"And number five, I’m going to say Smokey and the Bandit. I’m back on the comedy. It’s between Smokey and the Bandit and OSS 117, which is a French movie — it’s sort of like their version of the Naked Gun movies, but their agent’s really good; he’s actually very good at many things. He just happens to be a complete moron. But he’s a lover, he knows many languages… Anyway, Smokey and the Bandit, Jackie Gleason’s performance and Sally Field’s; she was amazing. It’s also a good snapshot of America when being a truck driver was cool. [laughs] Being an 18-wheeler truck driver was like, “That’s a good job.” I mean, they were badasses, and you don’t really think of that now; they don’t have that same mystique. But Jackie Gleason as Buford T. Justice… He has his own f***ing entrance music; every time he shows up, they’ve got this tuba playing, he’s there on the scene, and he’s doing his schtick, doing the best stuff. He’s another character, like the Joe Gideon character in All That Jazz, who’s despicable. He’s a racist, he’s a terrible father, he’s a sh**y cop, and you just can’t wait for him to get back on the screen. He has a line in there, talking about Sally Field, who runs off, and she’s a dancer, and he says, “That’s what you get for poontangin’ around with a bunch of hippie show folk.” [laughs] That is the quality of stuff he’s doing in that movie; it’s just so brilliant."

"I saw this one as a kid on PBS, I think. It was weird timing for that movie when it came out, and it was perceived in many different ways. I think it was probably one of the boldest statements from Charlie Chaplin. And I remember as a kid being very confused because I was terrified of Hitler. My mother’s family, her aunt, went to Auschwitz and a couple other places. And she wasn’t Jewish, but she was captured and thrown in with everybody else and went through some pretty heavy shit. So all of the stories I had heard, and the symbol of that being Hitler, was terrifying. I knew what he was trying to do, which was show the absurdity of people who have so much power built off of insecurity and what they’re willing to do, and then just showing him as an imbecile. As a kid that was an important thing to see, because it took the mickey out of something that was incredibly terrifying. I don’t think any other film can really touch what he did, and I don’t think you can really do that again. It was a first in a way, and there is not really a comparable thing in history that’s so singular that you could make fun of. So I think for me, as a kid, it was nice to know that you could disarm something so terrible. I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan, and I loved seeing all of his slapstick comedy, but that one did me in."