'I was fascinated by the sleight-of-hand concept,' Scorsese recalls. That kind of imagery also fascinated Scorsese, who tells Block about his memories of watching Melies' work. 'He's got the rocket in his eye, and white goo is kind of coming down where the rocket hit the moon, and he's sticking his tongue out.' 'All of a sudden, with a cut of the camera, the rocket goes right into the eye of the man on the moon,' Selznick says. In Georges Melies' silent film A Trip to the Moon, a group of astronomers travels to the moon in a giant bullet. Brian Selznick tells NPR's Melissa Block that his book was inspired in part by Melies' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket zooms toward a moon with a human face on it. Melies was a magician before he started making movies around 1900. That's because while tracking the story of the young Hugo, the book also tells the story of the early days of filmmaking and the genius of real-life French filmmaker Georges Melies, who is played in the film by Ben Kingsley.

The film, Hugo, is Scorsese's first 3-D project, and while it marks a creative departure for the man behind The Departed, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, it still deals with familiar territory. Now, director Martin Scorsese is coming out with a film adaptation of that book.

In his 2007 children's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, author Brian Selznick tells the story of an orphan named Hugo who lives in the walls of a Paris train station and spends his time winding the clocks. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is a 12-year-old orphan whose life changes after he encounters Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley) in his magical toy store in a Paris train station.

The book hugo cabret