I was with Brian De Palma at the time, and he said he wrote the role specifically for me. I don't know what that says about the way he saw me, since the role was of a castrating killer. Brian came one morning to the house, said "Here's your Christmas present." He wrote the character to have a Swedish accent, but since I couldn't pull that off, he switched it to French-Canadian. It was such a romantic time in my life. Everyone was young and passionate and convinced they were going to change film forever.

I remember when we were doing the love scene in Some Kind Of Hero, we got in bed nervously. Then he looked up, and it was very genuine, and he went, " Richard Pryor's in bed with Lois Lane!" And it was so cute!

I do remember when I first read the script of the 92 In The Shade. I was in the house at Nicholas Beach, and that gang was starting to break up, and I read this terribly well-written dialogue, not figuring out that films are about structure and the thing was totally unstructured, and I thought, "Who is this writer? God, he's great."

I had always thought of Chris as my kid brother and watching how this kid, as I still thought of him, had affected so many peoples lives around the world was incredible.

It's no accident that all the awards are for smaller movies. When you have $100 million in the budget for a movie, there's something obscenely wrong with the picture. But we didn't in those days, so it was fun.

The studios still had development programs for young people. Because you weren't talking about the budgets of small nations the way you are now when you make a movie. There was a lot more freedom to fail.

I went to work and did a lot of homework about what was wrong with me