Interview in review

For this blog entry I'm going to reflect on issues involved with interviewing people. Interviews are something I've done for assignments, articles for print and, most recently, for marketing videos. In each case the interview was arranged in advance but I can see potential for being more opportunistic when collecting interviews for television.

I haven't filmed many television interviews (only one entirely by myself so far!) but the best advice I've learned is to ask the subject to try and repeat your question in the first line of their answer. This provides context for their statement and can save having to script something later.

A good interview provides insight, a bad one feels like a waste of time for everyone involved. The process of extracting insightful material can be unexpected or, more often, it's the interviewer's role to know what insights they're after and create a conversation in which they'll be recorded. Andrew Denton is very effective at doing this. I like how he (or his researchers) will dig up old interviews and use previous statements to segue into a question.

I remember first thinking about this during a revealing interview with Toni Pearen. Actually, to write it was 'revealing' is wishful thinking. Anyway, she must've been bored talking about All Men Are Liars because she started explaining how her experience of interviewing people for television was that you know the sound bite you're after and you usually end up frustrated by the process of trying to record it. Thinking about it now it shows how research ensures you have some insights that can be extracted and questions to ask if the flow of conversation doesn't go where you want. And to know where you want it to go, you need to know. And that's why you need research.

Am I repeating myself? Maybe if I keep it up I'll find a sound bite. That's the other problem sometimes: waffle. I'm prone to it at times but thankfully in interviews the focus is on what the subject is saying.

In some situations the sound bite is all you can get and the insight is more of a statement. Sometimes the interview subject will be following their own script, either pushing a particular point of view or repeating a response to a frequently asked question. For the former the interviewer needs to try different approaches, testing the logic of the subject's responses and hoping to find an inconsistency or new bit of information to expose new detail. For the latter the interviewer needs to surprise the subject and break the pattern of previous interviews.

I once interviewed Stuart Coupe, a prolific Australian music journalist. The second thing he said to me was "How the fuck are you?" It seemed really effective in setting a light-hearted tone. Obviously it wouldn't work in all interviews but it impressed me as an attempt to establish friendly communication. This seems a good approach since the other thing an interviewer needs to do is establish trust. I'm curious how television interviewers manage this because my experience from print is it can be hard to establish over the phone and face to face interviews aren't usually allocated enough time.

There seems to be a direct relationship between how important the interview subject is and how long you get to talk to them. Consider how George W Bush has largely avoided interviews while president. His Australian counterpart seems to prefer phoning a radio shockjock but will appear on television (frequently sparring with Kerry O'Brien) more often than in print. Political interviews tend to be characterised as adversarial, in broadcast more so than print (where the journalist always gets the last word).

In Crikey yesterday there some interesting advice from interviewer Jonathan Coleman, formerly of Simon Townsend's Wonder World and now appearing in a weekly segment on Sunrise. Coleman believes you need to match your personality to that of your subject.

"When I'm interviewing Elton (John), I become more gay. For Meatloaf, I become more fat. For Billy Idol, I just become 'More'."

This degree of empathy seems right for celebrity interviews. Andrew Denton also said something similar recently:

"I try to be as vulnerable as they are."*

It's said nothing should be treated as off the record with a journalist. However, if you think about what John Brogden said to a couple of journalists, it would appear you can be held accountable for anything said anywhere these days. I'm hoping it will lead to a higher degree of wit in public announcements because politicians will be employing considerably more consideration while writing them?

(Sadly the lesson learned from Brogden and also Frank Sartor is that humour should be avoided. Luckily for media consumers used to news filled with short bursts of sensationalism, the media have proven adept at trivialising policy and condemning off the cuff remarks. Brogden and Sartor's remarks generated oodles of columns but it was mostly so shallow it didn't get beyond whether they were racist. It seems to me the real issue to tackle is how we acknowledge this misnomer called 'race'. I mean, I thought there was one human race with many genetic variations. Culturally we view these variations as significant yet in public discourse we're unable to discuss them. There are plenty of examples of how not to discuss 'race' but few promoting how to acknowledge it without offence. I think Sartor's comment was taken out of context and, as Brian Toohey's observed, Brogden was hardly saying all asian women are mail-order brides.)

This leads me to the other thing a good interviewer does and that's keeping the interview relevant. It's got to have an angle, a kind of narrative that establishes and resolves. Otherwise it's got to be packaged up to the consumer as being relevant or else it risks being a disjointed series of points. Hope this hasn't been the case here.

*Quoted in a great piece on this subject in The Sun-Herald, Interviewing the interviewers by Steve Dow, published in their magazine on 2 Oct. 2005