CHAMPAIGN -- Director Norman Jewison was a little shocked when Roger Ebert chose his "Only You," a light romantic comedy, for his film festival in Champaign.

"I didn't know it was that overlooked," Jewison said.

Told that Ebert had dropped "Overlooked" a few years ago from his festival title, Jewison said it was sweet of Ebert to select "Only You" and that the movie critic must be a romantic, or love Italy, where much of the film was shot.

Ebert will show the 1994 film at 8:30 p.m. Friday, and Jewison, who has one of the longest and most distinguished careers in the movies, will be on stage afterward.

Ebert wrote for Ebertfest 2011, which runs from Wednesday through Sunday at the Virginia Theatre, that Jewison has made many wonderful movies, but "Only You" holds a special place in the critic's heart. For one thing, it's not nearly as well-known as it deserves to be, Ebert wrote.

"Here is an embracing, joyous story of love and fate, starring Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. near the dawns of their remarkable careers. It's a reminder of how much genuine pleasure a movie can provide," Ebert said.

Jewison remembers that he shot "Only You" rather quickly and that he and his crew improvised and rewrote as they went along.

"By the time we got to Italy, it started to take on a different shape because we were shooting in Italy with Italian actors," he said. "I don't know, it started to become very Italian. And Bonnie Hunt was an improvisational comic from Chicago and I really kind of let her go at times."

But the director said the movie has some good performances, and that Downey is delightful and at his most charming.

Jewison said people usually reach for his more heralded films, such as "In the Heat of the Night" (1967) and "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971).

Indeed, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York did so while planning the Norman Jewison Retrospective, taking place next month.

The Film Society selected "Heat" and "Fiddler" as well as "Moonstruck," "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," "A Soldier's Story," "The Thomas Crown Affair," "The Cincinnati Kid," and other Jewison masterpieces.

"It's pretty exciting because I don't think I ever had a retrospective in New York," the director said. "But at my age that's what you do. They do retrospectives. When you get over 80 years old, what are you going to do?"

At age 84, though, Jewison remains involved in movie-making. The Canadian is now trying to find U.S. distribution for "High Alert," a movie he would direct that's based on his 1966 political satire, "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," which was made during the Cold War.

"It was playing off American paranoia about Russia," Jewison said. "It was the first time Alan Arkin was seen in a film because he was a Broadway actor. He plays a Russian submarine sub-commander who has a crazy captain who wanted to get closer and closer to America, and because he was just looking at it from a telescope, they run aground."

The sub does that near an island off New England. Jewison actually shot the movie in Mendocino, Calif., though people told him he couldn't shoot a movie set in the East along the West Coast.

"I said, 'It doesn't matter. An ocean's an ocean,'" he said. "But people said, 'The sun doesn't come up over the Pacific, it only goes down.' I said, 'Well, then, we'll shoot a sunset and print a lot of orange in it.' So that's what we did."

"High Alert" would update the political climate to present day: It deals with a Montreal-based group of entertainers from the Mideast who are booked to perform at a July 4 celebration in the Hamptons.

"At the same time there's a high alert that some Muslim fanatics are going to let off a suitcase bomb in New York," Jewison said. "So these poor guys are booked on these gigs, and they all speak Arabic. A couple of Muslims in the group are always praying at certain times of the day."

Jewison has received 46 Academy Award nominations and 12 wins, among them best picture for "In the Heat of the Night."

"He's not only the maker of some extraordinarily fine films, but a leading citizen of Movie City, who has directed the Oscars and single-handedly created the Canadian Center for Advanced Film Study," Ebert said.

As a director, Jewison is best known for tackling social issues and making them accessible to mainstream audiences. Some critics even believe some of his movies, particularly "In the Heat of the Night," changed American culture. Jewison doesn't go that far, though.

"I think the timing was right for the release of the film," he said of "Heat," which starred Sidney Poitier as a black detective investigating a murder in a racist southern town. "In other words, it came out when America was going through a civil-rights revolution. Cities were burning down. I just believe that the film did resonate with people, in a way it wouldn't have if times were different."

Though set in the Deep South, much of the movie was shot in Sparta, a small town in southwestern Illinois.

"My one promise to Sidney Poitier was we wouldn't shoot in the Deep South because he and Harry Belafonte had had an unfortunate experience in Georgia," Jewison said. "As a matter of fact, I put it in a scene, where a car was bumping their car and kind of terrifying them.

"There was a lot of racial prejudice in America when that picture first opened," he continued. "Did it change people? I don't think it did. I think people have changed because they found the truth that there wasn't anything to be frightened of.

"I think Martin Luther King Jr. did a great deal for the country. I think the fact that the American people would elect a black man president is evidence enough of an intelligent society, and a democratic society. I'm very proud of the American choice."