My father had always called me Sam since the day I was born. He rarely ever called me Tiger. I would ask him, 'Why don't you ever call me Tiger?' He says, 'Well, you look more like a Sam.

When I started, with films like 'The Bay Boy' and 'Stand by Me', I look back on those interviews and I'm amazed; there's no mention of my father; it's not even 'son of Donald Sutherland.' I caught a bit of a break in that it never felt like a weight to me.

Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.

We had this neighbor who was an actor, and he was going to an audition one day, driving by our house, and he asked if I wanted to tag along. He was reading for the part of the father, and they were reading for the part of the son the same day, and he told me to sneak in there and make it look like I knew what I was doing.

Fights with my father were really quite brutal. I would not live his vision. I would not become who he wanted me to be. Everything I did was criticized. I would spend three months drawing something and show him, and he would look up from his paper and just look back down. I got no approval from him for anything I did that was creative.

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