Behind the Scenes: Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959) with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis

It's not an easy task for guys, you know, to stand or to walk on high heels, you know, it's torture, believe me. Ask any man, ask any transvestite how long it took him to get used to that. And the only way that you think you can save your lives is by joining an all-girl orchestra, so about 80% of the picture you're going to be in drag. Do you want to do it? Jack and I would make bets when Marilyn would get it right or wrong. You know, Marilyn would come in and have a shot, shaking her head, saying, Relax, relax, Jack, we're coming to magic time, magic time. I was stuck between these two people. He was from the moon, I mean, this guy, or some other planet. I mean, he was crazy. Some Like It Hot was the creation of producer-director Billy Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond. We get into a room and talk, or don't talk, as the occasion demands, until something comes up. I mean, it's a close working relationship. Do you ever argue or fight about that? All the time. Sure. It's like a marriage, you know. They came in every morning at 9 o'clock and 9.30. One of them read Variety, one of them read The Reporter, then they switched. Then they sat and stared at each other until somebody got an idea. And sometimes they stared at each other for three or four weeks. Before anybody sat down and wrote a word, they talked the whole picture out. So that when you hear that they wrote it as they went along, they did, in fact, to a certain degree. But they knew where they were going. We usually start with two-thirds of a script written down on paper. That doesn't mean the rest of it wasn't constructed. I mean, we always had the third act in our heads, just a question of doing a little paperwork. My brother and I formed our own company. We named it The Mirrish Company. And we made an arrangement with United Artists for them to distribute our films. Billy came in one day and said, I've been thinking about this picture. And it's about these two musicians who are out of work and the only way they can get jobs is to disguise themselves as women and get jobs in an all-girls band. What do you think? I said, I love it. Harold Mirrish had a house on Lexington Drive up in Beverly Hills. And he used to run movies on the weekends. So I go see Billy at Harold's house. He pulls me in the room. He said, I'm going to make a movie of two guys that have to dress up as women because they see a murder and they join a girls band. I'm getting Frank Sinatra and you and Mitzi Gaynor. I said, anything you say, sir. And at that point, Billy felt that Tony could do either role, depending upon how they cast the second role. And he wanted to use, from the beginning, he wanted to use Lemon. I was in a little restaurant. Billy popped over, excused himself from his table and said, would you mind if I stopped and chatted with you for a moment about an idea I have? And I said, of course not. And he then plopped down. And I can't do Billy's accent. I don't think that Billy can do Billy's accent. But anyway, he more or less in 60 seconds said, I've got this thing. And it's set back in the 20s there with the St. Valentine's Day massacre. And you're going to be a musician with another fellow who's a musician. And you've witnessed the St. Valentine's Day and so forth. And they see that you see them. And you two musicians run away and hide from them. And the only way that you think you can save your lives is by joining an all-girl orchestra. So about 80% of the picture, you're going to be in drag. Do you want to do it? Realizing he was stone cold sober, a light went off. And I said, yes. I don't know why to this day I said, yes. Normally, I'd say, where's the script? Where's something? I just said, yes, because it was him. But the money people didn't feel that Jack was at that point a big enough star. And they wanted him to use Sinatra. So the original plan was Tony, Sinatra, and Mitzi Gaynor. And Billy made a date with Sinatra for lunch. And Sinatra stood him up. And that marital ass took care of that. Billy told me it would be too much trouble. And certainly, setting him up for lunch was evidence of it. So then, about the same time, Marilyn called and said she wanted to work with him again. And he said, fine. And once he had Marilyn and Tony, Jack was plenty big enough. Nothing happened for a couple of months. And then I got a call. And he was at the Golden Studios. He said, come down. I've got about the first act, as he would say, or 60 or 70 pages of it. He gave it to me. We chatted for a few minutes. I went home alone and read that thing and fell off the couch. And I knew then, boom, God had struck. It was just one of those moments. Billy felt strongly about Black and White because he felt that since the picture itself was in period, and since we were doing something that was going to be very difficult, namely trying to make our boys acceptable in drag, that that might work better in Black and White than in color. And he persuaded us to that. Incidentally, an awful lot of people, I'm sure, because I was aware of it in the industry at the time, thought he was crazy for making this film or trying to make this film, that it would be a disaster, that he was trying to make a two-hour or feature-length farce out of a five-minute burlesque sketch. We had makeup tests, which were drudgery, because we went through a week of Tony and me sitting side by side. I finally realized after about four days with the bee sting lips that I was getting to look like a bad imitation of my mother. Jack always said that he patterned the character after his mother. He fell into it very easily because he's sort of a living room performer, among other things. It was much harder for Tony. Tony was very self-conscious about it. But Jack, the first time you put him in high heels, he walked out there and was, you know, talking girl, talked to the members of the crew. You know, he loved it. He was having a ball. When Jack came out, he was like a 20-cent tart. He was chewing gum, hip swing, left and right, you know, carrying a purse. When I saw him, instinctively, I understood that I was not going to do that. So I came out like Grace Kelly or my mother, always meticulous. And doing wardrobe tests, I realized we had it made. That is to say, we knew we were going to blend with each other like two good musicians. Finally, it was about the fifth day, and I said, what do you think, Tony? He says, I'm happy. And I said, so am I. Let's go show Billy. And he said, wait a minute, I got a better idea. He said, let's go and see what happens. See if they catch on to us right away or what. And I said, okay. So we walked down to the ladies' toilet. And we went right to the mirror, started putting on a lipstick. And through the mirror, we could see the stalls behind us. Girls coming in and out. I finished my lipstick. I said, you do yours? He says, yeah. I said, I told you it would work. He says, I can't believe it. I said, let's go, darling. And we walked out. And as we got to the entrance or the exit of the ladies' room, a girl coming by said, hi, Tony. I said, hello. So we went up to Billy's office, and he looked at the two of us. And he said, it looks good to me. Then Tony and I told him about what we had done. And he said, that did it. Don't change anything. We went on location first, the back lot at MGM. Because they had a train station. And that's where we did all of the train stuff, getting on and off the train. That's where Marilyn walks by and the steam blurts out behind her. I rather felt the steam was sort of a first cousin to the scene that Billy shot with her in Seven Year Itch where the air thing comes up and blows her skirt. And that he was rather trying to top himself. When the picture started, I couldn't get the right elevation of my voice. I kept slipping in and out. And there was an actor, I don't remember his name, a very fine voice actor who came in and did some dubbing. Then they combined the two, and then it ended up what it was. I understand you're looking for a couple of girl musicians. We went down to the Coronado Hotel and started shooting there. Marilyn was in excellent shape and condition, you know. All the lines came out easy. I had no idea you're such a big girl. Oh sugar, you should have seen me before I went on a diet. I mean your shoulders and your arms. We're shooting the beach scene when Billy said, what shall we do for the millionaire? I said, I'd like to do something different. He said, what would you do? I said, well maybe I could talk a little bit like this. He said, well do it Tony. I said, I shall. And where did you get that phony accent? Nobody talks like that! So I took Cary Grant and manipulated him a little bit. Syncopators, does that mean you play that very fast music, jazz? She was under the auspices of Paula Strasburg and Lee Strasburg. She would do a shot and she wouldn't look at you, she'd look at Paula. And Billy caught that on very early, right in the middle of the scene once he said cut. He says, how was that for you Paula? The Coronado shoot I thought went quite well. We came back to the studio and of course problems developed with Marilyn. She had ills, she had insecurities. Many, many difficulties which led to multiple takes and rather tried the patience of her fellow actors. And most particularly Billy Wilder. It was tough, let's say the Monroe thing, you know. Her fear of the camera, her occasional lack of concentration. This is not cheap even in those days, you know. A day of shooting cost like $20,000, but just blown to bits. And not that she came at 9 o'clock prepared, because she would come like at 11.30. And she would then say, having worked there for a long time, that I'm sorry, I lost my way to the studio. She forgot the address of the studio. But every possible thing happened. I came down on the set one day when Tony and Marilyn were shooting their love scene. Where he does carry Grant and she's kissing him to see if it works. We all sat around for two hours before she would come out of her dressing room. Billy did tell both Jack and Tony, Tony will tell you this, that he said to them, you guys have got to be perfect on every single take. Because once Marilyn gets it right, that's what gets printed. The rumor was Paula Strasberg, who was on the set all the time with Marilyn, was her dark shadow, was signaling to Marilyn whenever she thought the scene was not showing Marilyn to the best advantage. And Marilyn would then stop dead in the middle of the scene. But the fact that she might very well be doing it on purpose was a source of considerable irritation to everybody. When we were in the rushes and the lights went on, Tony stood up and as he was standing up he said, it's like kissing Hitler. Well, Jesus. I said, did he? He didn't really say that, did he? Yeah, he did. And there was a silence in the room and a deep intake of breath from Paula Strasberg. And his came home and told me what had happened. They were all scared. They were scared that Paula would go and tell Marilyn and Marilyn would refuse to finish the film. But there wasn't anybody in the room with the exception of Paula Strasberg who wasn't totally in sympathy with Tony. As I said, he was giving the performance of his career. The joke was so obvious that it was scary that nobody got it if I said it. And I probably did. What was it like kissing Marilyn Monroe? It's like going down a mountain on a sled and flying to the moon on Joshua Wings. What are you talking about? What's it like kissing Marilyn Monroe? I said, it's like kissing Hitler. What do you expect me to say? That was the intent, don't you see? Everybody seemed to take it as a great insult. It was no insult to Marilyn. It wasn't an insult to anybody. Everybody in the company knew what I was talking about. All the newspaper women, what did you mean by that? Kissing her was like kissing... I said, I never said it. Leave me alone. That was that very famous scene where she used to come into the room. The boys were in women's clothes. She still thinks that they are girls. She used to enter and she used to say, where's that bourbon? She knows that the guys have bourbon. She is so disappointed in what is happening in her private life that she needs a slug of that booze. She used to come in and she used to knock on the door and they say, who is it? She used to say outside the door, it's me, Sugar. She comes in and she used to say, where is that bourbon? That was it. She had a mental block. She just could not say that line. Sugar, it's me. After take 16, she spoiled because she knocked on the door. Who is it? Sugar, it's me. No, no, cut. Now she would burst into tears. Now we have to remake the makeup. We redo it because there's the mascara. After take 53, I took her to the side. I said, Marilyn, please don't worry. She would look at me and say, worry about what? I said, that's a strange, strange girl. Then we said, look, I tell you what you do. We put on the door outside. We're going to write in big letters. Knock, knock, and then say, who is it? She would say, it's me, Sugar. Finally, she comes to the room. I said, now, you know, there is a piece of furniture with lots of drawers. It's in one of those drawers. Whichever drawer you open, it will be lined with a piece of paper which says, where is that bourbon? Whichever you open, you cannot... Well, there were another 30 takes because she went to the wrong piece of furniture. I would have printed anything except maybe, where is that Dr. Pepper? So you just say, my God, my God. This was a question as to who is going to have a nervous breakdown. Me, the two guys who were suffering, or the money man. You know, we worked for the Mearish Company. This is not cheap. Even in those days, a day of shooting cost like $20,000. That's just blown to bits. But the fact of the matter is, she had her back to the camera. They could have dubbed that line at any time later on. And it became basically a contest of wills. One of them was going to win and it was going to be Billy. It required a much longer shooting schedule than we had originally planned for it. I would guess the picture was three quarters of a million dollars or so or more over budget. We were already shooting and my collaborator and I were still fiddling around with the final scene. It was late in the evening and the scene had to go into mimeographing to be distributed. We just said, now we need a big laugh. We need something. He, Lemon, in the girl's clothes, taking off his wig and trying to tell our beloved Joey Brown, the multimillionaire, trying to tell him, look, I'm a boy. Now we needed a punchline. And it got to be so late. And then finally, so he says, nobody's perfect. And I said, well? And he says, look, it's getting very late. We can always change that line. It's not chiseled in marble. He wrote it at home and left it with me when he took it over to work on it with Billy. I read it and when he came home he asked me what I thought and I said I thought it was an absolutely brilliant scene but that I thought that the last line was flat, weak. And he quickly disabused me of that. He says, you're absolutely wrong and Billy agrees with you and he's wrong too. And he says, you don't understand the whole structure of the scene. Everybody in the audience loves to be in on a joke and everybody in this audience knows that Jack's last line is going to be I'm a man and he's going to take off his wig and they're braced for that. They're ready for the explosion. He says the only way you can do the other thing that audiences like which is surprise is to give them the flattest possible reaction, no explosion. But you don't understand! I'm good. I'm a man. Well, nobody's perfect. So we just did it and then slowly kind of came to realize hey that was not a dummy line that was one of the good lines in the picture. And of course it speaks to all of us. Nobody's perfect. The first preview was an absolute disaster. Complete. A preview at the Bay Theater in Civic Palisades. Nobody laughed. Nobody really got it. They weren't quite sure what it was about. You know, they thought it was kind of a melodrama. The next morning, Billy called me and said, we're going to preview again this Friday in Westwood. I said, oh, what did you cut? And he said, 60 seconds. They cut a scene they had no business cutting. When Marilyn tells me in the bathroom she's sleeping over beanstalk and he snores and I tell her I can sleep over anybody so I let her take my berth and I go sleep in her berth over beanstalk. Jack, who's playing like he's falling asleep, doesn't know this scene happened in the bathroom so he tips down the steps, goes down the hallway, climbs up on the ladder, beanstalk could be or could not be he climbs, opens it, there I am, he thinks it's Marilyn and he straddles me. He says, remember I told you I had a secret? Well, let me tell you the secret. I'm a man and with that I wake up and I said, I ought to punch you in the mouth. The minute he turns over I slap the wig back on real quick and I say, you wouldn't hit a girl, would you? Billy just took that one scene and took the whole scene out. The scene by itself was terrific. It was very good. But as Billy said, it was gilding the lily. It was one scene too much on the train in that whole sequence. That's all. And he didn't touch the rest of the film. And they previewed it the next week in Westwood and somebody, and I don't know who it was to give them credit, but there used to be always, I guess it probably still is, when there's a studio preview the card has always read we present a major studio feature preview. Somebody had the brilliant idea to have the card read of that screening a minor studio feature preview and the audience was smart enough to realize, oh, it's a comedy. And they laughed from the beginning. They never stopped laughing. When it was all over, you know, naturally I was absolutely drained. I knew I had the final shot and I looked at the rushes and there were no scratches so I knew we were in. It was kind of an exhaustion. There was a moment of never again. Well, all I can tell you is if Maron was around today I would be on my knees, please let's do it again. How about that guy? Yeah, look, Daphne, hands off. I saw him first. Sugar, let me give you a little advice to you. If I were a girl, and I am, I'd watch my step. If I'd been watching my step, I never would have met him. Nothing matched our movie. Nothing. It was original. It was outrageous. It took a lot of courage to do. In all the golden years of Hollywood there is no comedy any better than this one. More Billy Wilder films are in current lists of the great American films than perhaps any other American director. The only thing I now know is that it was a huge success worldwide that we knew we had a good picture. We are surprised that it has lived on after all those years. Meeting Billy Wilder was one of the great perks of having made L.A. confidential. He saw that picture and called me up and invited me down to his office which, needless to say, was a great call to get because Billy Wilder not only was an extraordinary writer-director that I admired as an adult but he was also one of those filmmakers who first made me aware that there was somebody behind the camera telling the story. This lot was originally the home of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks when they started United Artists. Then it became the Goldwyn Studio eventually Warner Hollywood. Billy Wilder first worked here when he was working for Howard Hawks on Ball of Fire and reportedly it was seeing Mary Pickford visiting the studio at night that gave him the idea for Sunset Boulevard. This, this whole parking area right here were sound stages. Stages 3 and 4 where sets were built for the apartment Irma LaDuce, Witness for the Prosecution and, of course, Some Like It Hot. The stage burned down in 1974. Billy was out at Universal doing the remake of the front page at the time and he sent Audrey over here to check out the damage to his office. His offices were right up here on the second floor the last two windows on the left there and he said to her what happened to the wall? How's the wall? And she said, what wall? Because the stage had collapsed and debris had gone right into the building not only taking out the windows but taking out the whole wall and it was a disaster. Everything he had in there was lost. This was always known as the writers building. Still is, although I don't know that there are that many writers left in here. These first rooms here are editing rooms and in her shoes we use them for rehearsals. And Shirley MacLaine the first day she walked in she exclaimed to me and Cameron Diaz and Tony Colletti this was my dressing room and Jax was right over there. The best way I have found to describe Billy over the years is that as close as we are I have never spent 30 seconds that were dull. And it's a true statement. He's a fascinating man. People say you have to have a sense of humor God knows he has that. We think of a sense of humor as someone who can get a joke. That really is not a sense of humor that's an appreciation of humor. A sense of humor is somebody who can see humor in a situation and then make it funny so that you can appreciate it. Lord knows Billy has done that for decades. Billy Wilder is a very smart man. He had a personal characteristic that is not necessarily true for a lot of smart people which is he trusted his audience to be smart too. People try their darndest because they want to please him and he gets good results. It's always a very intense friendly set. His was always on the set and always in all the post-production. I mean Billy felt that what was important going on in the set was that the script get on the screen. When Billy and his often collaborator I.A.L. Diamond are really on their stick there is never a word changed. You cannot take a word out. You cannot add a word. It's like trying to ad-lib Shakespeare. What kind of a band is it anyway? You gotta be under 25. We could pass for that. We could dye our hair. I still have not read in all these years these decades that I've been fooling around in this crazy business. I have never read a comedy script. Not only better, maybe not it's equal. I think that I think it should be mandatory for young writers for instance when they're in a college or university or when they're starting to study. If there were a few scripts that they should really study as for dialogue, construction, etc. That would have to be number one. It's flawless, I think. The idea that Tony Curtis' character Joe or Josephine is going to have a miraculous personality transformation is something first of all that's only possible in a comedy. It's been true since the Greek and Roman comedians such as Plautus and Shakespeare. None of that sugar. No guy is worth it. You must remember that the 1950s was a very conservative, politically and sexually, a very conservative decade. But things were changing and this film was part of that change. Shortly before the film's premiere the powerful Catholic legion of decency condemned it as morally objectionable, claiming it promoted homosexuality, lesbianism and transvestitism. The movie was banned in Kansas when United Artists refused to delete the love scene on The Yacht. That same scene caused the Memphis censorship board to restrict viewings to adults only. Some Like It Hot is a picture about sex. It's about sex from the title, Some Like It Hot, to the final line. The film is revolutionary. I think that's absolutely true. And that they managed to get away with a point of view in the film that would seem in a different context totally unacceptable and they got away with it. The movie is not just about sex as in people having sex, but it's also about sexual attitudes, sexual role and of course identity. I'm a girl. Get a load of that rhythm section. I'm a girl. Just keep telling yourself you're a boy. You're a boy. I'm a boy. That's the boy. If the film is anybody's, it's Marilyn's film. She's the character who everybody remembers. And if you take her out of the film and consider for example Missy Gaynor in the same role, I think you have a totally different film. I loved working with Marilyn. An awful lot of people in an awful lot of films in her lifetime certainly had their hands full according to them. I loved it. She was difficult. There's no question of that. But I was aware in my mind anyhow that it was hardly any temperament. The biggest problem was her inability really to face things, to get on the set in time and you could sit there for an eternity waiting for Marilyn. I think it was just her absolute emotional inability to face a situation. Everybody had those kind of problems with her because she was very hesitant and uncertain and dependent on the opinions of others like her dramatic coach and so on and so forth. And she had a great talent but she was not a professional in that sense. She was a phenomenon but she was not a trained actress. All of a sudden for some inexplicable reason she lost control. Something in her life must have happened. It didn't happen on the set with us. I had a wonderful time with her. First and foremost I think that Someone Like It Hot is probably the best film that she ever made. It also came at a very difficult time in her life. She was pregnant immediately before she made the movie. Lost the baby. It's part of why she's so voluptuous in the film. And it came at a time in which her own personal life was in tumult. None of which of course is reflected in the film. The film has a magic about it and of course that is because in a very real way of Billy Wilder. Believe me, I have known actors and actresses that can come up with six pages of dialogue absolutely flawless. Well Christ, you go to a French restaurant here in LA, you know, and this guy comes up and recites 14 dishes in French and in English. Never misses a vegetable. Nothing. The sauces are perfect. My God, why don't I have actors like this who never blow a line? But that does not matter. It is of no importance. Nobody cares. What is on the screen? Does it work? Do we feel for her? Are we involved in her fate? Do we wish her well? Do we want her dead? She was absolutely totally unique and there has never been anybody like her because there were also days, I should mention that, where she went through entire scenes without blowing a line. I come from this musical family. My mother is a piano teacher. My father was a conductor. Where did he conduct? On the Baltimore in Ohio. I always thought, you know, that this girl had a great, great sense for dialogue. She knew where the laughs were. And she did it with a great deal of elegance and she had that unique thing that makes a big star a big star. By that I mean women and men like her equally. There's something so totally disarming about her. The very nature of what makes a star is magic. It's undefinable. And you only know it when you see it. And she had it. She was magic. You view the film now through the eyes of what happened to her in the years immediately afterward. She didn't have a long time left on this earth. Story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop. She was that girl. She was Sugar Kowalski. She knew what she was. That's what she was. As Billy would say himself if he were here to this very day, that picture wouldn't have been anything like what it is if it hadn't been for what Marilyn Monroe brought to that picture. Her performance, as difficult as it may have been to get, is really what makes the picture. And she really is just marvelous in it. I think that Marilyn Monroe is more famous today than she was at the time of her death. And I do think that she is the definitive star of the glamorous age of Hollywood stars. I think she is without question the most memorable star really of the 20th century. Nobody's perfect. It's not a solution to the story. What is this? The world's first Hollywood gay romance? I tell you I will never find another man who's so good to me. He's going to go off and marry Joey Brown? No. Diamond and Wilder come up with this great one-liner, one of the most famous in film history. I'm a man! Well, nobody's perfect. And then the music comes in without a single pause. It's up and out and you're out in the parking lot before you turn to the person you're with and say, what the hell's that mean? The implications of the story are impossible for at least the Hollywood of its day. Nobody paid much attention to it until all of a sudden it started to erupt. And it erupted from the audience. The audience got it before anybody else. The film wasn't taken very seriously when it came out. It wasn't taken very seriously by historians and critics. But over the years, it's had a remarkable longevity. As far as reviews went, the reviews were quite mixed. Trade reviews were good. New York Times was not good. Time was not good. But gradually, people shifted their opinions. People who were given a bad review suddenly put it on their ten best list. We also sometimes remember that it did not get a single Academy Award nomination, or maybe one or two, but it didn't win anything, for sure. It got six or seven nominations. Unfortunately, it appeared in a year where Ben Hur was in the race, and Ben Hur, I think, won, I don't know, 12 or 13 awards. I think still the highest number any film has ever won. And so, we kind of got left in the dust by Ben Hur, and very unfortunately so. But the Academy made it up to Billy the following year by giving him, I guess, three Oscars for writing, directing, and producing The Apartment. It was unique and different without stretching. You know, all these other films that were made with men dressing as women, they all had to make a big excuse to do that. You know, it wasn't enough to just let it load. The one thing that was closest was a television show, like one of Tom Hanks' earliest work, Bosom Buddies, it was called. And that was the closest as taking a feel of it. I saw, I think, one episode of it, and it was quite clear they had all done their homework. In 1984, the legacy of Some Like It Hot was celebrated on its 25th anniversary by the San Diego Film Society and the Hotel del Coronado, with a reunion of the cast and crew and a screening of the film. I know all of us were terribly pleased that you remembered that it was 25 years ago. It's a long time. As Marilyn Monroe says in the picture, in a scene, she says, you know, I'm 25 years old. You know, 25 years, that's a quarter of a century. Makes a girl think. Well, made me think too now when you reminded me. I kind of make myself believe that was only yesterday and we're still going at that tempo. Well, we're not. At first I was shocked when someone said 25th anniversary because to me it was like yesterday. Obviously I knew it was years ago, but I never really stopped to think it was 25 years ago that we made this film. What makes a great movie is something that plays well, something that interests people, something that makes people forget that they are sitting in a theater, that it's all actually just two-dimensional, that it's just the shadows appearing on the thing. If you partake in what is being told to you, if you are part of the story, in other words, if you can involve the audience so the audience works with you, then you've got a good picture. Big care. The American Film Institute in their polls chose it as the funniest film ever made. You know, what more can filmmakers want than the fact that a film has passed the test of time? It's interesting that when the American Film Institute did this poll seeking to discover which were the 100 top comedies, some like it hot came in number one, which I'd been saying for years was the case, and Tootsie came in number two, which I'd also been saying for years was the case, and that both are cross-dressing films. I've made many films, and this was the first film that was ever acclaimed like that. With all the good fortune I've had, and God, I've had a lot of it, there is certainly no moment, meaning no particular film, as fortunately successful as they might have been at times in my life that could ever mean more to me, or that was more important to me, professionally but emotionally also. It was the first time I got to work with Billy, and it's become a personal as well as a professional relationship that is extremely rewarding to me. And the picture alone, if I had never worked with Billy again, it still would rank along with maybe a handful of others as really important moments in my life. I'm so thrilled that I'm in that movie, and that I do a good job in it. That meant a lot to me. And then you start asking yourself, how did I do it, and why can't I do it again? Gradually, it's attained much more status than anybody ever dreamed of. I mean, they were just making a funny movie. That's all.