There are no awards in Hollywood for being an idiot.

If you hold on to things long enough, they get back into style. Like me.

I love Stroker Ace. I love the whole team. Jim Nabors really stole the show, and Ned Beatty, well I've made more of my movies with Ned Beatty than anybody else.

My acting is a bit like basketball. Most females in my films come off very well. I give great assist. And if I'm lucky, I even score.

Smokey and the Bandit was the first picture [Hal Needham ] directed, and I knew he could handle it. I had just directed Gator, and he saw my style and used that as a pattern.

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.

I had known Hal [Needham] for a while by the time he moved in, so I was sure we'd get along well, and we did. He'd go off and do his gigs and I would do mine, and when we were lucky we got to work on the same ones.