Our Family Really Didn't Have A Car;

We Got Sally Field Onboard [in Smokey And The Bandit] And It Changed The Entire Dynamic. About A Third Of The Way Into Filming, I Was In The Car With Sally And There Was This Little Moment Where We Kind Of Looked At Each Other, And Then We Both Turned And Looked Over At Hal [needham]. He Gave Us A Thumbs Up And Said, "yeah!" And We Kind Of Knew There Was Some Magic Going On.

I'm Really Much More Like Phil Potter From [the 1979 Film] Starting Over. People Do Think I'm The Bandit [from Smokey And The Bandit ], And I'm A Lot More Serious Than That.

But Then When I'm In A Halfway Successful Movie, It Irritates The Hell Out Of The Critics In New York, Because They'd Like To Kill My Pictures If They Could. So Maybe I'm Pretty Good In The Movie. Then They Use All These Words Like I'm 'surprisingly' Good, Or 'shockingly Enough,' I'm Good. It's Like I Crawled Out From Under A Magazine And They're Surprised I Can Act.

I Regret That I Do Not Have The Dignity Of Ricardo Montalban, The Class Of Dean Martin, Or The Humor Of Bill Cosby. I Do Have The Heart Of A Lion.

I Had Known Hal [needham] For A While By The Time He Moved In, So I Was Sure We'd Get Along Well, And We Did. He'd Go Off And Do His Gigs And I Would Do Mine, And When We Were Lucky We Got To Work On The Same Ones.