I've always gotten along well with Texans. You've got to.

I'm really much more like Phil Potter from [the 1979 film] Starting Over. People do think I'm the Bandit [from Smokey and the Bandit ], and I'm a lot more serious than that.

Gator [ McKlusky from White Lightning] was a criminal and a felon, but he had a good heart - he's probably a cousin to Bo. Bo was not a felon and definitely never wanted to hurt anybody - the final scene confirms that. He confesses to Buford T. Justice that he is right behind him. Gator McKlusky would not have done that.

Florida is a very healing place.

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.

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.