"I loved the performances in that movie — Jerry Lewis, Sandra Benhard — and just the way it was directed and written."

"The Nutty Professor. So Jerry Lewis, I met Jerry once. We became friends later, but when I first met him, he knew what a fan I was of The Nutty Professor, particularly the Buddy Love performance, and [inaudible] I said to him — and I meant it — I said, “Jerry, it’s just you and Brando,” and he took about a two-minute pause, and he went, “Well, Brando’s good also.” It was hilarious. He was wearing a kimono, if you believe that, a Japanese kimono and tennis shoes. Something about Jerry Lewis’ direction, he believes in the total filmmaker. He felt that you weren’t really a filmmaker unless you starred in it, composed it, edited it, directed it, all of it, and that’s what he was, and I think that The Nutty Professor has also had a huge impact in terms of my own tone, performance style. I’ve borrowed from the Buddy Love character a million times, and so much so that I’ve had directors tell me I need to get new material. I put him in City of Angels, and I got the good fortune of having him play my father in The Trust before he passed on, so Nutty Professor was a big influence."

"For funny movies, Scorsese — you know, I have an affection for The King of Comedy. It’s just fun to watch. I like Rupert Pupkin… it’s hilarious. I like that it’s dark, and how this guy gets to be famous. But I like De Niro’s performance; I like Jerry Lewis; I like Sandra Bernhard. I like the Ray Charles song that comes on at the beginning. It’s terrific."

"I like The King of Comedy by Scorsese. I like that one. It makes me laugh a lot. I think it’s very funny. I mean, I like the combination, the trio of Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard; that’s just one of my favorite trios in a movie. The three of them had a pretty amazing chemistry, I thought. I’ve heard that Scorsese was reluctant to make it, that it was on the shelf for a while; I guess that makes me appreciate it even more."

"I would also put The King of Comedy. Certainly in my top three movies ever. I mean, it’s not underrated any more, because I think it’s certainly thought of as a classic movie, but at the time, it bombed like so many great movies did. I mean, it didn’t even get good reviews, which is insane. Like, I don’t know what its percentage it would have been on Rotten Tomatoes in 1983 when it came out. It’s such a great movie. And I think it’s sort of an endlessly fascinating subject, this sort of quest for celebrity, and the feeling that some have when they have it, which is just discontentment, and showing both sides of that fence really, really harshly. Jerry Lewis is just astounding in that movie."

"""I’m just trying to do ones that really stuck with me. Paths of Glory. I was, I don’t know, probably 13 or 14, and it was a Saturday matinee at the local cinema, and all the kids were dumped there by their parents to keep them out of the way on Saturday afternoons. I was sitting there, and this black-and-white thing came on. I was utterly blown away, because it was the first film that I really appreciated the injustice in the world that’s waiting for all of us, and just the tracking shots through the trenches. My version in Brazil in the Clark’s Pool was all about the shots from Paths of Glory. I remember going to school on Monday, telling everybody, “You’ve got to go see this movie.” Nobody did, because it was too serious. Everybody was basically normally going to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies, which I also loved. That’s the pratfall side of my nature."

"I liked Jerry Lee Lewis, because my dad turned me on to him, so I had this collection of all the Sun sessions that I would listen to a lot. I mainly just listened to 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On'. I used to love that line, ""got the bull by the horns"", I used that line in 'He's Alright', my song from a long time ago. It's so bluesy and goofy and from a wild man. But then at a later period, I read that book The Dark Stuff by Nick Kent. Adam [Granduciel], my buddy, one of my best friends, from The War On Drugs, he sent it to me for my birthday, which was nice. He wasn't even around, but he sent it to me. Anyway, I couldn't put that down. He knew I would like that book. The best article [in there], is on Jerry Lee Lewis, who's just a notorious maniac and is obviously an incredible piano player. In that article, he talked about a book, a biography about him by Nick Tosches called Hellfire and this book is off the hook, it's unreal. So just around that time I found the vinyl of this one, the Sun Sessions, maybe it's volume one, again I burned it and cranked it in the 'phones and played it a lot when I was driving around LA. There's a song, 'Little Queenie', which is a cover, but he says: ""She's too cute to be a minute over 17"" and I morphed that line in 'Pretty Pimpin': ""a little too cute to be admitted under marbles lost"". Whatever that part of the song is, the first time I say: ""All I want is to just have fun, live my life like a son of a gun"", but it's like a morphed version of that Seeds song, 'Pushin' Too Hard', like [sings]: ""All I want is to just have fun, live my life like it just begun"", so it's sort of referencing those old guys, two different eras. Obviously, if I had to pick one, Jerry Lee Lewis slays The Seeds. But it's just like that down-home, real rock & roll. How do you explore his back catalogue? I think you just start with the early stuff. He had a crazy career, because he had all these hits young and then he married his super young cousin, but he was totally in love with her and she was, and then they went to Europe and during that time they found out it was his cousin and then he was banned everywhere, basically. Then he had a resurgence, he started doing country music and was bigger than ever, so he would always go up and down, but he was a maniac. He would just always be battling demons. He would go back to Jesus. He would go to church where they would speak in tongues, he would just live extreme lives. He would go back and forth, lose his mind, take a million pills, play shows and his hair was flying around, playing with his foot. I mean, he was a bad motherhumper, as you would say!"

"I wish young actors and actresses were better versed in the work of Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and even lower-brow comics like the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis. Actors can partly cultivate a sense of humor from observing and mimicking our forebears. W. C. Fields makes me laugh more than any other film actor. His performances seem effortless, as if Fields is just doing Fields, but he deserves more credit than that. He constructed and honed his character over a twenty-year stage career. That character, known in The Bank Dick as Egbert Sousé, is the cinematic progenitor of a comic archetype: the lazy, drunken misanthrope. Fields wasn’t the innovator that Chaplin or Keaton was, of course, and in fact, his movies are not great. They’re flimsy vehicles for his routines. But I’ve also come to believe that’s part of the joke. “Can you believe they made a whole movie about this guy?” The Bank Dick also features several great comic character actors, such as Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton (as Og Oggilby), and Shemp Howard. I wanted to put Contempt on my list but Godard never put Shemp in a movie, know what I’m saying?"

"You know what, I think I’m going to swerve The Godfather and go for The King of Comedy. I love Scorsese – I loved Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets — they were all really seminal, but I always like a film which is, if not leftfield it’s not obvious Scorsese. He has made less obvious films, like New York, New York or The Last Waltz, which don’t hit the mark for me, but King of Comedy is a gem I think. Curiously enough I was talking about it to my fiancé at the weekend, saying, ‘You’ve got to see it,’ because I think it’s where we are now as a contemporary celebrity-seeking society. There are Rupert Pupkins everywhere now. What they don’t have, that Rupert Pupkin had, is innocence and naivety. When you see the whole Big Brother world, the way that people are cloying to get famous now, that’s Rupert Pupkin. I remember when I first watched The Office I saw a lot of Rupert Pupkin in David Brent. Rupert Pupkin had such likeability whereas Brent is a toad – you want to watch him fail. With Pupkin you want to say, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t go to Jerry Lewis‘ house. Don’t tell Diahnne Abbott you know him — you don’t!'"