City Lights

“City Lights. I love melodrama, but not when it’s… I hate sentimentality. So I never cry. I mostly throw up when I get to sentimental films. But I love melodrama as a structure because if it is truthful, or I think it’s truthful, then it works fantastically for me. The end scene of this film, I cry every time and I can’t help it, you know. It’s fantastic.”

“City Lights, Pandora’s Box.”

“And City Lights. Now I really have to shut up because I'm really out of time.”

“This is my friend Marty Brest's favorite movie. So amazing, the idea that people love you, they hate you, they love you, they hate you, and he made it so funny and it's so heartbreaking.”

“City Lights, what is there to say? This is one of the greatest movies of all times. The most sublime ending. You know that I have a photo even, Charlie Chaplin here at Radio City Hall in New York at the premiere, he cried. It's simply one of the absolute movies.”

“City Lights, I love so much. It's the best ending of a movie ever.”

“[Translated] Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. We did a Charlie Chaplin retrospective at the Pingyao Film Festival. I think his films are rarely seen in contemporary cinema. That kind of pure, cinematic, and charming quality, like a street Performance, that can keep the essence of the street in the film. It's becoming rarer and rarer. Very precious, City Lights.”

“[Translated] You all love this one, right? In Japanese, it's called Machi no Hi. Words have power in films, of course, but the power of visual storytelling without words is unique to cinema. No matter how many times I watch it, it's a wonderful film.”

“City Lights. Why? When I was doing Babylon, Damien Chazelle told me I had to study Chaplin’s eyes because he had the superpower of making the saddest expression and still have innocence as a kid. A classic.”