NOBODY knows anything, the prolific and award winning screenwriter and novelist William Goldman once famously concluded, when reflecting on why some films work and others fail. That conclusion should not be misinterpreted as meaning that Goldman has nothing more to say on the subject; on the contrary, as he proved when we met in Cannes a fortnight ago, when the new Clint Eastwood movie, Absolute Power, scripted by Goldman, was having its European premiere as the festival's closing film.
"As you get older you don't get smarter," he says, sitting in the seventh floor restaurant of the Carlton hotel. "It's just very hard to make a decent film.
Born in Chicago in 1931, Goldman has had more than 30 of his screenplays filmed, including Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and All The President's Men, both of which won him Oscars, and he has written more than two dozen novels, a number of which have been filmed. His 1983 book, Adventures In The Screen Trade, subtitled A Personal View Of Holly wood And Screen writing, is one of the most informative and entertaining film books of recent decades.
"You can do three things as a screenwriter," he says. "You can write an original, which is the hardest because you've got to make it all up. You can do an adaptation of your own work, which I did with Magic, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride, and you're not hard enough on yourself. If a scene was hard to write for the book, you're inclined to keep it in the movie, and that's not necessarily the best thing for the movie.
"The third thing you can do is an adaptation of someone else's story. When I'm doing an adaptation I don't care about the writer of the novel or the play, and his discomfort and difficulties are of no interest to me. I just want to make the story work.
Goldman says his most difficult adaptation was bringing David Baldacci's bestselling novel, Absolute Power, to the screen. The film is directed by Clint Eastwood, who also plays the central role of a veteran cat burglar who, on what he plans as his one last job, is robbing a mansion when he witnesses a murder which implicates the president of the United States, played by Gene Hackman.
"I've never changed anything as much as that novel," Goldman says. "And the hardest thing was changing it so much." Goldman glows with enthusiasm when he talks about working on the film with Clint Eastwood. "The reason he is so good as an actor and so good as a director is that I don't think he has any ego," he says.
"He's one of the most famous people in the world and he never brings that into the room with him. You know, he never auditions anybody. Laura Linney plays his daughter in Absolute Power and she didn't even meet him until they filmed her jogging scene. He said to me that he's so soft he'd hire everybody and that's why he never does auditions. He just watches tapes of what actors have done.
"On the set he doesn't even say `action' or `cut'. I was on the set of Absolute Power for one scene with Gene Hackman. Clint comes over and says, `We're ready for you, Gene.' Hackman gets into position and Clint says very quietly, `Go whenever you want.' There's a beat and Hackman starts the scene. They go through the shot and Clint says, `Thank you very much.' And that's it.
"There's none of that horrible tension you get on other sets, so everything goes like lightning. And writers love Clint because when he's locked into the script, that's it. There's no rewriting on the set.
Goldman regards Eastwood as "the most durable star in the history of movies he's been around since the 1960s and he's always the locomotive, always the star, and he's never played secondary roles like Sean Connery did in Indiana Jones."
Asked who might emulate Eastwood's durability in years to come, Goldman unhesitatingly names Tom Cruise. "Ten years ago Paul Newman told me to watch that guy, that he's terrific, and he is," he says. "Cruise is very polite and very serious. He's always on time, which is amazing for a movie star. I think he is going to be a huge star for a very long time to come.
"Have you heard the joke where someone is asked to list the 10 worst guys in Hollywood? The list is 50 long that someone has to die before the next worst guy can get on the list. But the list of the 10 nicest guys has only four names on it and I'll tell you who they are: Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Henry Winkler and Ron Howard. That's it. They're so nice you can't believe it."
Goldman's own experiences in the screen trade have not been too happy, as he readily admits. Returning to his radical reworking of Absolute Power for the screen, he recalls what happened when his own novel, No Way To Treat A Lady, was filmed. "It was set at the time of the Boston Strangler, and I had this idea that there were two stranglers and they were jealous of each other," he says. "When they made my book into a movie they got rid of the whole idea of there being two stranglers."
HOWEVER, he says that nothing compares to what he went through in adapting All The President's Men for the screen, even though it won him an Oscar. "I hated it," he says. "It was the worst experience of my life. It was a very tough movie to do. It was extraordinarily unpleasant all round." After he had been working on the screenplay for eight months he was shocked to be told that Nora Ephron, who was going out with the Watergate reporter, Carl Bernstein, at the time, had written her own version of the screenplay with Bernstein.
"Things like that happen all the time," he says. "There's one movie I'm really angry about because of the amount of time I spent on it, and that's The Chamber. When I took the job, Ron Howard was going to direct it and it was going to be the first major movie about the death penalty. He didn't do it. We lost a year. We became the last movie about the death penalty.
"They brought in a director, James Foley, who needed a break because he never had a hit - and still hasn't. He was begging to do it and then he changed everything. I regret the six months of my life I spent on that and I'll never see the film. I find it painful to watch movies of my screenplays which have gone the wrong way, like that genuinely awful movie, Memoirs Of An Invisible Man with Chevy Chase. I got a credit for that and shouldn't have.
"After 33 years in the business the only films of my screenplays which I'm really happy with are Butch Cassidy, A Bridge Too Far, The Princess Bride and Absolute Power.
"I have a lot to offer, as any good writer does, and a lot of directors hate us because they want to do their own spin on it, Very few people can write and direct. Bergman did it brilliantly and Woody Allen can do it, but a lot of guys just want to do it because of the power involved."