Martin Scorsese takes 3D cinema to another dimension

ALL IN ALL, Martin Scorsese hasn’t done too badly for a wee Scots boy. “That’s true, that’s true,” he says, earnestly. “My family name means ‘The Scotsman’ but it’s spelt differently, it’s misspelt. But they checked my DNA and I do have Scottish blood, from Shetland. I really, really want to go up there. It’s a base of civilisation.”

Has he ever been tempted to come and make a movie back in the old country then? After making a 3D movie, tackling the wind and ever-changing light of Scottish locations should be a breeze. He laughs. “Maybe, maybe.”

The Scottish film industry shouldn’t set a place for him quite yet, but you never know. Scorsese turned 69 last month, but shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, he’s been moving with increased urgency. Since Shutter Island last year he has made a documentary about his film-maker friend and controversial McCarthy testifier, Elia Kazan, another about writer Fran Lebowitz, and BBC2 has just screened George Harrison: Living in the Material World, an epic study of the Beatle. He’s also executive producing a second series of the wiseguys drama Boardwalk Empire and he is at the forefront of film preservation through the organisation he created in 1990, the Film Foundation. In between he spent almost nine months in Britain filming Hugo, a gorgeous 3D children’s fable which reaches out from the screen to grab your emotions.

It’s 11 in the morning, and Scorsese’s eyes are at half-mast under those famous black brows. His chair’s austere lack of comfort is clearly an additional prod towards staying awake, but he brightens as soon as the wheels of the interview start turning.

Scorsese likes to talk, especially about movies. Not only about his own – which include some of America’s most distinctive film achievements, from Taxi Driver through GoodFellas to The Departed — but just about everybody else’s, which is what makes him such a good fit for adapting Brian Selznick’s best-selling 2007 illustrated novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a fable which also salutes the inventive delights of silent cinema.

Scorsese hadn’t made a PG-rated film since The Age of Innocence nearly 20 years ago, and the reason he has ventured so far out of his comfort zone lies with his 12-year-old daughter Francesca. When she was eight, they read the book together.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to make a movie she could see, or that we could see together,’” says Scorsese, who also has two grown-up daughters from two previous marriages.

He has been more present for Francesca. When she was a child, she directed him in games of let’s pretend, making him swim across her bedroom, avoiding sharks and other predators. Now he hosts a Saturday film club for her and her friends, which includes borrowed Disney pictures but also Scorsese favourites such as The Searchers and Shane. So far, however, she hasn’t seen any of his films. Neither had Asa Butterfield, the 14-year-old who plays the titular orphan who lives in a clock tower in 1930s Paris and tries to bring a robot to life. He says: “Marty showed us lots of other films to get us into the mood of the film.” He and co-star Chloë Grace Moretz, also 14, name Taxi Driver as the film they’d most like to see when they’re older. “Maybe next year,” muses Butterfield.

Mind you, they seem to know the plot awfully well already, and later Butterfield praises Moretz for her role as Hit Girl in Kick-Ass. Isn’t he also too young to see Kick-Ass? “Rules are meant to be broken,” says Butterfield cheerfully, while his more press-savvy co-star rolls her eyes in a “you’ll learn not to say that in public” way.

Scorsese, however, was completely unaware of Kick-Ass and the controversy caused by Moretz’s knife-throwing, X-certificate-mouthed action star. In Hugo she’s a more demure figure – the British god-daughter of Ben Kingsley’s crusty Papa Georges – who has never seen a movie until Hugo takes her to see Harold Lloyd.

“Marty flew Asa and me to New York for an audition, and I kept the accent going beforehand and after the read through. Then as I left, I went back to my own voice and said, ‘See ya, Marty,’” It stopped him in his tracks,” she recalls gleefully. “He was, ‘Hey – you’re American.’”

It’s obvious that Scorsese identifies hugely with the children’s undisguised love of films, but especially with Hugo, who is forced to live apart from the Parisian bustle, watching the rest of the world from his tower.

“As a child I had asthma, still do,” says Scorsese. “But then it meant no sports. No pets. No grass. Hugo’s isolation was the key that attracted me to the story.”

Growing up in New York’s rough Little Italy, he escaped into the movie theatre and TV. Unlike most kids, his first memories aren’t of Bambi or Snow White but Singin’ In The Rain and The Bicycle Thieves. He only saw Bambi, with his aunt, when it was part of a double-bill with the far more adult Out of The Past. “I kept saying to my aunt, ‘Where’s Bambi?’ and she said, ‘Shut up, this is good.’”

This has been a year when many A-list directors have tried out 3D: Werner Herzog made the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Wim Wenders explored dance with Pina and Steven Spielberg mixed it with CGI animation for Tintin. Scorsese’s love affair goes back many more years, to watching Vincent Price in House of Wax aged 11.

“What we can do with 3D now would seem like science fiction to people who made the early 3D. But we see things in real life in depth, we live with depth, and that’s what I was looking for – when you see Hugo, you get the impression you are there.”

Scorsese says that filming with the bulky cameras was tricky and time-consuming and added to the eight-and-a-half month shoot.

Butterworth, who appears in almost every scene of the film, says: “It was very long and very repetitive and the set was boiling hot. The whole experience of working with Martin Scorsese is one I loved but it was tiring.”

Scorsese’s enthusiasm kept them from flagging but sometimes, however, even he lost the place. While watching footage, he would fret that the camera had lost focus – only to be handed the 3D glasses he had forgotten to put on. “But I do believe it’s part of a natural progression,” he says, animatedly. “The next thing will be holograms. You can have dancers amongst you in a musical, or the finest actor in the world performing Hamlet just a few feet away from you.”

As well as the future of film, Hugo looks back to its earliest exponents, drawing Georges Méliès, one of France’s most enthusiastic pioneers during the silent era, into its story. A Trip to the Moon, from 1902, is perhaps Méliès’s most recognised work, with its image of the man in the moon grimacing when a rocket lands in his eye. But despite a wildly prolific output, by the 1930s many of his films had gone up in flames – some deliberately, to extract a metal to protect the heels of women’s shoes.

The frail fortunes of film-making are also something with which Scorsese is familiar, and it has done much to shape his work as his distinctive storytelling. Two projects Scorsese really believed in – The Last Temptation of Christ and Gangs of New York – ruined him financially, forcing him to make more commercial fare, and later branch out into lower-budget prestige documentaries.

“Originally I was going to film Hugo after The Departed,” he says, “but Shutter Island came along instead. On the other hand, if I hadn’t done Shutter Island, I wouldn’t have been able to talk Sir Ben Kingsley into joining Hugo, so it all fell into place.”

He already has another project lined up – a thriller called The Snowman, whose themes of violence return him to adult territory. But Scorsese says he has many more stories to tell – even if not everyone is as enthused as his fans.

“It’s hilarious to go out to dinner with Marty and his family,” says Moretz. “He will tell you these fantastic stories – ideas, film heroes, scenes that he loves. And there’s Francesca in the background going, ‘Oh man, I have heard dad tell this a million times.’”

• Hugo is in cinemas from tomorrow.