27/02/2012

"This is for Martin and for Italy!", Francesca Lo Schiavo exclaims into the microphone, lifting up the Oscar which she and her husband Dante Ferretti have just received for the designing the set for Hugo. Martin Scorsese is smiling from his chair in the Kodak Theatre of L.A. An other award-winning success for European cinema.

This will be one of the 5 "technical" Oscars awarded to the great master's film in the course of the evening and the third for the Hollywood's most famous Italian couple. Ferretti won his first statuette in 2005 for The Aviator, also a fruit of collaborations with Scorsese, the second in 2008 for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd.

The set designer from the Marche region received ten Oscar nominations, and several contributions were made to the works of great filmmakers, from Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom it started in 1969 for Medea, and Federico Fellini, to Terry Gilliam, Claude Chabrol, Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg.

Ferretti defined Hugo as "the most difficult film". Most of the shooting took place in the Shepperton Studios, in England, where Ferretti supervised the construction of Hugo's world, which consists of a real size station with all its shops, the building where Méliès lives, his glass study, a bombarded building next door, the wine shop in the corner and a huge cemetery. The whole thing enhanced by period details and references that pay tribute to French cinema.

For one of the most important elements of the film, Ferretti was inspired by a personal experience: "when I was eight my best friend's dad worked with clocks", ha raccontato, and when the artist started putting them into his creations, "precious details came back to me which I had forgotten".

(Translated from Italian)