"Bill Forsythe film, Scottish and unassuming. He came to the states and he worked with Peter Riegert and you’ll recognize Peter Capaldi as a very young man named Donnie. It’s so sweet, and yet savvy, and I think that’s the same thing with Local Hero — it’s a comic film that captures a tremendous amount of sadness and that’s really hard to pull off, to have a character who’s fundamentally sad, and then finds something wonderful and risks it being taken away from him. That’s the complication of the film. He’s the oil man that comes over from this huge air conglomerate in Houston and his mission is to come over to this small town and buy the town and turn it into an oil refinery. It was a precursor to things like Northern Exposure. Instead of having aggressively quirky characters, all of these characters are people I’ve met when I’ve been to the British Isles and Scotland, and yes they are that eccentric. Peter Riegert is wonderful in it. It’s slow and it’s soft, but it’s hilarious, and the music is by Mark Knopfler [of Dire Straits]. I’ve never shown this to anyone who regretted seeing it."

"Number two is Kes, Ken Loach’s film. I’d already kind of established myself in television, and I loved Italian movies and all that. And then here was a genuine British neo-realist movie, which I thought was an exquisite film. It dealt with incredibly complicated social issues, which I was very much involved in myself, with my Up series, which had already started by that time. But what I thought was so beautiful about it was that he found the metaphor of this boy and this kestrel, and he told the whole tale of the boy’s life — the stress the boy was under, and the unfairness of life — through the relationship with him and a bird, which I thought was just a brilliant filmic notion. I mean, I’ve always loved his work. He was very influential on my generation — not that he’s much older than us, but I think he was very much our man, and, you know, he has a huge body of work in his lifetime. He never seems to stop. Stop! Right? Otherwise, we’ve all got to keep going, if you keep going. God."

"Along with Airplane, An American Werewolf in London, and Raising Arizona, this film is one that I can silently mouth along with every single line of. I don’t know if Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer could have ever known back in 1984 quite how far-reaching the influence of this movie would be. As a British director who made his start in TV comedy, I can vouch for the fact that this film is one of the key texts for every single UK comedy writer, actor, and director of my generation. The fact that it was performed by American actors doing killer English accents just makes that all the more impressive and ironic. So I cannot overestimate its position as an unassailable comedy classic. Along with Monty Python’s Life of Brian (also on Criterion) and Mike Leigh’s 1976 TV movie Nuts in May, it really became one of those movies that create strong bonds in creative partnerships. You either liked Spinal Tap or you were not worth talking to; it became that simple. And quite right too. It’s eighty-four minutes of comedy heaven."