In the 1980s I had the great pleasure of interviewing William Goldman for a Guardian series at the NFT. He did not suffer so-called “auteurs” gladly: “Movies are a group endeavour,” he told me. “Of course, people don’t really want to know that. They want individual heroes. They want to know Clint Eastwood is really superman and that Robert Altman is truly Plato re-incarnated.
“If actors really make up all the lines or a director has all the visual concepts, then why on earth would they pay the writer half a million dollars?” asked the man who was once the highest paid scribe in Hollywood.
