That's a big responsibility, and the details obsess me. And, also, I no longer feel I have to do the Tonight Show every time I open my mouth. Twenty years ago, I told myself I'd rather direct than act, and it's taken me this long. You lose your passion in acting. You make too many mistakes. Maybe that's why I make so many movies; if you don't like this one, another one's opening on Tuesday. But then I spent six months of my life on 'At Long Last Love,' a picture nobody saw. I enjoyed making it, I learned from it, I grew, but that's too much time out of my life.

If I want to be up for an Academy Award, I'm either going to have to play a tour de force of some kind or have a tracheotomy just before the nominations.

Our family really didn't have a car; we had my dad's police cruiser. Later he got a Buick, and that's what I was driving when I had a wreck. I'm lucky it was as big and strong as it was, because that Buick is what saved my life.

When an actor marries an actress they both fight for the mirror.

But then when I'm in a halfway successful movie, it irritates the hell out of the critics in New York, because they'd like to kill my pictures if they could. So maybe I'm pretty good in the movie. Then they use all these words like I'm 'surprisingly' good, or 'shockingly enough,' I'm good. It's like I crawled out from under a magazine and they're surprised I can act.

We got Sally Field onboard [in Smokey and the Bandit] and it changed the entire dynamic. About a third of the way into filming, I was in the car with Sally and there was this little moment where we kind of looked at each other, and then we both turned and looked over at Hal [Needham]. He gave us a thumbs up and said, "Yeah!" And we kind of knew there was some magic going on.

There are no awards in Hollywood for being an idiot.