"The first movie that I ever said was my favorite movie and I’ve said for the longest is The Producers, Mel Brooks’ original Producers. The two lead performances from Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are both unstoppable performances and then supported by amazing supporting characters throughout. I love the premise of the movie, I love the pacing of that — the opening scene in the office which also serves as the credit sequence is so funny and just such an amazing one — when Gene Wilder walks in and discovers Zero Mostel with one of his little old ladies who wants to do role-play with him, then getting caught by Zero Mostel snooping, then being brought in and negotiating through his various tax schemes… To me, it’s a great premise for a story and it’s so funny."

"Number four, I would say is Mel Brooks’ The Producers. It’s a toss up between The Producers and Young Frankenstein. It’s so hard to pick one, but I just feel like the first production of The Producers with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel is like … I feel like that raised me. That’s my daddy. Probably in the womb that was shown to me."

"The Producers is one of my favorite movies, and I don’t mean the musical. I mean the original one that Mel Brooks directed, with Zero Mostel. I saw it when it first came out. I saw it in the movie theaters, back in the ’60s. I just think as a comedy, and also being in the business as I am, and coming from theater, it just had that much more impact for me. That’s a movie I like very much."

"In terms of the first film that I remember having a real visceral connection with me, it’d be The Producers, the original Producers, with Mel Brooks. There was something about such a rich movie, in terms of the richness of the ideas and the power of the quality. If you take the two central performances of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, they’re such powerful performances. And you think that they’d both be almost too much for the screen because they both put in so much detail and they both bring so much energy. And they’re both such ballsy and powerful performances, you’d think that the screen wouldn’t be able to contain it. Especially because I was watching it on a TV screen, you think no screen is big enough to contain these two’s performance. But there’s something about the way they work together and the way their styles complement each other and the suitedness of those characterizations, the detail that they both put in. There was something about that. When you get two performers that are so beautifully in sync with each other, it’s like a jigsaw. Whatever one of them’s missing, the other kind of fills in with a perfectly compatible performance. It’s like listening to an opera, listening to those two perform with each other. I feel that way a lot about Mel Brooks in general, in terms of the way he writes and directs. There’s such musicality to that comedy. It’s so specific, and it reads like a musical score. You have to be able to play that absolutely precisely. There’s almost not enough room for interpretation on it. And for actors, they have to be able to say the lines. But the thing about Zero and Gene Wilder is they nail the musicality of it so perfectly and yet manage to layer all of this beautiful character on top of it as well. And they really attacked it. The chemistry and the musicality between them was something that really made me sit up and take notice when I was a young kid. It was very powerful, I remember it very vividly, seeing that for the first time."