"I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen Dumb and Dumber. It’s got to be at least 50. I remember in college, I watched this movie with my buddies and we just thought it was the funniest f—ing thing we’ve ever seen. I still watch it and I still quote it all the time. In fact, I [went] on Ellen as Lloyd Christmas for Halloween… You know what it is about it? There are so many moments in this movie that are ridiculous; they’re dumb — that’s why the movie is called Dumb and Dumber — but I’ve thought about this. Why is it that I love this movie so much? I think it’s because Lloyd and Harry really cared about each other. There was real heart to that movie… and if you don’t have that in these movies and it’s just pure broad comedy, it’s missing something that you can connect to."

"I’m an absolute lover of The Wizard of Oz. I adore that film from start to finish. It never gets old. I think it has a beautiful, tender tone of both real drama and huge comedy, and I adore it. I don’t remember the first time [I saw it]; it’s part of my brain. I mean, I saw that film along with The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins. I still watch it every couple of years, and it brings me great joy every single time. I love Bert Lahr [as the Cowardly Lion], and his performance really gets me where I live. When they go to meet the Wizard and he’s doing his big speech and he says, “I just want you guys to do one thing….” – I’m butchering this! – and he goes, “Talk me out of it,” because he didn’t want to go in… I adore that moment in the film, as well as countless others."

"Sunset Boulevard is the ultimate film noir for me. It has this incredibly unpleasant main character, who is played with a lot of charm by William Holden, and he thinks he’s really smart, and it turns out that he’s kind of in over his head. I love the environment. I love the way the story is told in flashbacks. I love the sense of Los Angeles. I love the humor in it — it’s a really funny movie — and it’s just one of those iconic things that, if you know the movie, you run into it once a month in some way, especially living in L.A. It’s got great lines in it. There’s incredible dialogue, incredible visual moments. Surprises. It’s a horror movie and a comedy at the same time; it’s all over the place in terms of genre. When I first saw it, I just couldn’t believe that it was a big Hollywood movie made by a studio because it’s so peculiar."

"The first one is The Gold Rush, by Charlie Chaplin. It’s the apogee of his genius. I saw that film when I was 11 or 12 years old in a cinema in Ramsgate, Kensington, and there were three people in there with me. Nothing has ever made me laugh as much as that. I remember, literally — in those days they used to have a velvet kind of cover over the balcony — and I remember hanging over and laughing at the sheer f–king brilliance of the comedy in that film. The one I saw was just black-and-white, too; this was before Chaplin put a voice-over on it, which I don’t enjoy — I don’t think it serves the film well. There are certain things in there, you know — around cooking and survival and stuff — that kind of are in my soul now, as someone who tries to tell stories too."

"I guess I’d have to say This Is Spinal Tap. I don’t know that many movies made me laugh as hard as that did — the first few times I saw it, anyway. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I know that at some point I will watch it again and laugh anew at it. That movie is just so brilliant. It captures something from a period in rock and roll that, even though I wasn’t there, it just feels so right. It feels like, “Oh, yeah, this is based on something real.” That time in rock and roll, and these guys are not that far off from real rock and rollers of a certain band. And it’s just brilliant. I mean, it’s just so well done, and just so funny. I mean, they were such an amazing team: Michael McKean, and then Rob Reiner directing, and Christopher Guest. You know, it’s a masterpiece, a comedy masterpiece."

"Being There is one of my favorite movies. It’s much more precise than a movie like The Last Detail. It’s a type of movie I hope one day to be able to attempt to make. It’s brilliant on every level. It is one of movies that I watch and go, “I probably will never be able to get close to this, but I should try.” The use of television in the movie is spectacular – how what’s happening on the television in the rooms that they’re in reflects or comments on the action. Nobody has ever done that better and people have tried since and always failed. Any time I see something on a TV in a TV show, I know that they’re thinking about how great they did it in Being There. It’s another movie with some of the best performances in comedy history – Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas, and Shirley MacLaine, so I go back to that a lot."