50 Fun Facts About Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès is often called the father of which filmmaking craft?

Special effects. Méliès was a stage conjurer before he owned a camera, so he treated film as a new box of tricks, using stopped-camera cuts and dissolves to make people vanish, change shape and swell to giant size.

In A Trip to the Moon, where does the capsule hit the Moon's face?

Eye. The 1902 image of a pained Moon with a capsule lodged in it became an emblem of early cinema, and it still turns up on the covers of film histories and DVD sets.

Méliès's family had grown wealthy from what business?

Boot-making. Georges was expected to stay at the family factory, but when his father retired in 1888 he sold his share of the firm to his brothers and spent the money on a theatre instead.

Sent abroad as a young man to improve his English, Méliès fell for stage magic in which city?

London. He spent his evenings at the Egyptian Hall, where Maskelyne and Cooke dressed their conjuring up as comic sketches, a style he later carried straight into his films.

Which Paris theatre, founded by a famous magician, did Méliès take over and run?

Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Méliès took it over in 1888 with his share of the family business, and from April 1896 he slipped moving pictures into its nightly bill of conjuring acts.

Why did Méliès build his studio with glass walls and a glass roof?

To shoot by sunlight. He filmed in the brightest hours of the day, and his greenhouse of a stage became the prototype for European film studios throughout the silent era.

What did a ruined Méliès do with his own film negatives in 1923?

Burned them. Forced to give up his studio to pay his debts, he destroyed the negatives in his own garden, which is one reason fewer than half of his films can be seen today.

Refused a camera by the Lumières, how did Méliès get one?

Converted a projector. Méliès bought one from the British pioneer Robert W. Paul, took it apart to see how it ran and reversed the principle to build his first camera.

Méliès nicknamed his patented 1896 cast-iron camera-projector his 'coffee grinder' and what else?

Machine gun. Both nicknames mocked the clatter of the Kinétographe, the cast-iron camera-projector he patented in 1896 after the Lumières refused to sell him one of theirs.

About how many films did Méliès make between 1896 and 1913?

About 500. He wrote, designed, directed and often starred in each one himself, a one-man method that could not keep pace once larger studios began turning films out like a factory.

According to his memoirs, Méliès discovered the substitution 'stop trick' by accident when what happened?

His camera jammed mid-take. When he projected the film, he said, a bus seemed to turn into a hearse; historians suspect he really picked the trick up from an American film of an execution made a year earlier.

In which town just outside Paris did Méliès build his glass-walled film studio?

Montreuil. Méliès even put the building on screen: the workshop where the space capsule is hammered together in A Trip to the Moon is a painted portrait of the studio it was filmed in.

Why did Méliès paint his sets, costumes and even his actors' make-up in shades of grey?

Colours filmed unpredictably. On his film stock blue came out white while reds and yellows went black, so he shot everything in greys and had colour brushed on to chosen prints afterwards by hand.

In A Trip to the Moon, what happens to a Selenite struck by an astronomer's umbrella?

It bursts into smoke. Méliès stopped the camera, pulled the performer out of shot and fired a smoke charge in his place, the same cut-and-swap he used to make stage assistants vanish.

How did Méliès play seven musicians at once in The One-Man Band (1900)?

Multiple exposure. He played each musician in turn on one strip of film, rewinding it for every new part, and had to match his timing and position from memory on each pass.

Méliès's 1899 film series restaged which political scandal while it was still dividing France?

The Dreyfus Affair. Méliès took the captain's side and showed him as a wronged man; he later recalled supporters and opponents coming to blows at screenings, though no report from 1899 confirms it.

Which Perrault fairy tale gave Méliès his first major film success in 1899?

Cinderella. Its run in fairgrounds and music halls on both sides of the Atlantic pushed Méliès away from one-minute trick films and towards the longer staged stories that led to A Trip to the Moon.

Méliès credited which novelist's Moon-voyage tales as his inspiration for A Trip to the Moon?

Jules Verne. The giant cannon is his, but scholars trace the film's parade of comic set pieces to an 1875 Offenbach stage spectacle of the same title, which was itself a spoof of the novels.

What character does Méliès himself play in A Trip to the Moon?

Professor Barbenfouillis. He is the bearded president of the Astronomers' Club who proposes the voyage, and at the end he gets everyone home by hanging from a rope to tip the capsule off the Moon.

Who played the Moon aliens, the Selenites, in A Trip to the Moon?

Acrobats from the Folies Bergère. They tumble across the lunar set in cardboard-and-canvas suits, and Méliès said those costumes were a main reason the film cost far more than his others.

How did Méliès film the capsule underwater after its splashdown in A Trip to the Moon?

A superimposed fish tank. Méliès moved a cardboard cut-out of the capsule behind an aquarium stocked with tadpoles and streams of bubbles, while the waves of the splash just before it are real sea.

In Méliès's The House of the Devil (1896), often called the first horror film, which creature turns into the Devil?

A bat. It flaps into a castle and becomes Mephistopheles, who conjures up ghosts and witches until a cavalier drives him off with a crucifix; the three minutes were made to amuse, not to frighten.

How did Méliès make the Moon's face loom closer in A Trip to the Moon without moving his camera?

Wheeled the actor forward. The Moon is a man's face poking through black velvet, hauled up a ramp on a pulley-drawn chair, the same rig that swells Méliès's own head in The Man with the Rubber Head.

The restored colour print of A Trip to the Moon premiered at Cannes in 2011 with a score by which French band?

Air. The duo, who had made their name with an album called Moon Safari, then grew their score for the short film into a full record, Le voyage dans la lune, released in 2012.

Widespread US piracy of A Trip to the Moon led Méliès to open a New York office run by whom?

His brother Gaston. To register each new film for American copyright he deposited paper prints of it at the Library of Congress, and those deposits are why many Méliès films still exist.

Méliès's 1902 film of the coronation of Edward VII was unusual because it was made when?

Before the actual event. Cameras were barred from Westminster Abbey, so Méliès staged the ceremony in France with lookalikes; when the king fell ill and the date slipped, the finished film had to wait too.

In The Impossible Voyage (1904), Méliès's explorers travel by flying train to which celestial body?

The Sun. It yawns and swallows their train whole, and when the heat proves too much the travellers hide in the train's icebox and are promptly frozen solid instead.

Hugo (2011), the film about Méliès's last years, was its veteran director's first in which format?

3D. The newest screen trick of its day was used to honour the man who invented the oldest ones, and James Cameron called the result the best use of the format he had seen.

Whose 1908 cartel, which Méliès's Star Film joined, set out to control the American film business?

Thomas Edison. His Motion Picture Patents Company pooled the camera patents and kept raw film for its members, and the rivals who went west to escape it helped to make Hollywood the film capital.

Star Film's American branch opened a ranch studio in 1910 to make Westerns in which city?

San Antonio, Texas. The American branch moved there for winters warm enough to film all year, and hired local ranchers and cowboys to ride in Westerns such as The Immortal Alamo.

A distribution deal with which rival French studio cost Méliès his independence and ended his film career?

Pathé. It bankrolled his last films but kept the right to recut them, handing one to his old rival Ferdinand Zecca; the films flopped and Méliès was left with debts he could never repay.

During World War I, hundreds of Méliès's films were melted down and their celluloid turned into what?

Shoe heels. The prints were stripped of their traces of silver and the celluloid went to shoe French soldiers, while the army turned his main studio into a hospital for the wounded.

The forgotten Méliès sold toys and sweets in which Paris station, known for an 1895 train that crashed through its wall?

Gare Montparnasse. The kiosk belonged to his second wife, and it was behind its counter that a film journalist recognised the old man in the 1920s and set his rediscovery in motion.

Whom did Méliès marry in December 1925?

Jehanne d'Alcy, his long-time mistress. She was the woman he made vanish in his first trick film in 1896, and she had been performing in his theatre's illusions ever since he took it over.

The film Hugo is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a 2007 illustrated novel by which author?

Brian Selznick. He tells much of the story in full-page drawings, and in 2008 it became the first novel to win the Caldecott Medal, a prize meant for picture books.

Louis Lumière presented Méliès with which honour in 1931?

Légion d'honneur. The medal came when Méliès was 69 and working a station kiosk, and the man presenting it belonged to the very family that had refused to sell him a camera 36 years earlier.

In 1932 the film industry housed the penniless Méliès in its retirement home in which suburb, now known for its airport?

Orly. The château there was a rest home for film veterans, and Méliès wrote that his greatest satisfaction was knowing he would never again go a day without bread and a roof.

Henri Langlois, who befriended the aged Méliès and rescued his films, co-founded which film archive in 1936?

The Cinémathèque française. Langlois visited Méliès on his deathbed, then gathered what prints of his films he could still find and oversaw their restoration.

Méliès died in January 1938 within a day of which fellow pioneer, the father of the animated cartoon?

Émile Cohl. He too ended his life in poverty, but where Méliès had been rediscovered and honoured, Cohl's pioneering cartoons went largely unrecognised in his last years.

In which Paris cemetery is Méliès buried?

Père Lachaise. Shortly before he died Méliès showed two young visitors a drawing of a champagne bottle popping its cork and told them to laugh with him and for him.

Which director made Hugo, the 2011 film that dramatises Méliès's later life?

Martin Scorsese. It was a radical departure for a director known for gangster pictures: a family fantasy, made by a man who has long campaigned for the rescue and restoration of old films.

Who plays Méliès in Hugo?

Ben Kingsley. He re-enacts the shooting of Méliès's fantasies on rebuilt sets, and the old films glimpsed on screen are the real thing, not imitations.

Which film beat Hugo to Best Picture at the 2012 Oscars?

The Artist. Each film went home with five awards, and both were love letters to the silent era: one a story about Méliès, the other a black-and-white picture with almost no spoken words.

Which band's 1996 video for 'Tonight, Tonight' was heavily inspired by A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage?

Smashing Pumpkins. The video sends a couple to the Moon by airship, has them rescued by a ship named the S.S. Méliès, and won Video of the Year at the 1996 MTV awards.

The Google Doodle honouring Méliès in May 2018 was the company's first in which format?

360-degree virtual reality. The short let viewers look around inside a Méliès-style stage of tricks, and it went up on 3 May to mark the day one of his last films opened in 1912.

Which pioneering American director said of Méliès, 'I owe him everything'?

D. W. Griffith. The tribute came from the very man whose close-ups and cross-cutting had made Méliès's fixed camera and painted stages look old-fashioned by the 1910s.

What was the title of Méliès's very first film, a copy of an early Lumière subject?

Playing Cards. The one-minute film simply shows Méliès and friends at a garden table: the future master of screen trickery began by copying the Lumières' slices of everyday life.

In one of Méliès's last films, made in 1912, explorers fly an 'Aero-Bus' to which destination?

The North Pole. The Conquest of the Pole spoofed the polar expeditions then filling the newspapers, and its showpiece is a towering frost giant that snatches up an explorer and swallows him.

What forced the young Méliès to leave his first school, just outside Paris, around 1870?

It was shelled in a war. The school was hit during the Franco-Prussian War, and he was moved to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he filled his exercise books with caricatures of his teachers.

An abridged A Trip to the Moon serves as the prologue to which Best Picture winner of 1956?

Around the World in 80 Days. Producer Mike Todd had the newsman Edward R. Murrow introduce the 1902 clips on screen before the story began, a prologue that was cut from later re-releases.