“He was also the first multi-talented auteur who wrote the movie, painted the sets, acted, and was his own editor and VFX supervisor. He did everything. When you study the work, you see what a genius and forward thinker he was, all the way back to his first films in 1896. There was no such thing as movie trickery before him.
“The first meeting I had with with Hugo Director Martin Scorsese, we talked about the scene where Hugo fixes a mechanical toy mouse that he presents to Méliès, having made it work better than originally designed. Marty said, “What if we did this stop motion?” My response was, “Well, it’ll look like stop motion. We don’t need to do it that way unless you want it to specifically look that way.” Then he said, “That’s exactly what I want it to look like.”
And on it goes, describing 3D dailies, getting the gravity of flying coal cars right and how they handled color timing long distance.