“One of the things I love to do when I work with young writers is to disabuse them of the notion that I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m writing a script now, and as we are speaking, I am looking at my computer, tearing out my hair, thinking, well, is this horrible, or is this going to work? I don’t know. Storytelling is always tricky.”

I don’t know what I’m doing. These words uttered by none other than William Goldman in this interview. So if William Goldman sometimes doesn’t feel like he knows what he’s doing, that should make each of us feel a bit better, yes?

Goldman’s writing credits include Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and The Princess Bride. He wrote Butch Cassidy on spec and sold it for nearly $300K in effect ushering in the modern spec script era. Goldman has been a columnist and has written a number of books about the movie business including “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” “Hype and Glory,” and “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

A few more excerpts from the interview:

“Well, I read a lot of scripts. If someone knows me and would like me to read it, I read it. In the case of GOOD WILL HUNTING, I work for Castle Rock on occasion, and it was their script at the time. They asked me to read it. The one thing in the world I can do, and I wrote this in the book, is I love to spitball. You know, just sitting around, throwing out ideas. The script that I read, the one that Rob Reiner told them to change, was filled with the government trying to kill the Matt Damon character or kidnap him. I can’t quite remember which it was. It was just filled with this, though, a very different movie. It was the movie that I’m sure these two young inexperienced writers did to try and make it quote commercial, wedging some action scenes in there. The only thing I know after all these years is that you can’t just make something commercial. That’s why I get crazed in THREE KINGS when Clooney reverts not to character, but to something that I suspect somebody forced on him. The only reason they do that shit is because they want to make their movie commercial. We all want to have our hits, but we don’t really know how to do that. The public tells us what they want. One of my favorite Hollywood stories this year and you guys are deeply involved over at Ain’t It Cool with word of mouth and what’s going on there was a movie this Christmas that was wildly expensive, way over budget, over $100 million. It was testing miserably, and I was told that knives were being sharpened for the studio executives that okayed the movie, right? It was going to be one of the great disasters. Guess what? It was STUART LITTLE. Nobody thought THE INSIDER would do as badly as it did. Nobody knows anything. I still believe it.”

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I had for many years a great agent, now dead, named Everett Ziegler, and he was famous because he only had writers. He had Bob Towne, he had Didion/Dunne, he had me. He was just a writer’s person, and was a fabulous person. He was fierce. He could fight the studios with this terrific anger because nobody wanted to anger him. He had all these powerful writers, and he loved us all. 25 years ago, someone was talking about whatever the new thing was then, the Internet at that moment, and asking if it was going to change things. And he said, ‘I don’t care. People will still need someone who can tell a good story.’ And I think that’s still true today.

Read the interview here.