“I have never wholly succeeded in understanding what it was thinking, that face with the black moustache, those slightly sparkling cat’s eyes, rather leonine, the speed with which he escapes from the clutches of the police, his bearing a little catlike. Earlier (…) I had always retained the impression that it was not really pietistic, it was not really the sentiment of deep emotion which inspired him, because in fact this vagabond was happy, was happy as an animal; it seemed to me that he had even the health, the agility, something biting, and even the invincibility of a cat. All in all, with a cat you can pretend a relationship of sympathy, a relationship of protection, you can even deceive yourself that the cat sees you as a master; in effect, the cat is an animal that cannot be sheltered in his cat-like, feline dimension, and he is the most unapproachable of animals. So, Chaplin also has always fascinated me from this point of view: everything that is said about him is fine, touches me, makes me laugh; then finally it seems to me that he shuts himself in a dimension of his own, in his closed habitation, an unapproachable dimension, unapproachable, even by kings (…) But it seems that the vagabond, the victim, the humiliated, the tramp, is the other face of an aristocratic monarch, of a solitary man, of a prophet, of a priest, a poet, someone who lives his own life, in detachment, in solitude if not in isolation”.

Federico Fellini, extract from a television interview by Giuseppe Vannucchi, RAI, Roma, 25 December 1977