I love John F. Kennedy. My mother had been a worker on his campaign and adored him. I was just a kid when he was around. I did a lot of preparation, a lot of research. I can't do him... I sort of get a slight Boston accent, and I tried to get his rhythm. My only fear was that I was too old to play him, because I was much older than he was when he died, so I was concerned about that. But it was one of those, "Oh what the hell, I'm doing this. It's a great part, and I'm going for it."

Whenever I study a genre of film-making, Steve Spielberg is the first guy I go to. Even Catch Me If You Can, which is a very lightweight kind of thing, if you just look at the economy of the way he designs his shots and works around actors, the craft is amazing.

I'd come up with one leg in theater, but never my first leg. I loved the camera too much.

Funny is funny. You can be fooled by the eye, but if your performance is funny to the ear, it will be funny. I think it's that if you don't have the visual, you have to infuse the full personality into the voice.

With comedy, you really want to work things out beforehand.

Chevy Chase had been a bad boy with a drug problem, and had never really realized his potential. Fletch was the first movie he sort of straightened up on. And Michael Ritchie was Harvard-educated, 6'6", a brilliant director and political thinker. He was the guy the studio thought could handle Chevy, and keep him in check. And he could.

I'd been working on more traditional movie sets and TV shows at Universal. All of a sudden, here we're on location in Animal House, and it's down and dirty and quick. It was the way the new commercial world was shooting; the way the indie world was shooting. These were lighter, faster cameras. It was a generational change.