When Rob Reiner spoke with Fresh Air in September to promote Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Terry Gross asked him about Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences.

Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.

The father character in Being Charlie feels a lot of tension between his own career aspirations and his son’s addiction — but Reiner said that wasn’t how it was for him and Nick.

“I was never, ever too busy,” Reiner told Fresh Air. “I mean, if anything, I was the other way, you know, I was more hands-on and trying to do whatever I thought I could do to help. I’m sure I made mistakes and, you know, I’ve talked about that with him since.”

At the time, Reiner said he believed Nick was doing well. “He’s been great … hasn’t been doing drugs for over six years,” Reiner said. “He’s in a really good place.”

Reiner starred in the 1970s sitcom, All in the Family and directed Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a sequel to his groundbreaking 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.

“After 15 years of not working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea, and we started schnadling right away,” Reiner recalled. “It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn’t talked to in a long time. It’s like jazz musicians, you just fall in and do what you do.”

Below are some more highlights from that interview.

Interview Highlights

Carl Reiner (left) and Rob Reiner together in 2017.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM

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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM

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On looking up to his dad, director Carl Reiner, and growing up surrounded by comedy legends 

When I was a little boy, my parents said that I came up to them and I said, “I want to change my name.” I was about 8 years old … They were all, “My god, this poor kid. He’s worried about being in the shadow of this famous guy and living up to all this.” And they say, “Well, what do you want to change your name to?” And I said, “Carl.” I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him and I wanted to do what he did and I just looked up to him so much. …

[When] I was 19 … I was sitting with him in the backyard and he said to me, “I’m not worried about you. You’re gonna be great at whatever you do.” He lives in my head all the time. I had two great guides in my life. I had my dad, and then Norman Lear was like a second father. They’re both gone, but they’re with me always. …

There’s a picture in my office of all the writers who wrote for Sid Caesar and [Your] Show of Shows over the nine years, I guess, that they were on. And, when you look at that picture, you’re basically looking at everything you ever laughed at in the first half of the 20th century. I mean there’s Mel Brooks, there’s my dad, there is Neil Simon, there is Woody Allen, there is Larry Gelbart, Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Aaron Ruben who created The Andy Griffith Show. Anything you ever laughed at is represented by those people. So these are the people I look up to, and these are people that were around me as a kid growing up.

On directing the famous diner scene in When Harry Met Sally

We knew we were gonna do a scene where Meg [Ryan] was gonna fake an orgasm in an incongruous place like a deli, and Billy [Crystal] came up with the line, “I’ll have what she’s having.” … I said, we need to find somebody, an older Jewish woman, who could deliver that line, which would seem incongruous. I thought of my mother because my mother had done a couple of little [movie] things … So I asked her if she wanted to do it and she said sure. I said, “Now listen mom, hopefully that’ll be the topper of the scene. It’ll get the big laugh, and if it doesn’t, I may have to cut it out.” … She said, “That’s fine. I just want to spend the day with you. I’ll go to Katz’s. I’ll get a hot dog.” …

When we did the scene the first couple of times through Meg was kind of tepid about it. She didn’t give it her all. … She was nervous. She’s in front of the crew and there’s extras and people. … And at one point, I get in there and I said, “Meg, let me show you what I meant.” And I sat opposite Billy, and I’m acting it out, and I’m pounding the table and I’m going, “Yes, yes, yes!” … I turned to Billy and I say, “This is embarrassing … I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.” But then Meg came in and she did it obviously way better than I could do it.

On differentiating himself from his father with Stand By Me (1986) 

I never said specifically I want to be a film director. I never said that. And I never really thought that way. I just knew I wanted to act, direct, and do things, be in the world that he was in. And it wasn’t until I did Stand By Me that I really started to feel very separate and apart from my father. Because the first film I did was, This Is Spinal Tap, which is a satire. And my father had trafficked in satire with Sid Caesar for many years. And then the second film I did was a film called The Sure Thing, which was a romantic comedy for young people, and my father had done romantic comedy. The [Dick] Van Dyke Show is a romantic comedy, a series.

But when I did Stand By Me, it was the one that was closest to me because … I felt that my father didn’t love me or understand me, and it was the character of Gordie that expressed those things. And the film was a combination of nostalgia, emotion and a lot of humor. And it was a real reflection of my personality. It was an extension, really, of my sensibility. And when it became successful, I said, oh, OK. I can go in the direction that I want to go in and not feel like I have to mirror everything my father’s done up till then.

On starting his own production company (Castle Rock) and how the business has changed

We started it so I could have some kind of autonomy because I knew that the kinds of films I wanted to make people didn’t wanna make. I mean, I very famously went and talked to Dawn Steel, who was the head of Paramount at the time. … And she says to me, “What do you wanna make? What’s your next film?” And I said, “Well, you know, I got a film, but I don’t think you’re going to want to do it.” … I’m going to make a movie out of The Princess Bride. And she said, “Anything but that.” So I knew that I needed to have some way of financing my own films, which I did for the longest time. …

It’s tough now. And it’s beyond corporate. I mean, it used to be there was “show” and “business.” They were equal — the size of the word “show” and “business.” Now, you can barely see the word “show,” and it’s all “business.” And the only things that they look at [are] how many followers, how many likes, what the algorithms are. They’re not thinking about telling a story. … I still wanna tell stories. And I’m sure there’s a lot of young filmmakers — even Scorsese is still doing it, older ones too — that wanna tell a story. And I think people still wanna hear stories and they wanna see stories.

Maybe an appreciation of Rob Reiner as a director should start with When Harry Met Sally…, which helped lay the foundation for a romantic comedy boom that lasted for at least 15 years. Wait — no, it should start with Stand By Me, a coming-of-age story that captured a painfully brief moment in the lives of kids. It could start with This Is Spinal Tap, one of the first popular mockumentaries, which has influenced film and television ever since. Or, since awards are important, maybe it should start with Misery, which made Kathy Bates famous and won her an Oscar. How about The American President, which was the proto-West Wing, very much the source material for a TV show that later won 26 Emmys?

On the other hand, maybe in the end, it’s all about catchphrases, so maybe it should be A Few Good Men because of “You can’t handle the truth!” or The Princess Bride because of “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” Maybe it’s as simple as that: What, of the words you helped bring them, will people pass back and forth to each other like they’re showing off trading cards when they hear you’re gone?

There is plenty to praise about Reiner’s work within the four corners of the screen. He had a tremendous touch with comic timing, so that every punchline got maximum punch. He had a splendid sense of atmosphere, as with the cozy, autumnal New York of When Harry Met Sally…, and the fairytale castles of The Princess Bride. He could direct what was absurdist and silly, like Spinal Tap. He could direct what was grand and thundering, like A Few Good Men. He could direct what was chatty and genial, like Michael Douglas’ staff in The American President discussing whether or not he could get out of the presidential limo to spontaneously buy a woman flowers.

But to fully appreciate what Rob Reiner made in his career, you have to look outside the films themselves and respect the attachments so many people have to them. These were not just popular movies and they weren’t just good movies; these were an awful lot of people’s favorite movies. They were movies people attached to their personalities like patches on a jacket, giving them something to talk about with strangers and something to obsess over with friends. And he didn’t just do this once; he did it repeatedly.

Quotability is often treated as separate from artfulness, but creating an indelible scene people attach themselves to instantly is just another way the filmmakers’ humanity resonates with the audience’s. Mike Schur said something once about running Parks and Recreation that I think about a lot. Talking about one particularly silly scene, he said it didn’t really justify its place in the final version, except that everybody loved it: And if everybody loves it, you leave it in. I would suspect that Rob Reiner was also a fan of leaving something in if everybody loved it. That kind of respect for what people like and what they laugh at is how you get to be that kind of director.

The relationships people have with scenes from Rob Reiner movies are not easy to create. You can market the heck out of a movie, you can pull all the levers you have, and you can capitalize on every advantage you can come up with. But you can’t make anybody absorb “baby fishmouth” or “as you wish”; you can’t make anybody say “these go to 11” every time they see the number 11 anywhere. You can’t buy that for any amount of money. It’s magical how much you can’t; it’s kind of beautiful how much you can’t. Box office and streaming numbers might be phony or manipulated or fleeting, but when the thing hits, people attach to it or they don’t.

My own example is The Sure Thing, Reiner’s goodhearted 1985 road trip romantic comedy, essentially an updated It Happened One Night starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga. It follows a mismatched pair of college students headed for California: She wants to reunite with her dullard boyfriend, while he wants to hook up with a blonde he has been assured by his dirtbag friend (played by a young, very much hair-having Anthony Edwards!) is a “sure thing.” But of course, the two of them are forced to spend all this time together, and … well, you can imagine.

This movie knocked me over when I was 14, because I hadn’t spent much time with romantic comedies yet, and it was like finding precisely the kind of song you will want to listen to forever, and so it became special to me. I studied it, really, I got to know what I liked about it, and I looked for that particular hit of sharp sweetness again and again. In fact, if forced to identify a single legacy for Rob Reiner, I might argue that he’s one of the great American directors of romance, and his films call to the genre’s long history in so many ways, often outside the story and the dialogue. (One of the best subtle jokes in all of romantic comedy is in The American President, when President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas, dances with Sydney Wade, played by Annette Bening, to “I Have Dreamed,” a very pretty song from the musical … The King and I. That’s what you get for knowing your famous love stories.)

Rob Reiner’s work as a director, especially in those early films, wasn’t just good to watch. It was good to love, and to talk about and remember. Good to quote from and good to put on your lists of desert island movies and comfort watches. And it will continue to be those things.