"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."

"I was thirteen when I saw this on opening weekend, and I remember leaving the theater walking on air. This had everything I’d wanted in a film. I was expecting just another fun action movie, and it was so much more. I was blown away by Verhoeven’s skillful hand with bleak absurdist satire, action, and genuine pathos. Somehow the film’s ludicrous extremes were able to make a perfect in-the-moment statement about the Regan-era eighties without the benefit of hindsight. Amazing script, amazing cast, and Peter Weller should’ve gotten an Oscar. So many memorable lines. Rob Bottin’s iconic designs of Robocop and the nuclear waste victim. Phil Tippet’s brilliant stop-motion wonder ED-209, so hilariously anthropomorphized through its beastly sound design and hurky movement—and I’ve yet to see something like that executed as perfectly with CGI. Some truly great, subversive physical comedy. When this was first released on Criterion I was so excited it was getting the reverence it deserved among the other classics. I believe it’s on the commentary track where Verhoeven talks about the sequel he pitched that was inevitably turned down. Instead of simply repeating himself, he proposed a love story with RoboCop falling for a cyborg that was little more than a floating brain in a jar. I would love to see that."

"What else would I include on a list of top five? That is so tricky because that list varies on a week-to-week basis. Another movie I’m really a fan of — and again, I think it mixes all kinds of flavors — is Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. That’s a really eccentric little film. He made it, if you recall, he was trying to make The Last Temptation of Christ and that fell apart, so he went back to basics and wanted to make this sort of short film that he could shoot very quickly in just a couple of months on a small budget. It’s a very, sort of, eccentric film about Griffin Dunne trying to get home from a date that’s gone wrong. It’s like a black comedy equivalent of Taxi Driver; it uses New York as one of the characters, to some degree — this kind of weird, almost Hansel and Gretel forest kind of place, where you can’t escape and there’s strange oddities around every corner. It’s shot through with this brilliantly black sense of humor. Lots of really quotable moments. The playing, as well, from particularly Griffin Dunne, who I think is such an underrated performer, a really great performance of a man just trying to contain his ever increasing panic and rage. Yeah, that’s a film I’ve watched endlessly."

"This was the first band I ever saw. I went to see The Who at Charlton in 1974, when I was 12 or 13, and we bunked in, and supporting The Who was Alex Harvey. And, fuck me! He had this sort of fake brick wall, and he burst through and started singing ‘Framed’ and it was just a fucking revelation. It’s funny because I’ve been looking at a bit of him on Youtube recently, interviews that he did, and what a fucking character. The bits of film that are left of him, there’s a clip of him singing ‘Framed’ at some festival, and he pours a bottle of beer over his wild curly hair and turns it into a quiff with his hand. It was only when Jerry Leiber from Leiber & Stoller died recently that I realised they wrote that song. He shocked me, with the theatricality, the fearlessness, just doing what the fuck he wanted. They had this song called ‘The Faith Healer‘, which I heard made Johnny Rotten want to be in a band. Just outrageous, but charming and intelligent too. And they did a version of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Next‘, which was just fucking brilliant. He weren’t around for very long, but I have a lifelong love of his work. Just that mixture of comedy and… terror. Perfect!"

"I think I gotta go with that old stand-by, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Love Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Love the — you know, it’s the two guys. It’s what me and my brother specialize in, the two guys. Well, in the Three Stooges‘ case it’s three. But the relationship between two guys like that, I don’t think it’s been done any better than with Butch and Sundance; particularly with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. The way they worked in so many different things, from comedy to romance to action and the way it’s so beautifully shot and, you know, a great story. And they didn’t pull the punches at the end. If you made that movie today, I’m sure that you’d do the test screenings and somebody would raise their hands and say, “We want them to get away at the end!” But they didn’t get away at the end. Today you’d have to re-shoot the ending where the guys go off on some secret beach somewhere and live happily forever — ’cause that’s the way audiences kind of demand it. But with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, of course, they met their demise at the end of the movie, and they had it coming ’cause that’s who they were. I just think it was a beautiful movie."

"The next movie would probably be Young Frankenstein. I remember going to see that as a kid. Because I loved all the Universal horror films, but I had only seem them on TV, like on Creature Double Feature on Friday afternoons. By that point I loved Gene Wilder, because I made the connection like, “Oh, that guy was in Willy Wonka. Now he’s in Young Frankenstein.” So that movie blew me away. And even to this day, I watch it all the time. It’s such an incredible movie because it’s really, really funny, with such incredible performances, but it’s so beautifully made. Nobody would spend the time now to make a comedy that well. Visually and technically, it’s so incredible. It doesn’t date; it holds up. Peter Boyle’s perfect, and Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder, and everybody. It’s just an incredible movie. It really captured the feel of those Universal films, like Bride of Frankenstein, yet it is really funny. It’s something that almost never works. You know, kind of look at the Munsters on TV, and the Addams family, where you could get into it and they have the art direction there and everyone’s funny, but it almost never works. It’s almost always a disaster, and that film is just so perfect. I think the fact that people were brave enough back then to release black-and-white movies."

"It’s a mad movie. It’s just insane. This was the first movie I remember having so many stars that I loved. My favorite scene is when the older woman realizes that her son-in-law lives close to the treasure, so she calls him up. I remember the phone ringing and ringing, and when they cut to her son, he’s with a girl in a bikini doing the twist to some song. And she has this disaffected look on her face, just staring into nothing. The son is in a ’50s-style bathing suit just jumping around her going, “Yeah. Go.” That moment is something I’ve put in theater pieces, and even when I go out and I’m on the dance floor, I think of that scene. So if that movie gave me anything, aside from the excitement of seeing all these awesome comedic actors, it was that moment. I love that old-style humor, you know, like Some Like It Hot, just over the top. I think comedy was done with a lot more class back then. And that was a crossover period. It’s hard to get that these days. Now it has to be cool. Back then it just had to be crazy and zany. That movie should be listed next to the definition of “zany” in the dictionary. “What is zany?” “Watch this movie.”"