"It’s difficult to watch The Great Dictator without thinking about how the world was about to be plunged into five years of war and horror, and it saturates everything with more wistful sadness than Chaplin probably could have imagined. It’s a comedy at the end of the world . . . this brief and desperate beam of optimism, laughing in the face of evil, just before everything went dark. These two Chaplin releases, as well as The Gold Rush and City Lights, are among the most amazing-looking Blu-rays I’ve seen. Could Criterion please do the same restoration work for Buster Keaton next?"

"The films that really changed my life were all the films made by Charlie Chaplin. Films like The Gold Rush. They were silent films, they were black and white. As a kid, I would just completely get mesmerized with every aspect of cinema. That kind of magic I’d never yet seen, the magic Charlie Chaplin created on screen — in terms of performances, in terms of technique, in terms of innocence, in terms of purity. I would wonder, “Is there anyone in the world who can match this?” I would see other films, and I’d think, “No, this guy is a real genius.” He makes me smile. And sometimes he moves me."

"The first one is The Gold Rush, by Charlie Chaplin. It’s the apogee of his genius. I saw that film when I was 11 or 12 years old in a cinema in Ramsgate, Kensington, and there were three people in there with me. Nothing has ever made me laugh as much as that. I remember, literally — in those days they used to have a velvet kind of cover over the balcony — and I remember hanging over and laughing at the sheer f–king brilliance of the comedy in that film. The one I saw was just black-and-white, too; this was before Chaplin put a voice-over on it, which I don’t enjoy — I don’t think it serves the film well. There are certain things in there, you know — around cooking and survival and stuff — that kind of are in my soul now, as someone who tries to tell stories too."