After The Sopranos, my mother said, "Couldn't there be some raft floating under the bridge when you jumped? Or couldn't you have a twin brother?" I said, "Yeah, if they'd wanted me that bad. But they don't."

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.

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.

I remember one afternoon when we were out on a golf course somewhere, and Lauren Bacall, James Garner, and Jack Lemmon were sitting there in deck chairs when I went off to do another scene. And I said something like, "Hey, where have you guys been?" And they said, "Oh, we were down at the clubhouse. We saw your scene!" And Jack Lemmon looked at James Garner, and James Garner looked back at me, and then they both looked back at me and said in unison, "You bet your ass it is!" So I've been up there with the greats. I've had my fleeting moments with theatrical genius.

I was a barfly, so going to work and acting and rehearsing and then going and sitting in a bar and drinking and then going home was sort of my lifestyle. And there was none of that out here in the '70s when I was lucky enough to get movies, and nobody else that I knew was working in movies at that point. I didn't really have a lot of movie friends.

Rip Torn had, like, lessons in everything he said, and one of them was, "I know that an actor can undermine anything a director tells him to do by making fun of it." And he thought that that's what I did.

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.