"Yes," I said. "Thank you, yes. That is what I said. We made this movie for $17, and nobody got anything. So it never dawned on me that we would get real people. But Elizabeth Perkins is great, and there wasn’t all that much for her to do. It didn’t dawn on me until later that this is a road trip movie."

"It’s funny, because I wouldn’t call it a road trip movie, and yet I clumsily did to people before I wrote it. The bare bones were there. I knew dad would show up on my door, and he would say ‘Hey, I don’t know where ma is, ma left me,’ and we would somehow get in the car. Originally, I thought that we were going to get in the car and look for mom. Then I thought, ‘that’s nuts, you don’t do that, and you certainly don’t drive at a leisurely pace.’ So, I always knew there would be a car, and I knew that somewhere in there would be a baseball game, and a pool hall, somewhere there’s going to be some drinking."

"I remember pitching the script to a big producer, and I said, ‘There’s this father and son, and they go on a road trip.’ He said, ‘All right, can I stop you here and tell you what I think?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess at this point, yeah.’ He said, ‘I don’t like road movies.’ I said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ So it’s not a road picture, but it certainly does what a road picture does."

"If there’s negative value to the words "road movie", I wasn’t trying to do that. I knew that it was going to involve the [father and son] in a car for a prolonged amount of time. I wanted them to have these experiences and you don’t have them if you stay home. You’re not going to sit down and have an eight-hour talk with your dad."

"This woman told me recently that women like to bond face to face and men need to be shoulder to shoulder. Men like to shoot together, or drive together, go bowling together, and to a degree I thought that it was really interesting, and a really good point. Eye contact is going to be off-putting, especially if it’s father and son and there’s heavy shit in the air. But if you’re driving, you have plenty of time, there’s no rush. Even when there’s a lull in conversation, it doesn’t feel like a lull, because you’re taking in the scenery or stopping for a bite. There wasn’t enough eating in this movie. I thought there would be a lot more restaurants, more ordering. I was surprised when I watched it that there wasn’t more."

"It wasn’t really eating, it was ordering. I love to see Peter order. There was this one longer, deathly silent scene. It was beautiful. The idea of him trying to get what he likes from the waitress, now [that’s interesting]."

"There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t like Peter Falk to do. There was a scene we shot where he and I go in to buy allergy medicine and there was a kid who was just extra zippy cheerful. ‘Paper or plastic today?’ Peter Falk says, ‘Whatever, it doesn’t matter.’ The guy just kept wanting an answer. Peter would say, ‘What’s the difference? Okay, Plastic. What? All right, paper then.’ Just the image of Peter being annoyed by such a mundane thing was funny. There’s very little that Peter Falk can do that is not entertaining. He eats entertainingly, he has mood swings that are entertaining, and he’s silent entertaining. Go on, try to think of something he could do that would not be funny."

"Right."

"No, not really. Sometimes something interests me, and I think, ‘I’d really like to learn how to do that,’ and I’ll push myself through it, even if I’m scared. But I won’t chase it. For example, I’m working on a show that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s about how random people affect each other without knowing each other, and that actions have consequences; that something you do might affect someone who’s never met you. You miss the light, so the guy behind you misses the light, which causes the guy behind you to be late for his thing. And to me what’s fun about this is the randomness; you’re never quite sure where to look, it’s like a shell game. Do I look over here? Nope, we’re actually following this guy."

"That works too. I’m trying to thread that needle, keeping a lot of characters spinning, and a bit of suspense, but at the same time, not make the viewers dizzy. Give them what they want, a little bit at a time, so they keep coming back every week. So it’s a challenge, and I don’t know quite how to do it, but I’m going to figure it out. However, challenge myself to do something just because I’ve never done it? That doesn’t feel right."

"Acting wise? No. As producer it was very different in the beginning. [Director] Raymond De Felitta was very open about it. He’d say, ‘Listen, this is your thing.’ Even so, I wasn’t going to suddenly wake up and say, ‘Can you put in an amusement park?’ Having said that, there were a couple meetings I missed, and I didn’t see the location before we got there to shoot and, "Whoa!" That’s part of the reality of making movies though. I’d say there were two, maybe three instances like that."

"The stadium for the baseball game; I always thought we’d use a bigger ballpark, like a 7,000-seat stadium. And Raymond fell in love with this ballpark that was about a 400-seat stadium. There were houses in the background, and he thought it was so funny that there would be houses that could look into the stadium. And I said, ‘Yes, it is funny, but now it just looks like a park.’ So I just told myself, ‘Okay, it might not be the minor leagues, it might just be the championship of this town, it does not make a difference.’

By the time I’d got on it, that ship had sailed, we’d bought the location, and I thought, ‘Oh fuck. Okay...’ And then I tried to take my producer hat off, put my actor hat on and play the scene. That’s a big reason why I didn’t want to direct. I already spent years putting my gut into this. It’s like, let me get someone else to collaborate, someone else to figure out the shots, and bring in some creative ideas. Raymond brought in terrific creative ideas. He’s a writer so he also had some very helpful tweaks to the script, and instructed, you know, ‘Put a scene after that.’ And I would say, ‘Gee, why would I do that, it’s perfect the way it is.’ And then he would push me and I would do it, and then say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’"

"So there were things like that, and I was happy and grateful to have him. I used to implore him, ‘Please, tell me, am I doing too much? Too little? Tell me as an actor.’ I can’t always tell how I’m coming across. I don’t know if I’m pushing too hard, if I’m hitting the joke. So I was certainly happy to have another set of eyes on the project."

"I always thought this was going to be a really small film, it’ll be a seven or eight million dollar movie. Someone told me it must be easy to make those. No. That’s the hardest movie to make. You can make a $20,000,000 movie or a $50,000,000 movie, but that [seven or eight million dollar picture] is the hardest thing to make. I could never quite understand it. And somebody said, ‘Well, if it isn’t too late in the game, why don’t we shoot digital?’ And to me, I thought, ‘Isn’t that, by definition, going to be second tier?’ I didn’t know what it looked like, and then I started watching some digital movies, and wow!"

"The camera was small but it wasn’t a tiny hand-held. At the end of the day it wasn’t so different. You can shoot quickly and you can shoot longer because you have one hour tapes. So you get a lot more tapes, and you’re not downsizing, and lighting doesn’t take quite as long. I still had the impression that we were going to have, like, guerrilla tactics. We’d be running out of a car, shooting, grabbing it. No, you’ve got trucks, props and lights; you’ve got dollies and everything. We shot it in 25 days, and everyone thought that we could’ve used more time on the set. I would’ve loved 28 days."

"Yeah. When the film was done and we were trying to find a distributor, I had all sorts of offers to put it on TV. You know, it could be a CBS movie of the week, or cable, HBO or Showtime. And I was like, ‘No, I want it to be in the theater.’ Looking back, it was a gutsy choice because it certainly looked like no one was going to pick it up. There’s something about the lights going down, and the sense of community in the theater. It’s just not the same seeing it at home. Going to see it with people takes you deeper into the story. I mean, the movie has been panned, it has been dismissed, people have been like, ‘it’s too soft, it’s more like a Hallmark film,’ but no it’s not. Yes, there’s a lot of emotion, but I’ve seen responses to this film that I’ve never seen before. People that can’t really talk afterwards because they’re like, ‘I have to go home; I have to go bawl.’"

"Yeah, Field of Dreams, yeah. I saw it in the theater on an afternoon when I was on location and there were like 12 people in the theater. At the end, I was just so devastated; I couldn’t get out of my seat. And I sat and watched it a second time."

"No. No, I didn’t. I’ve never done that, but I didn’t want to break that wall. I didn’t want to see the sunlight and break that warmth of that movie, and that feeling. When you can do that, it’s very exciting to see. I’ve heard people say about this film, ‘Oh this is a guy’s movie,’ because it’s about guys. They say women aren’t going to see it. I don’t suspect that’s true, because I think women are going to love this. The guys talk about women"—

"Guys showing emotion, and guys being okay showing emotion, because it’s dad. And it’s not some dad, it’s Peter Falk, for god’s sake! This guy is as close to the salt of the earth as they come. Everybody’s comfortable with Peter. So I think that’s a huge reason as to why this is working. We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile. It’s kind of like Nixon going to China, you trust it with him, and you can go to this place with Peter Falk. You wouldn’t go there with Richard Gere; you wouldn’t have gone there with Sean Penn."