But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't. And I'm not talking about imagining what a deaf person's whole life is like I even mean just realizing what it is like for an instant.

I walk into office, which is the casting office for CBS in New York. Mainly what they cast out of this office was the CBS daytime shows. I go in and walk into this room which every seat is filled with young African-American boys and girls and they were in their teens. I went, "I'm in the wrong place. Why am I here? What's going on?"So I go in and meet Norman [Lear].

Maybe if I'd gone in younger, I wouldn't have had that feeling, but I've seen an enormous amount of changes since the early-'70s in how this stuff is shot. I did the first TV movie ever shot in 18 days; before this film the normal length of shooting a TV movie was between 21 and 26 days. We shot a full-up, two-hour TV movie in 18 days with Donald Sutherland playing the lead, who had never worked on television before.

I did a film many years ago called The Man Without A Face.Gaby [Hoffmann] was in with Mel Gibson. That was his directing debut. He did a great job.

I have to say I was very lucky in this [movie] business. I was in the right place at the right time when I first got started.

You have to give people the opportunity to prove themselves.

In a very real way Norman [Lear] godfathered me into my career. He was the best mentor anybody could have ever had.