Confessions of an Interviewer, pt. 2

what makes interviews work

I love interviews. I’ve watched, read, and listened to so many interviews in my life so far, with so many highlights: Bette Davis chain-smoking on The Dick Cavett Show; Christopher Plummer saying he’ll never work with Terrence Malick ever again on a Newsweek Oscars Roundtable; Maurice Sendak’s absolutely heart-wrenching thoughts on ageing, loss and faith on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air (later illustrated by Christoph Niemann); Werner Herzog’s neverending trail of crazy life stories in his interviews with Paul Cohen, Miranda July’s collection of interviews in “It Chooses You”; Toni Morrison on her writing habits in The Paris Review, FKA Twigs’s vulnerability in a talk with Zane Lowe etc. etc.

What makes these interviews great? Sometimes, it’s wonderful, caring, captivating questions — Terry Gross is great at that; Debbie Millman too. Other times, it’s a level of familiarity and trust that automatically opens up the interviewee — some interviewers have actively built this environment, with Oprah at the forefront, and talk show hosts like Graham Norton, who is known and loved for his light-hearted, fun interviews. You can tell his guests genuinely enjoy themselves. For TikTok fans, you have Amelia’s Chicken Shop Date.

And then sometimes it’s just a high level of respect: I’m not a fan of Charlie Rose’s formal and uptight style, for instance, but I cannot argue against the level of access he gets with his interviewees. In his case, the questions were often basic, predictable, but given the prestige of the show, the interviewees opened up, voluntarily offering insights into their work and personal thoughts.

Scenes from My Dinner with Andre (dir. Louis Malle, 1981). Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn (playing himself) hesitates meeting long lost friend, theater director Andre Gregory (also playing himself). What will they talk about? Within the duration of the dinner, they open up to each other.

***

Interviews often have an air of ease and spontaneity that makes them seem casual (plebejische Kunst, as they’re sometimes referred to) — when in fact, a one-on-one interview with a successful individual, whether artist, Hollywood actor, Nobel Prize winning author, etc. takes on average months of planning, research, and editing.

At The Talks we had a very specific approach: we wanted to tell a story, or perhaps several stories, that are genuine and speak true of the people we showcased on the website. We researched the hell out of the interviewee and then prepared a number of potential angles, or themes (usually three), each with animated and creative questions that were intended to flow naturally. The themes were supposed to be loosely connected, so that they could still be worked together into a narrative if that were the case, but at the same time, they had to be different enough to allow you to move from one cloud of questions to another, if a particular theme was not hitting home with the interviewee. Researching what had already been covered in other interviews and coming up with questions that make the individual sitting across from you feel like their thoughts and life experiences were valuable — that was vital in preparing for the interview.

But perhaps the perception that interviews are easy (read: casual) to do might come from the Q&A style often used in the context of promotional interviews — typically press junkets, or roundtable interviews. The interviewing context at those types of events is almost purely transactional — you are surrounded by tens of other journalists who are there for that one quote or soundbite they can publish. With an evidently minimal level of investment, these environments are abundant in, “What was the inspiration behind…” questions at best, and painfully sexist, “What’s it like to be a mother and an actress” at worst. These types of interviews potentially represent all that’s shitty about the evolution of new media and the exploitation of celebrity culture.

Now imagine that back in the day, the process of interviewing journalistically was completely different. Photographers and journalists would be sent out to spend months on end with celebrities (think Harry Benson with The Beatles) or with the subject at hand (think Hunter S. Thomson cohabitating with Hells Angels’ motorcyclists for a year). It was a trend and fantasy epitomised in the 2000 film Almost Famous, where a 15-year-old (not weird at all!) is sent out to tour with a famous band to write a piece on them for the Rolling Stone magazine.

***

I often fantasized about how wonderful it’d be to spend even just a single day with the people I interviewed. Sometimes it felt we were only scratching the surface: if so much goodness came out in “just” 45 minutes, imagine what you could get in a day? And yet, there’s something about the pressure and intensity of the time-limited, condensed bubble of a one-on-one interaction, as well as the general anonymity, that creates this unique context for someone opening up perhaps more so than over the looseness of a day. German author Alexander Kluge, glorified buddy of Theodor Adorno and Fritz Lang, and veteran conversationalist, likens the time limitations of interviews to water in the desert; he says, “Wasser ohne Begrenzung ist ein Sumpf. Mit Begrenzung wird es ein Fluss—” Water without boundaries is a swamp. With boundaries, it becomes a river. There’s something about the scarcity of time that is a fertile ground for the creation of the flow, if one releases the ego and truly shows up in the moment to guide this flow.

***

Ah, one on one interviews. To me, they’re still one of the most wonderful, and at the same time, strangest setup for something that ultimately is meant to have a professional outcome.

Because there is little to no control over how a dynamic exchange between two human beings will unfold. Firstly, it’s an extremely subjective experience, all things considered. As a journalist, you walk into a scheduled meeting, you sit down next to a complete stranger that you happen to know a lot about already, and try to earn their trust in a matter of minutes. Similarly, the interviewee has to show up in the same artificial setup and open up to a complete stranger whose perceived intentions as a journalist are often muddled with years’ worth of bad experiences with vulture media. As an interviewer, you put your ego aside, and try to slide inside the headspace of the person in front of you. I’d often come out of interviews with a mix of exhaustion and delirious joy and inspiration.

Scene from My Dinner with Andre (dir. Louis Malle, 1981)

***

I remember my interview with Jeff Goldblum. We had great banter — he is so charismatic and gregarious that it’s easy to talk to him about pretty much anything. But once you read everything there is to read about celebrities online, you do pick up on formulas they regularly use to deliver an idea, the same idea, over and over again (the inevitable consequence of forcing these artists to promote! Promote! Promote! Incessantly, killing all spontaneity, turning them into marketing machines).

For a few questions, though, I felt him take a moment to think — I loved that. I thought, okay, my job here is done. He tells me at the end, “Hit me up when you’re coming to Los Angeles, I’m doing a jazz show in two weeks! Come tap me on the shoulder.” For a second I feel incredibly flattered and special — am I… besties with Jeff Goldblum?! But I had read enough previous interviews with him to know that this was exactly what he’d say to all journalists at the end of his interviews.

“I’d love to,” I said, and we never talked ever again.

---