"Let me really rattle my brain here. I want to go back. I’m going to say Halloween. When Mike Myers walks out of the backyard… It’s an establishing shot of the front of the house, and you think it’s just a standard exterior, night, Halloween, porch. [But] then the music goes [imitates Halloween theme]. And then [Myers] walks out of the shadow of the backyard. I, to this day, don’t look into a shadowy night yard situation without seeing him walk out. The same way that when I’m in a very sudsy bathtub — and, yes, I do take baths, don’t judge me — when my f–king toe comes out of the water — my number six pick would be Jaws — I still look at my toe and I still become frightened of Amity Beach and all the things that happened to the poor people in the Steven Spielberg epic. I grew up in a family that loved film, loved music, loved comedy. Thirsty for the how-to’s. Some kids liked to take apart radios. I wanted to know how Johnny Carson set up punch. I wanted to know how Burt Reynolds jumped over the bridge in Cannonball Run. I really have a love of film. And although I wanted to be a comedian primarily, I certainly wanted to, with a smidgen of success, be behind the camera and live that incredible world."

"People often talk about this film’s main character, Antonio Ricci, as if he’s some kind of allegorical everyman at the mercy of his circumstances. In fact, he is heartbreakingly specific. He almost misses out on the poster-hanging job because he’s dawdling behind the other men waiting for job announcements. He fails to notice his wife struggling with two heavy water buckets before he helps her out. He’s careless with his bike and does a lousy job of pasting up his first poster, leaving it full of lumps. He often takes off running without looking back for his son Bruno. He doesn’t notice when Bruno falls down in the busy street and at one point leaves him in the market to be preyed on by a pedophile. Bruno, on the other hand, shuts an open window to protect his baby sibling sleeping nearby. He shoves a priest out of the way who stands in front of him. He cuts in line when visiting the fortune-teller La Santona, fetches the cop when the thief is found, and saves his father from prison. These moments of characterization build and build to the point where seeing Bruno see his father’s hat on the ground is almost unbearable. When the distraught Bruno takes Antonio’s disgraced hand in the end, what we feel for them is overwhelming."

"It would have been very disingenuous of me not to acknowledge the enormous impact The Beatles have had on music and pop culture. They were lucky enough to be around at a time when people were pioneering with electric guitars and trying out different things and forming what pop music was. The Beatles were the best at it and the masterpiece is ‘The White Album’ because you get to hear them experimenting and going a little further out into the deeper water. Some of the McCartney songs are great, things like ‘Blackbird’, but the Lennon songs – ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ and ‘I’m So Tired’ – are magnificent. ‘I’m So Tired’ is one of those songs I relate to more than any. Certain songs suit our personalities or our way of being. With ‘I’m So Tired’ I’ve been in that position so many times; sleepless nights from jet-lag or too many things going on in my head. Lennon had this unbelievably effortless ability of capturing things and writing that postcard that would become a song. That album is filled with those gems. Of all the things they did, that album is by far my favourite. It’s the most experimental. It made me think you can do what you like with an album, it’s just an experience. Other people were just writing songs; The Beatles were addressing a much broader perspective."

"I remember hearing a PJ Harvey song, it might have been ‘Down by The Water’, and thinking ‘this is wicked, I’m gonna buy some of her music!’ At that age I had pocket money, about five pounds, so I went to this music shop in Exeter, found the PJ Harvey section, and all they had was this cheap cassette of 4-Track Demos. I was learning the drums around that time, and listening to the drums in a way I’d never done before, getting obsessive about it. I bought this PJ Harvey record, I put it on and thought ‘OK, the drums are gonna come in soon!’, but of course they never come in, it’s all demos. It was insanely disappointing! But I’d payed the money for this record, so I listened to it, and it became this educational thing for me of understanding that this was part of writing a song. Comparing the demos to the finished tracks, it was an interesting thing to hear and I think the most important thing I’d take from it is investing in something that deprives you of the one thing you were really excited about. It’s a good lesson, but completely unplanned, an interesting exercise to realise that the thing I feel is the most important thing, is not."