Screenwriting 101: William Goldman

“Nobody sets out to fuck up your movie. It’s not like the director or the star wake up in the morning and say, ‘Let me screw up this scene. How can I really cause Bill Goldman pain?’ It’s just that they’re terrified. I wrote a line once that caught on out there in Hollywood: ‘Nobody knows anything.’ And they don’t. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be wonderful. If actors knew what they were doing, every performance would be just swell. It’s a crapshoot. It just is. There’s no answer. I wish there were.”

— William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, Misery) excerpted from “Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories”

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