I've worked with a ginormous number of people over the years. What happens when you've been around for a while, when you run into people whose work you've seen and liked and they have seen and liked your work, there's a sense of you kind of know each other even though you don't.

People who just wanted to make it work and knew it was going to be a real challenge. We were on the beach the first day and Donald [Sutherland] and I are playing best friends our whole lives. We met each other for 10 seconds the night before and we're sitting on a beach lining up a shot that we shoot a few minutes later, never having had a conversation with each other and then end up going skinny dipping in the Pacific Ocean buck-ass naked, not knowing who the other person is.

I'm grateful I got the opportunity to do it because I know this now. If anybody ever asked me to do a daytime show again I would go no, no. I can't do that. Not because it's beneath me. It's above me. It's beyond my resources.

I know deaf people. I have discussed the issues with them I've also thought about them a lot so I have some insights that go a little further than people who haven't had contact with the deaf community.

After we did [All In The Family], that ended up being a real love fest all around. Me and Norman, Norman [Lear] and me, Rob Reiner, everybody liked everybody. So about six or seven months later I moved out to L.A. and I got a call that Norman wanted to see me. I came in and he said "ABC has given me a property that they just optioned to make into a TV series. It's from a play called Hot L Baltimore, and I want you to be in it."

She [Susan Lucci] was extraordinary. She wouldn't look at the scene until you walked in to rehearse it. It was amazing to me. That's the impression I got anyway.

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.