"I heard a tremendous amount of first-class soul music... my father was in the Royal Air Force and I lived on a base. It just so happened that it coincided with the period of pirate radio stations, so a transistor radio was a virtually unmediated way of hearing absolutely incredibly music. I heard Hendrix, Electric Prunes, all the best soul music. You didn't know what these people looked like, who they were, anything. There was this guy Nicky who I used to play football with, his father was from Jamaica, and when he was moving on he gave the youth club his soul collection. The guy who ran the youth club, he was championing what I thought was starting to be second-rate output from The Beatles, because after 'Strawberry Fields' or 'Magical Mystery Tour' they came out with this Sgt Pepper's thing which I had issues with. Meanwhile, we had every good soul record. You also had Johnnie Walker, I think, on [Radio] Caroline. This also represents that period in the 70s when I was listening to Al Green, Sly, Stevie Wonder; the most interesting and radical music that was going. It's pathetic to go 'black soul music, oh right, Al Green's Greatest Hits', because the productions, the voice and everything is incredible. Let's just say one of the greatest singers, that's for sure, and he has to represent all of that."

"Groundhog Day. I can watch that movie just a million times and never get sick of it. There was a whole spate of movies around that time in the ’80s and ’90s where something magical would happen, and sort of screw over a protagonist in some way, and some of those devices were very corny and kitschy and didn’t work as well. Some of them just worked magnificently, and this one is one of those. It’s just these sort of inexplicable moments where the universe is teaching this one guy a lesson, and they never explain how or why, but you don’t care, because it just kind of makes sense. And the way it unfolds, it’s sort of like it’s one of those things that, I think, if you tasked somebody with writing a story with that premise, where a guy wakes up every day in the same day and he has to relive it over and over again until he learns to be a good person, you’d be sort of overwhelmed, like how can I do that? Then you see this version of it, and you’re like, that’s the perfect way to do it. It’s like, “Oh, it’s so simple.” That’s a brilliant script, when it looks like there was no other way to do it, if that makes any sense. And the performances, everyone from Chris Elliott to Andie MacDowell to Punxsutawney Phil. I mean, they all nail it."