With The Blues Brothers, he took the one Saturday Night Live sketch with no discernible jokes, and turned it into a multi-million dollar blockbuster with no discernible jokes. ‘I disagree! What about the scene in which Ray Charles hangs a poster upside down?’ ‘In humourous reference to his lifelong visual impairment! Delightful! I concede!’ An American Werewolf in London succeeded where so many horror films before had failed, in extracting comedy potential from the northern line. He understands more than anyone that a close-up of Brian Glover’s flabbergasted mug is worth an entire megabyte of your computer generated so-called imagery. In homage to Stanley Kubrick, he subtly works the line ‘Yarbles! Great bolshy yarblokkoes to the lot of you!’ into every film he makes.
