"Animal House is a classic. You should have a DVD copy of it, you should stream it, you should just have it always. You should get the celluloid, and have it playing in your backyard. It is brilliantly written, based off of a National Lampoon article about college life. I personally love John Belushi. I love the casting in this because everyone looks like they’re probably 50-years-old to be honest, and yet they’re in college. (At the time, that’s the way things worked: Grease had John Travolta, so you’re like, really, does he look like a high school kid?) But everybody was cast perfectly in [Animal House]. There are so many subtle jokes. It makes you cheer. You see a young Kevin Bacon, [he] makes a cameo. There’s great music. There are so many quotable lines, and it is definitely a go-to comedy for me."

"I’m going to break my rules for this one, and just put in one old movie. I still think that Animal House is misunderstood, although I do increasingly read about a generation of comedians saying it is the great film. Because I think it’s a brilliant comedy, with brilliant acting, with everybody at their best – Karen Allen at her cutest, Tim Matheson at his handsomest, John Belushi at his most mono-syllabic. So these extraordinary comic performances with just a series of amazing scenarios with amazing set-ups with the horse and the chainsaw, the dead girlfriend, them going to the toga party, and just everything about it. It’s boiled down to the funniest joke scenarios that there could possibly be. That fantastic Elmer Bernstein score, which could be from Patton. “It seems to me like a really great, classic, funny character movie hiding in wolves clothing, pretending to be a big stupid old generic college movie, but it actually invented the genre, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a funnier version of those movies. Certainly when I was doing The Boat That Rocked, it was M*A*S*H on the one hand – very casual, conversational, just guys doing a weird job – and Animal House on the other – with big characterisations and set-pieces.. So we’ve got four moderns and one slightly older. Can I have one more? Am I allowed? Just for sorrow?"