Free As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes, Joe Layden

strike me as a real laugh-out-loudkinda guy). Reiner was beaming. Bill was clapping, too, and there was a faint smile on his face. For the rest of us in that room, I think we all knew that we were part of something special. Did we think the movie would become an enduring pop-culture phenomenon? Of course not. But did we feel involved in something truly unique? Definitely. For myself I just felt enormously grateful to be there. To be involved in a project with so many gifted people, not to mention getting to be in a film written by the legendary William Goldman and directed by the remarkable Rob Reiner. Life is good, I thought.
    CHRIS GUEST
    Having read dozens and dozens of scripts, or more, I know there are only a handful of people that I can literally put in a class of great screenwriters. And Bill Goldman is certainly one of them. It’s brilliant writing. The dialogue is brilliant, the descriptions are brilliant. It’s funny on every level. And there are a lot of really well-drawn characters. From an actor’s standpoint, you couldn’t possibly ask for more. It’s a dream to read a great script and you’re lucky if that happens once in your life. This was a rare thing where you trusted the words that you had to say.
    MANDY PATINKIN
    You know, I was never a great movie connoisseur. I certainly saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I didn’t know who Bill Goldman was really. I just read the script and thought, This is great. So I had no outside influences. I just knew I had read something wonderful. Knowing Goldman now, of course, I’d think, Well, obviously it’s going to be great.
    Afterward we made our way to a nearby restaurant where they had set up lunch outside on a back patio. I remember finding myself sitting next to Robin again. What quickly became apparent about her, besides her sense of humor, was how cool she was. She could hang with the guys. She told me about growing up in San Diego. How she had alwayswanted to be a dancer, then done some modeling and kind of fell into acting. She’d been a leading player on Santa Barbara for a couple of years, and she had only one previous movie role, playing a homeless drug addict in Hollywood Vice Squad .
    I had not yet done any television and remember being fascinated by what it was like for her working on a soap. She explained that she had to learn anywhere from ten to twenty pages of dialogue a day, working with up to three cameras simultaneously, with a different director each episode. That it moved very fast, which forced her to think on her feet as an actor. I also remember her telling me how lucky she felt that the show let her out of her contract to do the movie, as normally they didn’t do that. I asked her how she knew how to do a British accent so well. She then proceeded to tell me about her British stepfather who had introduced her to Monty Python at an early age.
    An intelligent and beautiful young woman who loves Monty Python playing opposite me as Buttercup? Does it get much better than that? And looking around the table at the talent I was about to work with, I felt blessed to have been given this incredible opportunity.
    For most of us the day ended relatively early. Most of us except for André, that is, who, we discovered later, ended up spending the night at the hotel even though he wasn’t staying there. André, as I stated earlier, was not at his physical peak. He was in fact suffering. All those years of toting around so much weight had left him with this very painful condition, which had only been exacerbated in the ring. I remember him telling me his opponents rarely held back when jumping up and down on his back or smashing metal chairs on his head, thinking that since he was a giant he could take it. I found out from his friends much later on that his classic one-piece black wrestling outfit was specifically designed to hide a back brace.
    André was due to have an operation after he wrapped the movie.But until then the only