‘Hugo’ Press Conference Provides Insightful Answers to a Variety of Questions

Last Sunday, there was a press conference at the Ritz Carlton in New York where several members of the cast and production team spoke with members of the press. Graham King (Producer), John Logan (Screenwriter), Sacha Baron Cohen (Actor), Emily Mortimer (Actress), Chloe Moretz (Actress), Asa Butterfield (Actor), Sir Ben Kingsley (Actor) and Brian Selznick (Writer). Photos were not allowed, but the one’s attached were provided. Unfortunately, Martin Scorsese did not attend.

It was a fantastic conversation, with the best answer to the worst question at the very end.

MODERATOR:   All right, I would like to introduce Producer Graham King, John Logan, Sacha Baron Cohen, Emily Mortimer, Shirley Moretz, Asa Butterfield, Sir Ben Kingsley and author Brian Selznick.

MODERATOR:  Okay, wonderful. Let’s get started.

PRAIRIE MILLER (PRESS):  This question is for Sacha Baron Cohen. We’re more used to seeing your very irreverent and subversive side. So what was…?

SACHA BARON COHEN:  Hey, there you are.

PRAIRIE MILLER (PRESS):  So what was this different direction like for you as an authority figure and as a sexually inhibited guy this time around?

SACHA BARON COHEN:  Was that for me or for me or for Asa?   Who said I was sexually inhibited in this?  I have a bath with the dog.  What happened beneath the bubbles is our business.  What was the question again?  It was very, very long. I heard Sacha Baron Cohen.

PRAIRIE MILLER (PRESS):  Yeah, we’re more used to seeing your very irreverent and subversive side.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  Oh, yes.

PRAIRIE MILLER (PRESS):  So what was this different direction like for you as an authority figure and as a sexually inhibited guy?

SACHA BARON COHEN:  Well, there is actually, there is a bit of romance between myself and Emily’s character, which is actually the first romantic plot I’ve had that’s not been with a black prostitute or a man. So it was actually my first.  We didn’t actually have a kissing scene, but there was a bit of romance in there. So that was a little bit different.  And as for the rest, playing an authority figure, well, he’s a bumbling authority figure. And he’s dark, but he does have some beauty and softness underneath him. So a bit like my other characters. You know, he’s a mix of things. Does that answer it?  Not really.

PRAIRIE MILLER (PRESS): Yes.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  [SOUNDS LIKE] Do you want me to do more dirty?  All right. I’ll be talking more about the bath if you want.

MODERATOR:  Steven.

PRESS:  Hi, I’d like to ask Asa and Chloe if you could just describe your characters, and what you felt was the biggest challenge making this movie.

CHLOE GRACE MORETZ:  You go first.

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  Well, Hugo, he’s an orphan and because he’s had to grow up far faster than anyone else his age should have, I found it quite hard to relate to him because of all the hardships he’s gone through in his life.  So I just had to come up with false past for him that was similar to mine and relate to him in that way.  And, of course, the book that Brian wrote, I’m not really relating to him. Only over there.

PRESS:  And the biggest challenge?

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  The biggest challenge filming it and probably dealing with the crying scene were probably the hardest, but they’re draining mentally and physically.

CHLOE GRACE MORETZ:  Well, I play Isabelle and she’s actually a lot like Hugo because she doesn’t have a mom or a dad, but she has her godfather. And they’ve got, which is a kind of special relationship between her and Ben and her and [PH] Holland.  And I’d probably say the hardest part about it was I was trying to conquer the accent. That was probably the most challenging thing I had to do as a character.

PRESS:  Do you have a voice coach?

CHLOE GRACE MORETZ:  Yeah, my brother Trevor and I kind of created the voice, and we worked together on the whole thing really.

PRESS:  Thank you.

MODERATOR:  Next question.  Right there in the white shirt.

PRESS:  There is so much film history in Hugo, and I was just curious is it really burning on the cast.  Was this in the sort of curated things you want to do to watch specific things to look at some and prepare for this film?

SACHA BARON COHEN:  Well, he always does that with cast, you know, when it’s set in a specific period, and I had a whole box set of many of his films to watch.  And hours of it, really, which was hugely useful for me not only to understand his language of cinema, but also how he multi-tasked to an extraordinary degree.  When you’re watching the films, you see a great performer. But then, of course, when reading the footnotes, you realize that he wrote, choreographed, directed, edited, designed, starred in with his wife co-starring.  I think he must have got about four hours sleep a night because he then having worked in his glass studio, he then went to the musical in Paris to saw people in half, and do all these kinds of fun things like that. So, yeah, Martin really saturated us with wonderful material to watch.

EMILY MORTIMER:  I watched the film and I’m sure it did give everyone Under the Rooftops of Paris.   It was a really beautiful French film made in the 1930s at the time that the movie is set.

PRESS:  Rene Clair.

EMILY MORTIMER:  Exactly and then where it was set that’s how he tends to direct.  He doesn’t sort of tell you what to do, and guide you through every step of the performance. He just shows you all the people’s movies. He did that on Shelter Island as well.

MALE SPEAKER:  Yes, he did.

EMILY MORTIMER:  So it’s more like he just helps you to understand the world of the film by showing you other people’s films, which is his inspiration anyway.  And that movie was just so beautiful. It was all about just sort of working class people in Paris in the 1930s.  And what was so striking was how real those faces were, and how there was something incredibly mysterious and subtle about the movie but magical. But also they just looked like real people.  And, that for some reason was very helpful.  And the whole thing of what he does with this movie, and what he does when he’s sort of educating you through the process of being in one of his movies is by showing you that you only have to look to the movies that were made years and years ago to be able to find incredibly kind of radical unconventional stories and to be inspired. There’s so much there to be mined that we don’t know about, and it’s really incredible. It’s such an education.

MODERATOR:  The next question.  Rob.

PRESS:  For both Sacha, Emily and Chloe and Asa.  Martin gave you guys a great story and he established a bit of the back story, but did you guys think more in detail about the back story?  And also even the future story.  I want to see what happens in some of those, the two romances that are going on there.  Did you guys talk about it or envision a sequel.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  A sequel.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  I mean yes.  I mean certainly when I sort of approach the character of the station inspector, I wanted to know why was he so obsessed with chasing children?   Was he actually, you know, a class villain or was there reason for his malice?  And, I sat down with John and Martin and we started talking about perhaps he was World War I veteran, and maybe he was injured.  So we came up with the idea of the leg brace.  Originally, it was a false leg, which the audience wouldn’t have realized until it was going to be the first chase.  Then I was going to turn a corner and then my leg was going to fly off and go into camera in 3D.

And that was going to be the first big 3D moment. Unfortunately, practically I was made aware that I would have had to kind of strap up my leg for four months in order to do that. So we kind of abandoned that, and I started wearing a leg brace instead.  But yes, there was that whole, you know, we were trying to examine the kind of roots of evil. You know, this station inspector who is doing incredibly unpleasant things.  Why was he doing that?  We kind of realized that maybe he himself was an orphan, and was put away in a work house and that’s the kind of any structure that he knew.  And that’s what he is kind of trying to impose on these young children. So as for the future, is there a sequel? Is that what you’re asking?  I’m sure there is.

PRESS:  For the rest of you, any thoughts on that?

FEMALE SPEAKER:  I didn’t exactly know we had a romance in the movie.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  Projection, projection.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  Yeah, I think it was more of your best friend type thing.

PRESS:  [SOUNDS LIKE] That’s what friends are for.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  Oh, yeah, there you go.  We know we needed each other like a brother and sister I think.

PRESS:  Can you discuss that relationship at all?

FEMALE SPEAKER:  Yeah, it was special.  The relationship was interesting because they both needed each other for some reason. They both had something that they didn’t have as parents, and they both wanted to be loved and they needed love.  You know, I think Hugo needed someone to talk to, and someone to have close to him. And I needed someone to have an adventure with.  I think that’s really it.

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  Yeah.

MODERATOR:  Carla in the back.

PRESS:  Hi, I have a question for Sir Ben and Sacha.  Can you confirm or deny reports that you stayed in character even when the cameras weren’t rolling?  And for anyone on the panel, can you tell any funny stories if they stayed in character while the cameras weren’t rolling?

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  I think stayed in character.  I tended to stay in character because so many of many of my major scenes were with Asa.  And in order to feed that relationship because action and cut can be shockingly short, that space you have to establish a deep rapport with your fellow actors.  So I think I tended to.  Also, my shape was so defined as older George. So like it was very difficult for me to snap back into Ben because I mean it just didn’t happen. I just stayed because I was stuck with George.

So I thought I should exploit that, and allow Asa and Chloe as younger actors discover George even when the cameras weren’t rolling. And sometimes for lines off, Marty encouraged me to be really ruthless with you, didn’t he?  Because I have to push Asa away.  I have to reject him really vigorously.  Go away. And the more vigorous I am against Asa’s entering my life, the more heroic his entrance is.  So, it really helps a lot to in a sense stay in character.  It doesn’t always work.  I don’t always do that, but particularly when I’m working with much, much younger actors I think it really feeds the process.  I was pretty grumpy most of the time.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  And as for me, I mean I saw Sir Ben do it, and he’s won an Oscar. So I thought I’ve got to stay in character.

MODERATOR:  The special mike.

PRESS:  I have a question for John and any of the cast as well.  My question is since you’re all in the business of filmmaking, did making this film, writing this, and everything that you had to do, everything you had to absorb, did it give you a different appreciation of filmmaking and what you do?

JOHN LOGAN:  Yeah, absolutely it did and, you know, both my movies with Marty the Aviator and Hugo dealt with movie making as part of the texture of the piece. And, you know, Brian Selznick’s amazing novel he talks about movies as dreams, as ways to dream, as ways for all of us to dream. I know, when I was a kid growing up, that’s what they were for me because I was asthmatic.  I couldn’t go out and play. I have to be in a dark room, and watching movies on TV allowed me to liberate every thought I’d ever had. And when I read Brian’s book for the first time that’s really what struck me more than anything was it was touching the 8-year-old me.  And so, for me it was always about how does that damaged child find the place that he belongs?

BRIAN SELZNICK:  And I’m distantly related to David O’Selznick who produced Gone With the Wind and King Kong. So I grew up seeing my last name at the beginning and end of all those movies, which is always very exciting.   And so I’ve always loved movies, but it wasn’t until I started working on Hugo that I discovered Rene Clair, and actually under the roofs of Paris was one of the most important movies I watched making the book years earlier. And those [PH] strongs that I did they were taken directly from film stills from Under the Roofs of Paris.  Hugo’s father is one of the actors from Under the Roofs of Paris.

And so, that then led me to Jean Vigo, who then led me Francois [PH] Trufeau.  For myself, I had this amazing education in theater in French film history, and it was really incredible.  And definitely was one of my favorite parts of making the book was discovering this entire part of cinema. So when I got the call that Marty wanted to make this movie after the initial shock passed, which actually it still hasn’t entirely passed. You know, knowing that he would then, of course, have gotten all of the references that are made in the book to these movies. And then be able to use these references for the film themselves, and bring God knows what else to it. The entire history of cinema to it is amazing.

MODERATOR:  Next question.  In the back, Marie.

PRESS:  This is such a magical film.  I would like to know from the actors, when you decided to embark on this journey of acting, do feel that is a magical journey?

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  Go on, sorry.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  No, you go.

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  Well, I think the core value of its magic is its fearlessness in putting wounded characters on the screen. That’s a very brave move.  It’s not very fashionable.  It’s not sugar coated.  A wounded man who is totally retired from his life. He almost committed suicide of the spirit, orphan, orphan, a girl who lost her brother in the Battle of the Somme in 1914, a dreadful way to lose a brother, and a chap who lost his leg.  Wounded, wounded, wounded, wounded, wounded. And I think that’s an incredibly bold move to make in the present context. That’s where the magic comes from. And as Sacha was saying, where’s the wound? Because if there is no wound, the healer has no function and the healer is the youngest person on the screen who pulls all these threads together.  But you won’t have an audience empathizing with you if nothing needs comforting.  It won’t happen.  So I think all of this individually paradoxically nourished that scar inside us in order to make the magic, in order to make him the greatest magician on the screen and make all the magic happen.

EMILY MORTIMER:  I was just going to say that I was so very aware that there was something magical about the whole enterprise. And so much so that I really wanted my son to be on this set. I made sure that he was and that stood there because I felt like somehow–I didn’t really know why–but in years to come he would be able to boast about having stood on that set because it felt so special. And part of it was that I knew the book already from my little boy who goes to a school in Brooklyn for which it’s practically required reading this book.  Everybody is so obsessed by it and rightly so.  And I knew how magical the book was, and then known that Martin Scorsese was the person that was going to be making that into a film. It was just such a perfect coincidence of everything.  And, I was saying yesterday that there is something about Scorsese using the latest 3D technology to push the boundaries of filmmaking in 2012 or 2011 or whatever. To make a film about the very first technology ever used to put magic on the screen over 100 years ago is just so perfect.  And somehow you get a sense of every film that was made in between [PH] Miller and Scorsese.  While watching it or while experiencing it or while even standing on the set making it, and there was just something that it did feel like special and like something that only happens once in a lifetime.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  If I could just continue that. It felt like here’s the logical extension of filmmaking that if Miller was alive that he definitely would have been using 3D.  That was the interesting thing because of the whole debate in cinema at the moment whether 3D is a gimmick or not.  Scorsese really showed that it was a logical development of the filmmaking process. And that was fascinating for us really.

BRIAN SELZNICK:  In 1931 when Under the Roofs of Paris was made, sound was still thought of as gimmick for a lot of directors. And Rene Clair didn’t want to use sound. So he used it in really weird experimental ways to help move the narrative forward. So here we have Marty doing that with today’s technology.

PRESS:  We have a couple of Scorsese veterans on stage now.  [INAUDIBLE].  And I wonder what is it like to have this broad relationship with Scorsese.  [INAUDIBLE]   You mentioned the prosthetic leg, and I wondered what other suggestions you guys might have thought that were included in the movie.

MODERATOR:  Asa.

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  Working with Marty was a completely new experience for me.  Not only was it an amazing experience, it was an amazing education as well.  Because he gave me lots of homework as he called it, in old films both by George and other old filmmakers.  Some things that inspired him to become a director. So it was amazing working in that way.  And the things Marty does on set are just so different from other directors.  For example, rather than saying do this and do that, he lets the actors come up with their own ideas to bring to the theme.  And because me and Chloe are kids and we could come up with like a truthful representation of how a child would react in certain situations rather than say an adult’s thinking of how a child would act. So it was really helpful working with him.  I learned loads.

MODERATOR:  Chloe.

CHLOE GRACE MORETZ:  Yeah, the same thing basically.  You know, not only did I grow as an actor on this film with Scorsese, I grew in my knowledge of film history, which I’ve always been a history buff.  Of course, I walked on the set knowing a little bit about it thinking oh I can have a conversation with him. And then you get into the conversation and he’s like dah-dah-dah-dah. And I’m like, “Okay, I’m not prepared for this.”  But, yeah, it was a magical experience working with him, and a magical movie with all these awesome, amazing actors. And I really wouldn’t give anything in the world to take it back.

MODERATOR:  Sacha.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  I think that’s the key about Scorsese that he’s totally collaborative, which I was surprised about.  Because I expected him to be some incredible author, which he is an author. But part of his power and part of the reason why his films are that successful and that enduring is the fact that he’s ready to collaborate fully with all his actors.  And, in fact, everyone.  So any idea that I came up with he was ready to listen to, and surprisingly–because I came up with some really absurd ideas–he was ready to try them out.  You know, to having a bath with a dog.  And one day Asa hurt his hands. He got stepped on, and he had take the day off. We had nothing to do the next day.

I was looking at some old chaplain that Scorese had given me, some unseen chaplain. And I thought maybe there is a scene of something to do with the train. Maybe his leg got caught in the train.  I don’t know if it’s in the final cuts or not.  He said, “All right, let’s try it.”  I said, “Are you sure.  It’s going to involved hundreds of extras and a moving train.”  He said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”  So he was just totally ready at each point to try out any idea however ludicrous the suggestion was, which was wearing for producer and the finances of the movie.  But for me, it was great.  It was basically like doing improvisation or sketch comedy except you have 500 extras around, and award winning designers and producers and actors. So it was a lot of fun for me.

MODERATOR:  Grace.

PRESS:  So this question is for Chloe.  So I heard during the audition for Hugo you fooled Martin Scorsese into thinking you were British.  Why and how did you pull that that trick? And also, can you do your British accent for us?

CHLOE GRACE MORETZ:  Oh, no.  Well, the movie comes out November 23^rd.  So you can see it then.  Yeah, when Marty flew Asa and I to New York to chemistry read for the role, we walked into this screening room, which was absolutely terrifying.  But we walked into this screening room, and I was fully British from like meeting Marty to the end of the audition to where I went back to my American accent.  The whole time he totally thought that I was a British actress because he had never seen any of my other movies. He had never seen Kick Ass or anything like that.  So by the time that I left, “Okay, thanks, Marty.  See you.”  He was like, “Whoa.”  He was, “So you’re American?”  I was like, “I am.”  He was like, “You fooled me, kid.”  I was like, “I did fool you. But it worked. It worked.”  Yeah, I don’t know.   Asa and I kind of I guess I just tried to mimic Asa’s type accent. So that way we were on the same kind of playing field. Yeah, so it was simple. Yeah.

PRESS:  The early film history it certainly makes this a very person film for Scorsese even though he didn’t create this by himself. So I wonder for Asa, how did it feel to be playing a character who is in a way a stand in for the young Scorsese the same way that he loved the early movies?  And then for Brian how it felt to have your creation become this vehicle for the director’s self expression for his own love of film?

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  Yeah, become Hugo was an amazing experience because before the auditions I was sort of looking up about sort of 1930s Paris, and what it was like. And when I finally got the part, and I saw the set that Dante Ferretti designed, and it was incredible. It was very Parisian and it was huge.  So looking around there was nothing that could take you out of the character. You couldn’t see a Coke bottle or litter or anything. It was completely spotless, and that was amazing doing that, and that would really help you to become the character.  And because the whole sort of backbone of the film is on cinema, and Hugo’s character, he’s sort of troubled.  He’s an orphan, but he also loves old cinema.  So it was like a younger version of Martin Scorsese, and that was amazing working in that way.  And then seeing the real version of him in working with him as it grew.

BRIAN SELZNICK:  Yeah, and I made this book thinking it could not be filmed because the book at the end of the story, the object of the book itself actually becomes part of the plot. And what happens when you turn the page because a big chunk of the narrative in my book is told with images like a movie.  But even so, it’s celebrating movies. It’s really about what happens when you turn the page, and the power of the book itself.  So I just imagined it could be a movie. And like I said, I got the call that Scorsese wanted to make it. And I though well maybe this actually can be a movie. And, I realized I never would have thought of him. Like if someone had asked me, “Who would you imagine directing this movie?”  But, of course, the second we hear his name, we all realize there was no one else who could have made this movie.

It was if I had sat for 2-1/2 years at my desk during which time in real life I was thinking I was writing something no one would read because it’s a book about French silent movies for children. Which isn’t a guaranteed best seller.  You know, but it’s as if I did all of that for Marty. And so, being able to come to this set and see the sets and actors because I think this might be the first illustrated book that Marty has adapted. I don’t think there are drawings in Age of Innocence.  I haven’t read it.  But all of these people except for Emily’s character are drawn in the book.  Emily was from John’s mind, and opens up Sacha’s character in this really beautiful way. But everyone else I drew. And when I got the cast list, and I saw who was being cast, I was like, “Oh, my God. Like they all look exactly like the people who I drew.”  And the person I was most nervous about meeting was Asa because Sir Ben is playing a real person.  But I made him up and there he was, Asa.

MODERATOR:  And Sacha.

MELISSA HANSON:  For Graham King. How did you find the book you ended up with?

GRAHAM KING:  Somebody in my office brought me the manuscript of Brian’s book, and Marty and I during the making of Departed were talking about how great it would be to make a movie that we can show to our kids.  Because he had a young daughter at the time and that was like magic. It was like this turned up.  And if there was ever a book for Martin Scorsese to direct this was it.  And, in fact, we were actually going to make it after Departed, and one thing led to another and he went off and did Shutter Island. And had about five or six really great filmmakers come to me saying they wanted to make Hugo.  But I just couldn’t take my mind out of it had to be Scorsese for this.  And so I waited, and after Shutter Island, as he said, “Let’s go for it.”  And here we are.  It’s magic.

MODERATOR:  [SOUNDS LIKE] Espechia Organdi.

PRESS:  This question is for Asa.  We were wondering what character traits of Hugo are kids going to relate to?

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  Sort of the adventurous side.  It all depends on the child’s age of younger kids who will get their adventurous side sort of him and Isabelle finding the key, the fixing the [SOUNDS LIKE] alternatives on the kids my age or they will get sort of the deepest side, the more emotional side of him and the more troubled side.  So I think kids of all ages will get different sides of him.

MODERATOR:  Rosa.

PRESS:  This is Sir Ben.  How did you get into character?  How did you prepare for your role?

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  I had the opportunity to as I said earlier watch so many of George’s films and watch him star in the films co-starring with his lively life. And I saw how acrobatic and agile and fit he was when he was making his films.  And in a sense I worked in reverse. What I focused on was how glorious his life was, and then I had an appreciation of the loss of that glory. So my preparation was in his body, how his body had to let go of being basically an athlete and a dancer. And I also mentioned to Marty the possibility of him because he did his own stunts, how many tiny injuries he sustained during his work as a star. And once you stop performing all the tiny injuries kick in. You don’t notice them when you’re performing but afterwards you do. So it was a bit of a wounded body as well.

So really in order for Asa to have something to rescue from a dark corner I had to go into that.  That was my starting point was his loss of his defeat, and then, of course, Marty going with that glorious opportunity to recreate his triumphant days when he was the peak of his power.  So I even had an opportunity to physically experience what it was like to be the flourishing George, which again gave me an enormous opportunity to jump back into that dark space out of which Asa has to rescue me.  So my preparation was studying and leaving that light and having to go into that dark toy shop corner of the railway station.

MODERATOR:  Emily.

EMILY MORTIMER:  I remember thinking gosh this is quite difficult because she’s such a sweet character.  Like when you were all getting ready to do a part sometimes it’s quite useful to think about the characters’ problems and what’s wrong with them as a way of finding out how to do it.  And this Lisette is such a sort of sweet, bright little person that that at first was sort of daunting.  But I think Sir Ben said it yesterday or the day before that that moment where she talks about her brother having been killed in the First World War, was a real clue.  And it’s such a good line. It comes as sort of a surprise but it’s suddenly so revealing about the backdrop to the whole film, which is that everybody has gone through this war.

And either indirectly or directly been sort of devastated by it, and they’re all coping in their various ways. And the way that my character is copy with the devastation and the awesome grief is by sort of running home a little faster and being very neat and orderly about it. And on the first day Marty came up to me and first of all I was pushing my cart on the railway track, the station.  And he first of all teased me and said I looked like I’d been pushing that cart for about 30 seconds, which was true. And then he said and this is a very different meeting and a very different guise from when I saw you.  And I’m married with three children and was covered in blood.  And it was in Shutter Island, and we talked for a little bit. And then we both decided that actually in every murderer there’s a flower growing, and every flower there’s a murderer somewhere.

And that’s what he gives you gives you license to do is to find as Ben was saying the lights and the darks and everything. And I was very aware of that in Shutter Island when I was playing this raving dangerous lunatic. That was the way into that was through the sort of light side of her.  There was something very sweet and vulnerable about that character. And that was a useful way of finding the dark side of her, and then the opposite was to Lisette thinking about the pain and the loss and the grief and the torment. And then working backwards from that to the light, sweet girl that you see pushing her flowers badly, [SOUNDS LIKE] and on the row with sticks.

MODERATOR:  We have time for two more questions.  The gentleman in the back in the gray shirt.  Sir, you can stand up.

PRESS:  Yes.  Good morning. This question is to the whole panel. How many of these sets were actually built to scale, and what are you most memorable moments interacting with them?  Thank you.

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  I think older sets. Other than the location, we did two weeks in Paris, which was the cinema and the film library.  Everything was the set. It was all built to scale. That’s what Dante and Marty do.   Dante is just a magician himself at creating this world. I actually went to the studios and he had a couple of walls up. And I went three weeks later and there were [SOUNDS LIKE] kunkles of the train station. He just puts it up. He creates that whole world exactly and he makes it so it’s so much easier for the actors to be in a world like that.

BRIAN SELZNICK:  When I visited the set for the first time, I was taken to the entrance of the graveyard, walked through where posters were peeling off of the wall and wines were dying up it. I walked through the entire graveyard, which is there that all these beautiful hand sculpted graves like are from Pere La Chasse were made by hand for this film. You walk through the entire graveyard. You come to the exit of the graveyard. You come to a full sized cobblestone street with buildings; an entire block of buildings was there, a full stocked wine shop on one end where you probably could have gotten drunk.  And then on the other end was a building that had been bombed in World War I that was being held up by some timber. You walked inside the building, down actual Parisian apartment building hallway, up a staircase, which I was told was designed after the staircase in the 400 Blows.  And then up into a full scale [PH] Malaise apartment.

And I had the great thrill of being put into the last scene of the movie. I got a line.  I think a lot of you saw the movie.  I’m sure you’re excited to meet me now because of that.  But Sir Ben was incredibly generous with me. I suddenly found myself next to Sir Ben saying my line to Sir Ben.  And we spent a lot of the day filming the last tracking shot in the kitchen waiting for the action and to do the three-minute tracking shot again. And the camera never goes into the kitchen, but we would open the cabinet doors and it was fully stocked with food. And we were talking about what we could cook. And inside the wall where the cameras could certainly never see were period light switches and that’s when you were saying …

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  And we knocked a little castle over to [INAUDIBLE].

BRIAN SELZNICK:  But it was like Asa was saying it’s all there and it’s all good.

SIR BEN KINGSLEY:  It’s a huge gift to us. It constantly fed us.  Between takes I used to wander around the station, and the detail was extraordinary. You never left that world, did you?  I mean it was so embracing and so sustaining, a huge gift to the actors, all to scale and not a lot of CGI really.  I mean compared to what there might have been, very little.

MALE SPEAKER:  It sounded like going to London.

MALE SPEAKER:  And Asa with the clocks and everything that you were taking care of.

ASA BUTTERFIELD:  Yeah, a lot of the clocks were actually in the train station.  So they sort of took them down, and you had to go inside then. And some of them that just sort of blow out the insides so you could walk around the hanging clock tower, which me and Chloe spent quite a lot of scenes in.  There was this big spinning thing which a lot of the time I would stand up and it would smack me on the side of the head.  And, the working clocks were incredible because they were real. You could actually wind them and they had weights on.  And it was just incredible. I mean, as Sir Ben said it was a gift to the actors to work that way.

MODERATOR:  Great. The last question.

PRESS:  Hi, back here.  I think it’s laudable to present something that’s complex and as intricate as this story is for a family audience.  But maybe my kids were more fidgety than most, but I did find myself wondering about the length. And I wonder if somebody could address that because when you break through the 90-minute barrier and, in fact, break through the two-hour barrier. And I’m trying to imagine sitting there with a room full of 8-year-olds, whether that’s a bit of an endurance test.

SACHA BARON COHEN:  I’ll say this and I have worked with Scorsese, it seems to me that Marty makes films for himself.   He is an artist, a true artist and he makes the movie that he wants to see.  So my first line in the movie had the word malfeasance in it, which I barely understood. And I said, “Aren’t you worried that some of the children won’t understand this let alone the grown ups?”  He said, “No, it’s the right word to use there.”  And he’s one of the last remaining artists that is out there.  And I think we should respect that.  The movie is not focus grouped, and it’s not tailored for a 7-year-old in Iowa or Berlin or anywhere to appreciate it.  Marty has made a work of art in the same way that Miller did.  So I think that is a beautiful thing and it’s an incredible achievement for a filmmaker still to be able to do that.  Thanks to Graham for being able to fund that.

BRIAN SELZNICK:  The book I wrote is 530 pages, and a lot of people had this same comment about the book, “Will kids be able to sit through the book?”  But I think that the story that Marty has captured on the screen is something that I do think the long lines of it as we’re saying is something that will carry kids through. Of course, there’s going to be individual kids who are fidgety. There are going to be individual adults who were fidgety during Gone With the Wind or anything.  But I think that the story will carry them along because what I’ve seen the film, of course, and we have. And I’ve talked to a lot of kids now who have seen the movie as well. The ones I have talked to have been really, really thrilled and excited about what it is.  So it’s very interesting. I’m excited.

MODERATOR:  Great. Thank you all so much.

MALE SPEAKER:  Thank you.

FEMALE SPEAKER:  Thank you.