"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?"

"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?"

"I saw it when I was 13 and it had an amazing impact on me, I couldn’t believe something was so funny and so smart. The level of writing is so crazy; it’s a continual inspiration. It blew my mind. I was at home babysitting my younger siblings. My parents were out dancing, and it came on at 1:30 AM. I would watch Saturday Night Live, and it was on after. I thought it was a horror film to start because it’s dark and there’s the pop-pop-pop and there’s smog. In the movie, that’s their preamble thing that I missed, so I didn’t know it was a comedy."

"Man Bites Dog is a Belgian film in 1992. It’s about a film crew that starts following a serial killer around, and he’s charming and disarming and delightful, and he kills people with this film crew never interceding. The first time you see it, you’re like, “Wait a minute,” and you laugh a few times, and the second time, you laugh the whole time. It’s a bleak, dark comedy, but my god, it’s so funny. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was before the onslaught of reality television, but it makes a perfect comment on it now. It had subtitles and I still loved it. I laughed so hard."

"Number one that always springs to mind is Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. I’m sure you’re familiar with that film. It’s one of those movies which manages to combine all sorts of flavors. People tend to think of it as a romantic comedy, but actually it has some quite dark elements; the Shirley MacLaine character tries to kill herself at one point. And that’s the sort of movie, I like to think — in terms of the sort of films I would like to try and make — are films which are hard to pigeonhole. It has elements of humor, maybe, but there’s also drama in there. Billy Wilder’s one of my heroes, because I think he’s able to sort of step between different genres and make masterpieces."