Here are some backstage comments gathered from Hugo’s cinematographer Bob Richardson and VFX supervisors Rob Legato and Ben Grossmann (pictured above with Alex Henning [l]) along with Rango director Gore Verbinski:

Can you talk about working in 3-D? This is not the first 3-D film to win, but it’s unusual to get recognized with 3-D.

Bob Richardson: You’re right. I think the odds of winning are extraordinarily small. I was the crystal ball didn’t work this way. I know it worked that way for Mark Wahlberg, but for me, I didn’t see it.

Where do we go now, dramatically, with 3-D now that you’ve paved the way?

BR: That’s a huge question, but I don’t think there’s any limits for it. 3-D is a very solid step. I believe it’s 15, 20 percent, give an arbitrary percentage. The advantage is a tool towards what filmmakers can use, if used, as just that, as a tool, not as a gimmick. There’s an end. I do believe it will alter that, but, technically, I don’t believe we can go into that here, ’cause I could go on for an hour…

This was a marriage of visual effects and 3-D. Talk about that marriage.

Rob Legato: What we are trying to do with the 3-D of the movie itself is to basically extend the art form of cinema by using the depth that you get and every shot was designed to take advantage of the depth that we would enhance the model of the story. So, every shot was literally made to be in 3-D and designed to give you some depth or emotional response from it.

Ben Grossmann: And there’s a lot of science behind it, but we try to take the science and distill it down to something that is so simple that it doesn’t interfere with your instinctive creativity, so you can hear Marty or Dante or Bob, and say what they feel the shot should emote.

What does this win mean about the state of visual effects and the appreciation of visual effects at least by the Academy?

RL: There’s a perfect blend and ours does not stick out but assists that and becomes part of the art form that the Academy sort of growing up with the visual effects world, and saying, we are now going to also appreciate the art of what you tried to achieve, what’s literally on screen.

Talk about the unorthodox approach of putting all the actors in one room.

Gore Verbinski: I don’t know any other way to direct actors. I want them to act and react. I suppose it I think it made it feel like it was occurring and we encouraged line overlaps and we encouraged people to be out of breath. So we really were kind of paranoid of the computer making things clinical, and it so lends itself to perfection. So suddenly you had the feeling I guess in the soundtrack that there was a tortoise talking to a lizard, because Johnny was talking to Ned Beatty and they were actually playing the scene together. So I think there’s there’s something in there. There’s some sort of DNA underneath it all. But ultimately it was just a fear of having somebody sit with a bit of text in front of a microphone. I mean, I haven’t done that since I was selling sugar water, Budweiser, you know, or whatever, doing commercials, but that’s so distant from getting a performance.

What is the take away now that you’re back to live action?

GV: They’re two completely different hats. I suppose underneath all of it it’s just finding a story you want to tell in the same way you would if you were sitting around a campfire or something. But completely different. I mean, there are no gifts in animation. We have to fabricate everything, including the anomalies, and yet now I’m two days into shooting a live-action picture. I actually go back tomorrow to shoot, and there’s chaos and you can’t orchestrate things exactly how you want them, but when events happen, they’re set in stone and you’re done. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s just every aspect of it is so different.”