Photo: Julien Hekimian/WireImage
Chloë Grace Moretz received an early-age cinematic education from none other than Martin Scorsese himself.
In a new interview with The A.V. Club published Thursday, Moretz, 25, called working with the famous director on 2011's Hugo an "all-encompassing" experience.
"He is such a cinephile, and he really imparted that knowledge to me, just in the time that I got to spend with him," the actress said in the interview. "One of the first things he did when I showed up to start preproduction is he had a big box dropped off, and it had probably 25, 30 movies in it."
Moretz said that Scorsese told her to watch "all of these" movies before they started production on Hugo, which follows Asa Butterfield's orphan Hugo Cabret in early 1930s Paris.
"The movies that he gave me were different than movies he gave [Butterfield]," Moretz told the outlet. "So we had to do our homework, and then he would basically pop quiz us on it. He'd be like, 'So, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?' He really got our muscles flexing."
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Though Hugo came nearly four decades into Scorsese's career, Moretz said he has "more pep in his step than any other director I've worked with" as she recalled the experience.
"He was gung-ho every day — more so than, like, us as kids," Moretz told The A.V. Club. "And at the age of 11, 12 years old, that is an absolute dream — with someone who, to me, was so much so an adult and had been around for so long, talking to children."
"He treated us as equals, and he really allowed us to have a conversation and cared about our opinions on the projects that he showed us," she added in the interview.
In September, Moretz told Hunger Magazine that "everything shifted" in her life when her 2010 breakout film Kick-Ass opened and she found herself famous at 12 years old.
The actress described that time in her life as "kind of a distant memory, in the sense that I was a kid and 90 per cent of the time no one would really bother me."
"But after Kick-Ass, the first time I experienced paparazzi, it was 10 to 15 adult guys surrounding a 12-year-old girl," Moretz told the outlet, remembering a specific interaction with photographers. "They pushed my mom and she ended up falling into traffic – she didn't get hurt, but the situation was really chaotic."
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"It's an assault on all the senses, with screaming and flashes," she added. "I got into the car afterwards and I just burst into tears. I think that's my marker of before and after."