Georges Méliès Trivia
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50 free Georges Méliès trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Georges Méliès trivia quiz covers the stage magician who turned the cinematograph into a machine for dreams. The easy questions ask what he did before films, which 1902 film fired a shell into the Moon's eye, what invention he tried to buy from the Lumières, where he sold toys in old age and which Scorsese film brought him back to modern audiences. Then it works through the career: the Egyptian Hall in London, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the Animatograph rebuilt as a camera, the jammed film that produced the substitution splice, the glass studio at Montreuil and the 500-plus films that followed. The hard end is for people who know their féeries from their actualités: the Kinétographe 'coffee grinder', the One-Man Band's seven selves, the Dreyfus Affair riots, the pre-shot coronation of Edward VII, the pirated prints that sent Gaston to New York, Edison's Patents Company, the Star Film Ranch in Texas, the ruinous Pathé contract, the army melting his negatives, the Salle Pleyel gala, Louis Lumière pinning on the Légion d'honneur, and the first key to the Cinémathèque française. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon and Hugo before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our silent film, film history and special effects quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Georges Méliès is often called the father of which filmmaking craft?
Special effects
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.
Q 02In A Trip to the Moon, where does the capsule hit the Moon's face?
Eye
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.
Q 03Méliès's family had grown wealthy from what business?
Boot-making
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.
Q 04Sent abroad as a young man to improve his English, Méliès fell for stage magic in which city?
London
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.
Q 05Which Paris theatre, founded by a famous magician, did Méliès take over and run?
Théâtre Robert-Houdin
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.
Q 06Why did Méliès build his studio with glass walls and a glass roof?
To shoot by sunlight
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.
Q 07What did a ruined Méliès do with his own film negatives in 1923?
Burned them
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.
Q 08Refused a camera by the Lumières, how did Méliès get one?
Converted a projector
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.
Q 09Méliès nicknamed his patented 1896 cast-iron camera-projector his 'coffee grinder' and what else?
Machine gun
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.
Q 10About how many films did Méliès make between 1896 and 1913?
About 500
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.
Q 11According to his memoirs, Méliès discovered the substitution 'stop trick' by accident when what happened?
His camera jammed mid-take
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.
Q 12In which town just outside Paris did Méliès build his glass-walled film studio?
Montreuil
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.
Q 13Why did Méliès paint his sets, costumes and even his actors' make-up in shades of grey?
Q 21How did Méliès film the capsule underwater after its splashdown in A Trip to the Moon?
A superimposed fish tank
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.
Q 22In Méliès's The House of the Devil (1896), often called the first horror film, which creature turns into the Devil?
A bat
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.
Q 23How did Méliès make the Moon's face loom closer in A Trip to the Moon without moving his camera?
Colours filmed unpredictably
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.
Q 14In A Trip to the Moon, what happens to a Selenite struck by an astronomer's umbrella?
It bursts into smoke
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.
Q 15How did Méliès play seven musicians at once in The One-Man Band (1900)?
Multiple exposure
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.
Q 16Méliès's 1899 film series restaged which political scandal while it was still dividing France?
The Dreyfus Affair
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.
Q 17Which Perrault fairy tale gave Méliès his first major film success in 1899?
Cinderella
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.
Q 18Méliès credited which novelist's Moon-voyage tales as his inspiration for A Trip to the Moon?
Jules Verne
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.
Q 19What character does Méliès himself play in A Trip to the Moon?
Professor Barbenfouillis
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.
Q 20Who played the Moon aliens, the Selenites, in A Trip to the Moon?
Acrobats from the Folies Bergère
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.
Wheeled the actor forward
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.
Q 24The restored colour print of A Trip to the Moon premiered at Cannes in 2011 with a score by which French band?
Air
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.
Q 25Widespread US piracy of A Trip to the Moon led Méliès to open a New York office run by whom?
His brother Gaston
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.
Q 26Méliès's 1902 film of the coronation of Edward VII was unusual because it was made when?
Before the actual event
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.
Q 27In The Impossible Voyage (1904), Méliès's explorers travel by flying train to which celestial body?
The Sun
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.
Q 28Hugo (2011), the film about Méliès's last years, was its veteran director's first in which format?
3D
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.
Q 29Whose 1908 cartel, which Méliès's Star Film joined, set out to control the American film business?
Thomas Edison
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.
Q 30Star Film's American branch opened a ranch studio in 1910 to make Westerns in which city?
San Antonio, Texas
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.