"I know three right off the bat. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. How’d it influence me? Big Steve Martin fan. Knew I wanted to be a comedian when I was very young. And my sister brought the Wild and Crazy Guy album home, which I still have in my office. When Planes, Trains came out, that was the first film that really I looked at and said, “I’d love to, someday if I’m lucky enough to have a comedy audience, bring them into film and make that kind of movie.” Big heart, big laughs. And, of course, Steve Martin at the car rental shop, you know, “I want my f–king car right f–king now.” Unbelievably funny movie. Of course, John Hughes, John Candy, one of my favorites ever. Can I take two minutes to tell a story? Awesome f–king John Hughes story. [My Best Friend’s Girl director] Howie [Deutch] was directing Some Kind of Wonderful and the studio wanted a four-page rewrite on a scene. So Howie’s all, “I can’t figure out what to do.” Calls John, says, “Can you come over and help me write these four pages?” For two-and-a-half hours they’re just pacing around, John is just smoking incessantly. Howie says, “I need to lay down. I’m beat. I’m going to sleep a few hours and then we’ll finish it.” Then he says, “Dane, I wake up at about five in the morning and John is scribbling like crazy. He hands it to me and says, ‘Read this. It’s only 50 pages right now, but read it. I’m calling it Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’"

"I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson of Saxon were into the bluesy bands - simple but with a lot of groove. But me and Paul Quinn were into more muso bands like Genesis and King Crimson. That was the type of stuff we played, with more jamming and improvisation. As a bass player and singer, my goal was to play like Chris Squire. I used to try and learn the songs – it took me about six months to learn ‘Roundabout’. I‘ve talked to Rick Wakeman about Yes, and he said Jon Anderson would structure melodies like I do it. They would sit in a room and arrange things around the vocals, and we do that because it gives me more freedom to write. I could listen to this all day. NWOBHM bands liked Yes because the musicianship was great - it moves away from blues feel to a jazz feel. A lot of these guys were university trained, but we learned from listening to music. We knew nothing about music theory or scales, but prog rock really made you better as musicians when you learned to play it. It seemed unattainable because it was so good."