Nastassja Kinski is a sweetie. She's very quiet. But smart. I hung out with her mother more than Nastassja. I think Nastassja was more worried about Paul Schrader and doing the part in The Cat People, so her mom and I kind of became friends.

That show, The Sopranos put HBO on the map. So there I was - and then there I wasn't. Too bad. The same thing happened to me on Prison Break: I got the role of the governor on that, and then a handful of episodes later, I hanged myself.

Rip Torn thought I was being a wise guy, and one afternoon he got pretty angry with me after telling me to do something and he thought I was pretending like I didn't know what he meant.But he was very frustrated. He was very frustrated as a director in trying to get his little theater group going. It was called The Sanctuary Theater Workshop, I think, and he wanted to do these classical plays by people like August Strindberg, and he was fighting hard to get his show up and be good and be professional.

There were a lot of things in it that were important at the time to me. Cutter's Way movie was very relevant. And I wanted Cutter to succeed as a vet, as a guy coming back from 'Nam, because there were so many guys like that. And there were so many other movies at the time, like Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter, that it was really important that the movie be believable, that I come across a pissed-off vet who'd been there and comes home angry.

Griffin Dunne and I were both terrified that Martin Scorsese didn't think we were very good - and if he didn't think we were very good, that was it. That was the end of the line. If Martin Scorsese thinks you stink, you stink.

When my agent called me up and said, "Do you want to be in a movie called Sharknado?" I said, "What is it about? Is it really about sharks falling out of the sky and eating people?" And she said, "Yes." And I said, "Definitely. That is going to be a huge hit. That is going to put to rest the Home Alone dad image. I'm going to be the Sharknado drunk instead, hopefully." And I was right. I don't know how I knew that, but I just knew that Sharknado was going be a huge hit.

The look of the movie and the music, which was by Jack Nitzsche, is what really stands out to me. I don't know if the movie succeeds as a political, cultural comment on the times and the war in Vietnam, and the capitalists versus the everyday guy that gets sent off to fight corporate wars. I don't know if the movie ever succeeded in that range. But it was a wonderful part in the Cutter's Way.