Director Marty goes gentler

You think you know by now what you'll get in a Martin Scorsese movie. Someone will be gothically whacked. A person's tenuous grip on reality might slip away, possibly in a mental institution. Vengeance will be doled out — with guns, knives, fists or anything else that causes great bodily injury. And a sweet orphan will search for a new family.

What looks at initial inspection like Hollywood's version of a shotgun marriage — the man behind Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Shutter Island and Gangs of New York directs the 3D family film Hugo — makes sense if you look closer.

In some ways, Scorsese's personal life and professional interests have guided him toward a gentle movie like this.

"It's just natural this time," says the director, who turned 69 last week and is the parent, with book editor Helen Morris, of a 12-year-old daughter, Francesca, "in particular experiencing living life with not only parenting but a child being a partner with you and with your wife.

"There have been great films made about children, and some great films made from the point of view of children. But what does a child really understand or perceive?" Scorsese says, explaining what captivated him about the project.

Adapted by screenwriter John Logan from Brian Selznick's popular, richly illustrated children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese's new movie is a Dickensian drama about a lonely boy's quest for happiness.

The film also brings to life some of the Oscar-winning director's longtime obsessions: the history of cinema and film preservation. Hugo simultaneously stands on its own as a drama. Like the novel, Hugo is focused on the relationship between Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) and an ornery toy seller (Ben Kingsley).

The very things that make Hugo attention-grabbing are also part of its commercial challenge. Cineastes who are drawn to Scorsese's mature movies might be reluctant to see a film about a 12-year-old boy.

Parents, open-minded enough to take their kids to a Scorsese film, could see their younger children squirming when Hugo, which runs about two hours, delves into the history of motion picture production.

But audiences of all ages should be more than a bit intrigued to see what one of American movies' most celebrated directors can do with a family film. Like Georges Méliès, who began his show business career as a magician, Hugo proves that Scorsese still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

With abundant illustrations designed to mimic filmmaking storyboards, The Invention of Hugo Cabret felt like a gestating movie, producer Graham King thought. "I knew Marty was looking to do something different — something with kids," he said.

Change of direction

Scorsese warmed to the idea, especially when a Logan draft landed as he was making 2010's Shutter Island. After he finished that psychological thriller, Scorsese began figuring out how he could approach Hugo.

The director's two daughters from two previous marriages were grown, but Francesca was a large presence in his daily life in Manhattan, and changed how he saw the world.

"You begin to perceive everything around you differently, very differently," he says, animating his conversation with bursts of laughter and hand gestures. "In a way, I've gone through it already a number of times, different times of my life, being a different person to a certain extent. And now, I said, ‘A lot of this is very interesting.' I didn't quite get it until I just had to deal with it, my wife and I."

Like Hugo, Francesca created her own dream world, and Scorsese became a player in it. "She would begin to make imaginary rooms in her own room — I'm talking about a year and a half to 2 years old — where I found myself pretending to swim across the room. And I was enjoying it. ‘Swim here! I'm over here, it's safe. Over here, be careful over here!,' imagining what she's imagining," he says, in a bungalow of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Those experiences were the equivalent of a SAT prep class for the film, as Selznick's book and Logan's screenplay are also governed by Hugo's perspective of the bustling, and potentially perilous, world around him. "The threat of violence, a comic moment, the anthropomorphism of an animal's face — all of this is an extraordinary, rich creative world," Scorsese says.

"The question in approaching Hugo was in my mind if we're going to perceive it through the boy's eyes, [we needed to see] the isolation — that was the key that attracted me to the story: the isolation of the boy."

Logan said one of the biggest challenges in adapting the novel was that even though the book was filled with movie-quality imagery, he had to convert Hugo's internal thoughts into cinematic action.

But how best to shoot Hugo? If a child has an exaggerated, hyper-real way of seeing, Scorsese wondered, how could he translate that point of view? What would bring moviegoers into Hugo's universe and allow them to physically experience the bustle of his Parisian train station?

"It just seems so magical for me to create a heightened reality, a heightened world," Scorsese says. "And not have audiences look at it from the outside." He had an idea how to get inside — 3D.

In Meliès' footsteps

Working a century later, Scorsese followed his French predecessor in using the newest tools and plunged into 3D filmmaking. "Meliès was aiming that way anyway," he explains. "There is some footage of his that's in 3D that's been preserved in France right now."

From the moment the film begins, you notice that Scorsese is using his stereoscopic cameras to give the film definable depth. The station is often filled with steam and smoke, which helps to separate foreground from background. This makes the station's hallways, passageways and galleries feel like a maze, with Hugo scurrying through it. While he concedes the technology has been misused here and there — "over the years, there's been some gimmicks" — he was certain it was the right choice after he saw James Cameron's Avatar.

"And then when you see [Hugo] in 3D, the impression you feel is you're there. You see around the person. You could feel the dust. And it transports you to another place."

Logan says that no matter how operatic Scorsese's films might be, they are connected by a common element.

"Marty is at heart an absolute humanist," Logan says. "What excites him beyond technical achievement is getting inside the souls of human beings. It could be Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, and it could be Hugo Cabret. It's what he does best."

— Los Angeles Times