across from Marlon Brando".
It is a cinephile's dream, a description that also could apply to the magical Hugo. The film, adapted from Brian Selznick's award-winning illustrated book The Invention of Hugo Cabret is about a 12-year-old orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who lives in a 1930 Paris train station. It also is - as are so many of Scorsese's films - a movie about movies.
It captures young Hugo's ecstatic discovery of cinema, echoing Scorsese's own experience as an asthmatic child in New York's Little Italy. Hugo's adventures ultimately lead him to the turn-of-the-century French film-maker George Melies (Ben Kingsley), a special effects pioneer and early believer in the wonder of movies.
Just as Scorsese is looking back through film history, however, he also is looking ahead: Hugo is his first 3-D film. For a medium that has undergone a lot of criticism and doubt since James Cameron's groundbreaking Avatar, Scorsese's enthusiastic embrace of 3-D does a lot for its credibility.
"It was a big issue when Fellini did his first colour film, when Bergman did his first colour film, when Antonioni did Red Desert," recalled Scorsese in a recent interview. "Everybody wanted to see how they did colour."
This has been the year in which many notable directors took up 3-D: Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), Francis Ford Coppola (Twixt), Wim Wenders (Pena) and Steven Spielberg (The Adventures of Tintin). But no one's entry to 3-D is as important as that of Scorsese, long held as America's best director.
Asked what films he shows his 12-year-old daughter (who helped inspire him to make Hugo), Scorsese lists more than 20 films, a virtual film school for adolescence.
Scorsese grew up in another age of 3-D films, and he consulted many of those from the 1950s: House of Wax, Kiss Me Kate, Dial M for Murder. To him, seeing in depth is natural, "because we live with depth".
"There's great potential for it," he says. "It's a natural progression, especially with the fact that cinema is all around us.
"It's not only in a theatre. Obviously, the next thing you go to is holograms. You could have West Side Story with the dancers dancing up the aisles, or a wonderful actor doing Hamlet."
To Scorsese, ultimately it is part of film evolution. He recalls the arrival of sound, the early distrust of colour and the ushering in of wider screens with CinemaScope.
"The French critics Truffaut, Godard, all of them embraced every new technological advance from Hollywood as part of cinema: colour, sound, ultimately, and wide-screen," says Scorsese. "They embraced wide-screen and I'm sure they would have done 3-D."
In Hugo, the depth of the images comes through fullest in the expansive interior of the full-size train station, built on a soundstage in England's Shepperton Studios.
"Marty was pushing the boundaries all the time, saying, 'Let's go further, let's go further,"' says Schoonmaker, who has edited most of Scorsese's films since Raging Bull. "It takes a lot of care and time to set up a 3-D shot properly and he was really committed to that ... I don't mean the sensational aspects of 3-D, but the way the camera embraces the actors is what he wanted."
"Every shot that we did was a discovery and an experiment," says Scorsese. "I did feel like they were moving sculptures rather than seeing paintings."
Lately, the 68-year-old Scorsese has been moving with urgency. Since last year's Shutter Island, he's made three documentaries including George Harrison: Living in the Material World.
His recent work suggests an expanding perspective of cinema.
"Not every picture has to be made in 3-D," he says.
"Not every picture has to be made in colour, either. Not everyone has to be made with dialogue. Why can't we keep an open mind?"
Lowdown
Who: Martin Scorsese
What: 3-D fairytale Hugo
When: Opens in New Zealand January 12
- TimeOut/AP
By Jake Coyle
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