Original subtitles

How do you do, sir? I'm Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin. You sent me a telegram.

Butte, Montana.

You've hired me for a year, Mr Sennett.

You can't be Chaplin.

The guy I hired did the best comedy drunk I ever saw.

But he was old. I don't pay 100 a week to juveniles.

Another one, boss? No, no, we'll move on.

Mr Sennett...

There can be no argument that Charles Spencer Chaplin

is the most iconic figure in movie history.

Through his silent film persona as the Tramp

and his dazzling talent behind the camera,

he transformed cinema into an art form.

So if nothing else, it is an act of great daring

to take on such a man.

With Chaplin, director Richard Attenborough does much more.

This is a passionate, richly detailed biopic

of one of cinema's founding fathers.

What is it about the life of Charlie Chaplin

that makes him such a worthwhile subject for a biopic?

Well, Charlie Chaplin does encompass almost all of the 20th century.

So the events of his life cover the key events

of one of the most tumultuous centuries.

Also, he is a particular kind of man,

and he's the kind of man that lends itself well to biopics

in that he's driven, he's passionate, he's damaged,

and therefore, the decisions he makes

are not necessarily the decisions we'd make.

He's incredibly famous as a result, but it doesn't make him happy. He...

These are all the great things for a biopic.

The coming from nowhere, in his case, extreme poverty,

the getting to somewhere, and it not giving you what you want.

Hm?

OK.

You might be Chaplin after all.

In a sensational central performance,

Robert Downey Jr portrays Chaplin both on and off screen,

from teenager to octogenarian,

convincingly capturing both his outward glamour and inner turmoil.

This is a highly textured portrait of a highly complex artist.

Charlie Chaplin remains, I think,

one of our great geniuses of the art of motion pictures,

and even people who don't know much about him

probably recognise the iconic image of him as the Little Tramp

with his moustache and cane.

And so when Richard Attenborough makes this film,

which encompasses not just the biography of Chaplin,

but really a history of the early part of Hollywood

and silent pictures going into talkies,

he is sort of introducing that to a brand new audience in the '90s.

Charlie Chaplin is vitally significant

in the evolution of cinema. He is, in fact,

one of the most important figures in the early period of Hollywood.

He was the man who took basically silent comedy,

which was relatively unsophisticated,

and dragged it into the 20th century

with a greater deal of sophistication

and also social conscience.

He was able, somehow, through his character of the Little Tramp,

to engage with the audience in a way that hadn't been done before,

because behind that figure,

with whom many people could identify,

because, of course, these films, the great films,

were made during the Great Depression,

he could then not only send himself up,

but he could also show the spirit of someone who was down but not out.

And it's also an extraordinary time for mankind, isn't it?

This is technological change. There's the invention of an art form,

but the period in which Charlie Chaplin sort of comes of age

is sort of the move into the industrial century, isn't it?

Well, it's the industrialisation of the arts.

I mean, we've had the industrial revolution in the 19th century,

and where Chaplin is, it's at the point where creative arts

are becoming industrialised. In particular, we see him in Hollywood

at a time when it begins like a factory

and very gradually becomes an artistic endeavour.

But he's encompassing how ideas about what we do

with all this machinery to create something beautiful,

something funny, something tragic,

he's critical in helping us understand

how to use things like a movie camera

and make something out of it that isn't simply

knocking out 20-minute short films.

And who's this sitting on top of the world?

Why, it's none other than Charlie Chaplin,

back in the old Keystone days when his pathetic little figure

first taught millions of grouches how to smile.

And here we see him, a couple of million dollars later,

but you'll notice there are silver threads among the gold.

We get the many shades of a remarkable life,

the rise from London poverty to Hollywood fame,

the pursuit of all the possibilities of film and its attendant stardom,

and also the womanising and political views

that tested his welcome in America

and eventually would bring about his downfall.

Chaplin as a film has all of the beats

that you would want from a biopic or from a film from this period,

which is lavish period detail,

the glamour of Hollywood bygone times,

the sort of idea that the creative process

is a difficult and costly one for the artist.

And, of course, Chaplin's life was incredibly glamorous.

He was the first really major international film star

and one of the most famous men in the world.

And the art form was so new that he sort of lived out

how that would affect the future and what that meant to people.

This is indeed

a very emotional... moment for me.

You're all here, and it was realised,

and I want to take this occasion

to thank you

and to express, if I possibly can in words, although words relatable,

I can't express the wonderful friendship,

this marvellous family and love I've felt

ever since my arrival here.

I can't tell you how much it has meant to me

to know that I've had such staunch, loyal friends.

It's wonderful to be back in my country, amongst my people.

Hear, Hear!

Charlie Chaplin is an ideal subject for a film

because, of course, he is a creature of the cinema.

Not only that, he had such a full life

that it's sort of stuffed with incident.

There's also a great rags to riches story,

which, of course, is one of the great narrative arcs

of any biography or any biopic.

So there's everything that you need to make something

that is not only relevant to the subject itself,

I mean the man himself, but also has a kind of meta interest

in the fact that it's about the creation

of a certain cinematic style.

But it's also a risk, isn't it, taking on the most iconic figure

- in film history? - Yes, I mean, he was, well, for the '20s and '30s,

he was probably one of the most famous men in the world.

And he is also a particular kind of performer.

He's very skilful, very precise.

So to put someone on screen trying to imitate him,

you can't imitate Chaplin, you can't,

"Oh, well, we'll do something that's a bit Chaplin-style."

You have to be able to be sure that the actor, the performer,

is able to have that level of precision about comedic timing

that Chaplin had that would make the simplest things funny,

which is incredibly hard. There's a reason why

there's really only one Charlie Chaplin

and that's because it's very hard to do what he did.

What do you think makes for a good biopic,

just in the general sense of the genre?

I think a good biopic has to be laced with tragedy.

We are not going to go to the cinema

to watch someone become incredibly wealthy and live happily ever after.

That's not what we like.

We are aware that with the deals that we do for fame,

it's like the blues singers at the crossroads,

the deals that we do for fame bring about great costs.

But also, we're also aware that artists are normally damaged,

that there's something they're carrying with them.

To want to do this in that sort of way, that obsessive way,

they're driven by something. And we're fascinated,

what is it that drives an artist?

And with Chaplin,

it begins, and certainly the film argues it begins,

with his poverty-stricken upbringing,

with his mother going to the madhouse,

and with him falling in love with a girl who he never sees again.

So there's a lot of tragedy at the beginning

which he's really unable to resolve. He's always trying to find a way

to use the money he has to find the happiness he's lost.

We also get a fabulous portrait of Hollywood's sunlit infancy

and the changing face of a nation

across the first half of the 20th century.

The little man makes for a big subject.

He was the FBI, old darling.

Said he knew what a loyal American I was,

wondered if everyone else felt the same way.

I just sat there and let him work his way around to you. Which he did.

He asked were you a member of the Communist Party?

I said that was an absolute impossibility.

- Because I love America. - Because you're too cheap to pay the dues.

It's remarkable. Your timing and work is flawless.

In life, it's the reverse.

In 1992, Attenborough was celebrating 50 years in the film industry,

both as star and director.

He specialised in transforming real lives into epic dramas,

with Winston Churchill,

apartheid martyr Stephen Biko,

and an Oscar-lauded life of Gandhi behind him.

When a biopic of American revolutionary hero Thomas Paine

fell apart, he was at a loss where to turn next.

Richard Attenborough, by the time of making Chaplin in 1992,

was a recognised and beloved veteran of the motion picture industry,

both in front of the camera and behind it.

He had starred in the indelible role of Pinkie in Brighton Rock

back in the '40s, and went through doing a series

of amazing war pictures,

and then went on to direct films like Gandhi,

which would win him Best Director in 1983.

Richard Attenborough's reputation in 1992 was,

after 50 years in the business, absolutely unassailable.

He was actually a kind of national treasure, to be honest.

Of the 12 films that he actually made,

only three of those are not based on real people or real events.

So he was very attracted to real lives

and tracing their kind of trajectory

over often many, many years.

He is, you know, the archetypal biopic director.

Essentially, he almost invented the form, didn't he?

Yes, he did. I mean, he invented the form

with films about Winston Churchill, Young Winston,

concentrating on a very specific period of his life.

This is the most interesting thing about the film Chaplin

is it stands out from his biopics.

He does Young Winston, he does Biko, and he does Ghandi,

and later he would go on to do Shadowlands,

but these are key figures in the 20th century again.

You know, obviously Churchill, Biko is an anti-apartheid campaigner,

a critical anti-apartheid campaigner.

And these are people who bring about change.

Without them, we would have a different world today.

And so that's what interests us.

And so Chaplin's decisions change art forever,

but he doesn't know that. He's unaware.

What he's doing is he is being driven by the thing that hurts

and the desire for some kind of peace.

And that is why we watch. Because if we just had someone

writing a great song and becoming famous, great, we don't care.

It was Diana Hawkins, Attenborough's long-term assistant,

who came up with the answer.

She drew up a list of everything she thought Attenborough looked for

in his world-changing life stories,

and something closer to home.

At the bottom of the list, she scribbled "CC."

When Attenborough realised she meant Charlie Chaplin,

he leapt at the chance to celebrate

the supreme figure of his own art form.

Sir Richard Attenborough had actually made the acquaintance

of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s, and like many who were in cinema,

was a huge admirer of his.

So he, I guess, had, on some level, it in the back of his brain

and loved Chaplin very much.

But it hadn't been at the forefront of his thoughts

and he had recently had a project fall through

and was feeling quite depressed about it.

So enter his long-time publicist and assistant

and creative collaborator, Diana Hawkins.

She, knowing that he loved Chaplin,

and feeling that actually if he were to take on that project,

that all the best talent in Hollywood would be drawn to it

because of the subject and how beloved Chaplin was,

she put a list on his desk

and floated the idea of Chaplin to him. And that was the beginning.

And she kind of graduated from being a publicist

to being credited as a producer and co-writer on Chaplin.

Chaplin and Attenborough met, they knew each other briefly,

towards the end of Chaplin's life. And he was obsessed by him.

But he'd come up himself through a very different kind of route

into acting. One of his early roles was Pinkie in Brighton Rock,

which is definitely not a Chaplin role, it's a psychotic killer.

Really, really mesmerising actor.

And he was able to play an enormous range of characters.

He could play comedy, he could play hard working-class,

he could play posh, he had an enormously diverse range of talent.

So he understood the challenge of acting

and he understood the possibilities of acting.

But gradually, he became more and more interested

in production and directing,

beginning with Oh! What A Lovely War, which is 1969,

and then moving more into his biopics,

until by the 1980s, he was rarely acting, if so, more cameos, I think.

Do you think there's sort of an added resonance, though,

in the fact that Attenborough is one of the most famous actor/directors

who there's ever been, taking on someone he reveres

as much greater than even him, but it's a love song to the very art form

and industry that Attenborough belonged to.

Yes. And, I mean, it's a risky thing to do.

It's typically a truth in film and television

that the general public don't want to see films or television

about people who make films and television.

But people who are in that industry, they find the artist

and they want to explore them.

Attenborough had known Chaplin in his dotage.

They had met by chance at a restaurant in the French Riviera.

The younger director would drop by

whenever Chaplin was at the Savoy in London,

listening to his stories, catching the note of sadness.

Years later, getting his daughter, Geraldine Chaplin, on board

was key to gaining the approval of Chaplin's widow, Una.

Her one condition was that she had nothing to do with it.

She entrusted Attenborough with her husband's legacy.

He then acquired the rights to two books,

Chaplin's autobiography, and David Robinson's biography,

very well regarded, in order to be able to start thinking about this,

what would be a grand and, in fact, rather difficult project.

But what he wanted to do first of all, his initial idea,

was to make a television mini-series,

because he felt that the project was too big

to be contained within one movie.

He went to Universal Studios, they initially liked the idea,

and they agreed in principle.

He had, on the back of the huge success of Gandhi,

got a three-picture deal with Universal.

So he knew he had to make three movies. So he set about making...

I mean, Gandhi he'd been working on for 18 years,

so he must, to some degree, have felt

a level of creative sort of completeness and exhaustion,

to looking around for something, "What can I do?"

To find that, he then was committed to that.

You know, not the same level of time, but the same level

of absolute defiant determination to deliver the project.

You would've thought Attenborough would've had the keys to the kingdom

after the success of films like Gandhi and his overall career,

but he struggled with Universal

when he approached them for the idea of Chaplin.

They didn't really feel that this dusty old figure

was someone that was relevant any more.

They assumed audiences wouldn't be interested.

Tom Cruise, who was initially chosen for the part, turned it down.

And the person that Attenborough wanted instead

was a young actor called Robert Downey Jr,

who had been in a few things but didn't have

a huge amount of star power behind him just yet.

And so there was a lack of confidence on the studio's part.

Also, to complicate matters further,

he wanted a $30 million budget for it,

which he needed in order to capture this elaborate world,

over a long period of time, as well.

So the production actually stopped,

or pre-production stopped, for about ten months.

As convinced as Attenborough was that he had the perfect subject,

Hollywood was wary of such an expensive project.

There was the fear that Chaplin might not translate to modern times.

Initial plans for a mini-series were shelved.

Then Universal pulled the plug

as they were building sets at West Fillmore in California.

Attenborough had to take his begging bowl around Hollywood

to save his film.

It was blockbuster indie Carolco

who scented awards potential in the lavish biopic.

Attenborough had a very difficult time making Chaplin to begin with,

and getting it off the ground, because Universal Pictures,

first of all having sort of got cold feet about it,

then halved the budget. They said,

"You'll have to find the rest yourself."

Attenborough went to Columbia and they turned him down flat.

He then thought, "Where can I go?"

He went to a studio, Carolco, run by Mario Kassar.

Carolco was known for Rambo films,

and they made a lot of money through Rambo and Schwarzenegger movies,

and they, unbelievably, said, "We will finance the whole film."

They probably saw it as a prestige product.

It was something that would give them respect and kudos,

having made vast amounts of money

from, you know, sort of shoot-em-ups.

All of my fear and everything came up before doing this film

because this was like saying,

"Are you... Can you really do

what you've always hoped and wanted to do?"

So it's like, you know, it was like a real judgement day for me.

But what did you hope and want to do?

I hoped I could...

I could bring him to life on screen.

And I wanted to...

I wanted to do it for myself and for Richard,

who had had the faith to give me the opportunity.

Naturally, there were big names in the frame to play Chaplin.

Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.

26-year-old Robert Downey Jr,

one of Los Angeles' brat-pack generation,

won the part the old-fashioned way, in a screen test.

Nearly tripping on his way in, he ballet-danced around the room,

moving in and out of character as the Tramp.

It was the way he moved that convinced Attenborough.

The fact that he and Chaplin looked uncannily alike also helped.

Why are you so worried? Me?

Oh-ho-ho! I haven't a care in the world!

I'm the oldest action star in the business and talkies are coming.

What the hell have I got to be worried about?

That's talking, Charles.

Talking! Talking.

Can you imagine the Tramp talking? It's the future, Charlie.

Not in my lifetime.

Talkies!

It'll never catch on.

Talkies!

Talkies?

Talkies!

A perfectionist, Chaplin first rehearses his routines

in front of the camera, so he may later study

and improve every gesture.

This rare film, a rehearsal without make-up for a scene in City Lights,

shows how carefully Chaplin develops his exquisite precision.

Downey was well aware he was taking on an icon.

He worked with film historians, vocal teachers and movement coaches.

He learned how to take a fall, to walk with splayed feet,

or simply how Chaplin sat in a chair.

All of it had to feel effortless,

that languorous, dishevelled elegance,

those madcap, slapstick routines.

His entire body had to become Chaplin.

Moreover, this isn't just a convincing version of the figure

we see on the screen, but the man we never knew,

out of character, wrestling with his art.

Now, you mentioned briefly that Robert Downey Jr won the part

in probably the most traditional way there is, he did a screen test.

Can you just tell me a bit more about that very famous screen test,

and what it was that Attenborough saw in him?

Well, I mean, the screen test started with an accidental trip,

that he walked in front of the camera and genuinely,

unintentionally, almost fell over.

That didn't necessarily immediately translate

and Attenborough thought it was deliberate. Excellent.

And then Robert Downey Jr used sort of dance techniques

and he moved almost as a ballet dancer.

And that's what... really what the Vaudeville

and the Music Hall slapstick routines were,

is they were choreographed as if they were dance.

So he saw that ability to move like a dancer,

which was critical for inhabiting Chaplin.

He also looked a bit like him. That was very, very important.

I mean, that does a lot of work for you,

if you've got a certain physical resemblance.

But the performance was just, he had a little, and it wasn't quite there,

well, of course it wasn't there, it took him a year

to get to that stage where he was ready to perform,

- but he had a quality. - Yeah. And once he'd seen that quality,

that ability to be both a bit tragic and funny,

then Attenborough stuck with him,

despite the lack of financing as a result.

No, wait, wait, hold it. Keep it going.

Maybe it's not so crazy after all.

Photographer! Henry! Chase him around the camera!

OK, put him in line.

Big reaction! Big reaction! Who is this?

Stay down, Henry, stay down!

Groom, look jealous. Jealous.

You can do better than that, can't you? Pride!

Now, Mabel, give the Tramp the eye. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. Matron, you're a real hoity-toity. Who is this bum?

Good, very good.

Downey Jr shows a really natural and instinctive ability

to switch between Chaplin the performer,

which was a very important thing when there's a real persona

behind him in those early silent years,

and Chaplin the man, who was a very serious artist,

who was someone who was naturally haunted

by some of his past and childhood experiences

and who put that into his work, and who was a major perfectionist,

who did things in the early wild days of Hollywood

that were truly pioneering, but spent much longer amounts of time

than the quick sort of slap-dash way that they made films back then,

was sort of in opposition with.

And so Downey Jr encompasses both of those sides of Chaplin,

rather than just playing to a crowd who might only see the stereotype.

The choice of Robert Downey Jr was quite controversial

because he wasn't a big star.

He was recognised, but, you know, he would never...

he'd never led a film. The two films he had done before Chaplin

were Soap Dish and Air America,

and he was a sort of second lead, or even third lead in that.

He was on his way up, but he was by no means a sort of marquee name.

Once you've seen Robert Downey Jr play Chaplin,

it's quite obvious that nobody else could have played it like him.

He is absolutely perfect.

It's not that he was born to play the role, in spite of what he says,

it was that he worked so hard to get it right,

and he took all the right choices.

He got the voice right for a start off.

His English accent is absolutely impeccable.

But he got the physical comedy, the timing.

He could do the man with the Chaplin mask,

the Little Tramp mask, perfectly, and when he took the mask off,

he could do Chaplin the man wonderfully.

You could see the transition,

you could see the melancholy in his eyes

and the sort of way that he needed to

sort of keep this creature that he had created going.

The other crucial element is this isn't just the Tramp

he's performing as. It isn't just him repeating Charlie Chaplin's films.

He's playing the teenager, he's playing the old man,

he's playing the man off camera, the man in Hollywood.

You know, this isn't simply a version of the Tramp, it is an entire life.

Yes, and it is very hard for an actor to manage to do that.

I mean, at that point, Robert Downey Jr was not tested in that way.

He'd been in brat-pack films, he'd been in...

He'd been in smaller roles, he'd never led a film.

And he wasn't necessarily known as an actor actor,

he was, you know, quite good looking, he was in popcorn movies.

So Attenborough saw something in him

which made him understand that he would commit to this performance

and that he would work hard every step of the way

to try and inhabit this man.

He was also a huge fan. I mean, actually, he was a fan of Chaplin.

By the time he'd finished all his training,

he was probably as knowledgeable about Chaplin as Attenborough,

and they did used to argue a bit about details of,

"This would happen first, Richard," and he would go,

"Poppet, this is not a documentary, we are making a film,

we're making my film."

So that's the other thing is that he was a huge fan.

Tell me a little bit about your opinion of the performance,

because it is the movie. You know, we talk about Chaplin the biopic,

it's really about Robert Downey Jr,

who's in every scene of the film virtually.

And as we say, he just did all these different versions of him

and these different textures. What do you make of that performance?

If Robert Downey Jr can't convince us

that he is the greatest physical comedian of the 20th century,

then we are not going to buy this film. It's someone doing

a really poor-quality Charlie Chaplin impersonation.

And there's plenty of people who do impersonations of characters

and we just don't really want to pay to go to the cinema to see them.

He was so devoted to getting this right,

he found a guy who used to work on The Benny Hill Show,

who had worked with a guy who'd worked with Fred Connor,

and he then trained with that man.

He had these huge books that all the Vaudeville and Music Hall stars

used to work from, these enormous choreograph books.

He had two body movement coaches.

You know, he really, really put himself through the hoops

in order to get everything right.

Chaplin is almost by definition a one-man show.

No-one knew how to hold centre stage like him.

Nonetheless, there are sumptuous supporting performances.

Paul Rhys as his devoted brother Syd.

Dan Aykroyd as cranky, tobacco-spitting

comedy mogul Max Sennett.

Kevin Kline cutting a dash as Douglas Fairbanks.

And Kevin Dunn as a soon-to-be FBI head J Edgar Hoover.

And out of an unseemly parade of wives and lovers,

Diane Lane shines as the sassy, exasperated Paulette Goddard.

So in order to understand Chaplin

and the sort of microcosm of early Hollywood,

you do have to understand who all the major players are

within that world, especially because Chaplin,

as a newcomer in the beginning part of the film,

is himself kind of an ingenue.

And so two of those key figures are Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks,

who were sort of the first celebrity couple of Hollywood,

and great friends and creative partners to Chaplin.

And they would go on to form Famous Players,

which would become United Artists,

the first sort of independent production companies and studios

for and led by artistic vision and by the actor.

So that's one set of relationships that Chaplin has.

Another more adversarial one is one with J Edgar Hoover,

who basically begins a vendetta against Chaplin

which will end with Chaplin in exile,

leaving Hollywood and not being welcome back into America,

having his visa revoked.

So these are the key relationships that the film shows at the start,

which will go on to affect the trajectory of his life and career.

There are an awful lot of characters, of course,

in the film around Chaplin, who are, you know,

are or were very well-known,

and they all get very distinctive portrayals by the actors.

I'm particularly fond of Paul Rhys's portrayal of Syd Chaplin.

Dan Aykroyd as Max Sennett, who is wonderfully funny,

at the same time immensely sort of irascible.

Diane Lane as Paulette Goddard,

and Kevin Kline, who's a fantastic Douglas Fairbanks,

and who has to age, and so you see him go into a sort of decline.

And you have to be good, really, in those roles

because you're playing with Robert Downey Jr,

who's spent a year getting this part right.

If you don't turn up with the same level of commitment,

it's going to look weak. And they really do.

I mean, I think that Max Sennett is superb.

There's a description in Chaplin's autobiography

about what it was that made Max Sennett a great director.

And it was that he was always laughing.

Whenever he was directing you, if it was funny, he laughed.

That's what you were working towards was getting Max Sennett to laugh

while you were filming. And that's what Aykroyd's doing.

He's watching the performance, and once Max Sennett starts to laugh,

then it happens. So that's, you know, it's a nice touch.

Poignantly, Attenborough asked Geraldine Chaplin

to play Chaplin's mother, her grandmother.

Hannah Chaplin's rapid decline into insanity,

with her son committing her to a London asylum,

haunted Chaplin his entire life.

Just as he was haunted by 16-year-old Hetty Kelly,

the girl he left behind to seek his fortune in America.

Casting Geraldine Chaplin in a very important role in the film,

as her own grandmother, Chaplin's mother,

is a master stroke by Attenborough

because she gets to bring all of her inherent family knowledge

to that role. And Chaplin's mother was a very key figure

in his life and his work.

She herself was an artist and an actress for the screen.

She had a great artistic ambition and passion,

but she struggled with her mental health.

His own heartbreak is that he can't get his mother back from insanity

and he can't ever get Hetty back.

Yes. And, I mean, there's also, he doesn't overly stress this,

but there's also his mother's psychosis involves

an obsessive-compulsive aspect,

which she's always grinding things up in her hands.

And you get the sense that he sees Chaplin's obsession

with just a few notes on the piano

as he's trying to compose the score for a film,

it's not madness in the same way, he's functioning,

- but it is obsessive. - Cos the book editor asked the question of him

in the film, he said, "Did you ever fear going mad yourself?

Your grandmother had been mad, your mother went mad."

And that felt like a very powerful thing to ask him.

Yes. And Chaplin dodges the question.

But it is a film that studies - a kind of madness, isn't it? - Yes.

The obsessive nature, the creative madness

of what he brought, that you wonder.

Chaplin became, very quickly, very famous.

In fact, he became one of the most famous people in the world.

And that, of course, brings with it

a sort of forensic sort of spotlight.

And because of the nature of what he was doing,

which was he created a character

in the clown, in the Little Tramp,

that spoke to millions of Americans

who had suffered under the Great Depression,

and they could identify with someone who had nothing

and yet had the sort of... had that sort of spirit

to, you know, kick authority in the pants,

in spite of the fact that he had, you know, absolutely nothing at all.

And that appealed to them a lot.

It was almost... almost anarchic.

The script by Brian Forbes, William Boyd and William Goldman

condenses a mini-series into a feature film.

This is the life, beginning with a hard-scrabble, East End childhood,

then the rise in Music Hall,

the coming to America, the movies, the Tramp,

to being the most famous man in the world,

as framed by an aging Chaplin, exiled in Switzerland,

discussing his autobiography with Anthony Hopkins' book editor,

sceptical about what he's leaving out.

I am amongst my own fellow artists. Hear, hear!

And after all, the wonderful profession

was a great and honourable one.

It was the backbone,

the sort of...

oh, the joy,

the expressed joy of good old England.

And I come back and, of course, that's gone.

Life goes on. There's nothing static about life.

Alongside Chaplin's journey from stage to screen

is a portrayal of the birth of cinema.

After the dingy, cluttered, Victorian streets of London,

early Hollywood is rendered with a widescreen poetry,

an almost rural industry basking in that glorious Californian light.

This is still pioneer country,

where Max Sennett was making two pictures a week,

and where a tramp could make a million.

Well, he is... it's the Tramp, - isn't it? - Yeah. He is the Tramp.

Yeah, he carries the Tramp with him everywhere and the Tramp has no home.

And, I mean, this line that he says, the critical line is,

"If you want to understand me, watch the movies."

If you think about the Tramp, the Tramp has many qualities

which Chaplin had. He's enormously sentimental, he's enormously kind,

he falls in and out of love a lot,

he is, well, he certainly begins each film broke.

But he's incredibly cruel, as well.

So he will kick anyone if he wants to, if he needs to.

I mean, there is almost no person who's safe from him.

So there is something about understanding the Tramp

that is really about understanding Chaplin,

is that this switch between lovely sentimental man,

caring for the small child, and the guy who will give you a kicking

if you get in his way.

And so he really is saying the truth.

"This man is me. I am him."

And understanding that all of the qualities of that,

that rootlessness, that inability to be anywhere comfortably,

get caught up in things to your own detriment, that's how he felt.

So, there is a narrative device in Chaplin,

which is entirely the invention of Attenborough and his screenwriters,

which is this idea of Chaplin, who in real life

had been living in Switzerland, sort of in exile from America,

in his later life, working on writing an autobiography.

He is having conversations with an imagined book editor,

played by Anthony Hopkins, and I think this is a way of Attenborough

addressing the fact that the book was criticised

for Chaplin having certain omissions

around some of the more tawdry or controversial aspects

of his life story. And so it's a way to lightly challenge Chaplin

in terms of his egotism,

in terms of his own narrative of the story of his own life

that he is putting in the book. And so Attenborough is trying to address

some critiques of Chaplin's fame and personality there.

This biopic of Chaplin is surprisingly unsentimental.

He is drawn as a flawed man, a neglectful husband

and cruel perfectionist, and often wilfully naive.

Memories of that poverty-stricken childhood

lead him to risky political views.

Chaplin understood that this art could speak to millions.

Tellingly, it is his first encounter with a Kinetoscope

and walking onto his own sound stage

that are accompanied by composer John Barry's Love Theme.

Nothing quite like it.

The film is also the story of how Chaplin created Chaplinesque.

From the Vaudeville routines born out of desperation

to his unbending devotion to the art of comedy,

we see the spontaneity behind scenes,

or the balletic choreography of silent film,

and the grind of editing that could go on for months.

Attenborough even dares to switch the film into slapstick mode,

as Chaplin and his team escape across the state line

with reels of The Kid to avoid divorce lawyers.

One of the good things about this film,

and particularly the character of Chaplin,

is that it shows how difficult the creative process is,

and how, you know, the idea that

creation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Chaplin was, like Stanley Kubrick, he was a perfectionist,

and he would do many, many, many, many takes to get it right.

He would want absolute perfection.

He not only drove his actors into making sure, you know,

going through several takes, but he would drive himself.

And it was that driven quality

that, you know, was, in fact, as one of his wives says,

you know, when he's pouring over a screenplay,

or still pouring over something that isn't quite right,

right into the middle of the night and the early hours of the morning,

said, "Is this why, you know, is this what caused your last divorce?"

And he said, "Probably." Because filmmaking and getting it right

was above all. It was paramount, above relationships, everything.

That shows a man who is clearly driven

by an ambition and an aspiration.

It also shows someone who cares more about what he's producing

than what he... and what he leaves, in other words, after his death,

than his relationships with anybody.

The film didn't do well on release. It was as if critics, audiences

and Hollywood itself felt that Chaplin was untouchable

and were blinded to the film's qualities,

though Downey Jr's performance gained a much-deserved Oscar nomination.

But it's only over the years

that the film's value has come to be recognised.

What Attenborough and Downey truly evoke is Chaplin's humanity.

He was gifted in ways he couldn't express in words.

Uneasy and often tormented, but deeply empathetic.

This mix is what gave us The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights,

Modern Times and The Great Dictator.

As Chaplin says in the films,

"If you want to understand, watch the movies."

One of the big takeaways for me from watching Chaplin

is that Hollywood, and often, in a larger sense,

the commercial side of the artistic,

punishes those who colour outside the lines too much.

And although eventually we get great catharsis for Chaplin,

being invited back to America

and the welcoming arms of a 1972 Lifetime Achievement Award

at the Oscars, and it's a very emotional moment for him...

...it is profoundly unfair, really, what happened to him

and the way a target was put on his back for his politics.

And it was because he wasn't a people pleaser.

It was because he didn't quite colour within the lines.

And Hollywood punishes its geniuses sometimes.

And so that's a bitter pill to swallow.

And I think Attenborough really understood the complexity of that

and also the immortality of Chaplin's art.

Chaplin gives an excellent portrait of an instinctive artist

who created an incredible character,

universally recognised,

and then also takes off that mask and shows the man beneath it

and the psychological complexity that actually made him what he was.

I think it's one of the few really good biopics

of somebody who went from being a nonentity

to a universal icon.

It's vastly important, isn't it?

Because this is a lasting testament to Chaplin.

You know, we've read the books, we've seen the films, but so many haven't.

And I think this is an extraordinary film in just honouring that legacy.

Yeah, this is going to be the urtext about Chaplin and his life

for the majority of people who encounter him and his life.

I mean, it's beautifully, respectfully, lovingly delivered.

But it's more than that. It has a heart and a soul to it

that is part and parcel of the Chaplin films.

You can take enormous pain and suffering

and you can make millions and millions of people really happy.

That's the paradox.

This is a valuable portrait of a man, an artist,

and America, his great backdrop.

Attenborough goes in search of the source of greatness

and returns with a profound ambiguity.

This film is a moving testament to the enigmatic, era-defining,

unforgettable genius of Charlie Chaplin.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky