Our date-nightrule is no talking about the kids. That lasts about to the end of the driveway.

I'd distract myself until finally it was a combination of things. The show was over and I had time on my hands. I had taken time and played and just relaxed.

A friend told me to listen to my heart. Another friend told me to listen to my gut. Maybe I need an autopsy, because right now my colon is kind of iffy.

And in that time, I lost my dad and had kids of my own. It was like, OK, I get it now. I know what fatherhood is all about. And you look at your parents differently

The most rewarding part about being a dad is just looking at children who didn't exist at some point. The first time you saw them, they were the size of a quarter, in a sonogram, and now they can pour orange juice and yell at each other.

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.

In fact, I had the idea because of Peter Falk. I saw my dad watching a Peter Falk movie and something clicked in my head. I gotta go make a movie for Peter Falk and me