What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being found out.

I am literally smaller than life. I am an unextraordinary-looking person. I've seen people trying to hide their disappointment when they meet me, and I have to watch them get over it.

The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

"The Prince Of Tides" is a lot about my mother - what my mother would do after Dad would hit one of the kids or hit two of the kids, hit all the kids, hit her, she would usually get in the car. We'd drive out. She would say, I'm going to divorce him. I'm never going back.

I think the interview form works best on the radio. There are a lot of personality traits conveyed in a person's voice, the rhythm of their speech or how confident they sound.

So the Great Santini was how he liked being referred to by his children. He would line up his seven children, and there was this ritual we'd go through. And he would say, who's the greatest of them all? And we - the seven - would say, you are, oh, Great Santini. And he would say, who knows all, hears all and sees all? You do, oh, Great Santini. So this was the ridiculous way I was raised.

What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being found out.