"Let me really rattle my brain here. I want to go back. I’m going to say Halloween. When Mike Myers walks out of the backyard… It’s an establishing shot of the front of the house, and you think it’s just a standard exterior, night, Halloween, porch. [But] then the music goes [imitates Halloween theme]. And then [Myers] walks out of the shadow of the backyard. I, to this day, don’t look into a shadowy night yard situation without seeing him walk out. The same way that when I’m in a very sudsy bathtub — and, yes, I do take baths, don’t judge me — when my f–king toe comes out of the water — my number six pick would be Jaws — I still look at my toe and I still become frightened of Amity Beach and all the things that happened to the poor people in the Steven Spielberg epic. I grew up in a family that loved film, loved music, loved comedy. Thirsty for the how-to’s. Some kids liked to take apart radios. I wanted to know how Johnny Carson set up punch. I wanted to know how Burt Reynolds jumped over the bridge in Cannonball Run. I really have a love of film. And although I wanted to be a comedian primarily, I certainly wanted to, with a smidgen of success, be behind the camera and live that incredible world."

"If I had to have one favorite movie that I’ve seen a hundred times, it’s probably that. I’m not really sure why I first liked it; I must have been fourteen or something like that when I first saw it. It’s always meant so much to me. Peter Riegert plays a maybe 40-year-old businessman who’s in the oil business and is called and sent up to the coast of Scotland to look into buying some land where they found some oil and he has to negotiate with the local village. [He] thinks it’s going to be a very tough thing to sort of uproot all these people, [and] the comedy is that they’re only too happy to sell out. They’re just trying to negotiate the price up as much as possible. It unfolds at its own pace, and he falls in love with this town and with the sea and cares less and less about the deal. He more and more wants to trade places with the local innkeeper and move to this town and stay there. A beautifully made film and I feel like there was a rash of movies right afterward that sort of tried to capture what he achieved. These people sort of coming to some little town and being transformed. It’s so touching and so funny and warm, and has so many moments of grief and elegance and delicacy. It’s got beautiful music by Mark Knopfler. That might have been the first movie that I felt that strongly about at that sort of formative time. But it’s very strange to feel like that’s the movie, you know? It doesn’t have some young protagonist. [But] from then on I was obsessed with Scotland and Ireland. Wanting desperately to go up there, and then when I did, it was very similar to that feeling. I went [on] a Bill Forsyth binge and watched all of his movies, like Gregory’s Two Girls, and Comfort and Joy, and Breaking In, even, with Burt Reynolds of all people. I wish he were still making movies."