The documentary interviewer sets out to draw people’s stories from them, and the interviewee either wants to fulfill the interviewer’s purpose or to resist and deflect it. As the human presence whom the interviewee addresses, the interviewer functions as a catalyst on behalf of the audience. This can produce fascinating results, so this chapter describes how to go about it. Sometimes, though, you’d like to get an inner monologue that is unmediated and free of your catalyzing influence. To this end, you’ll find another method of initiating spoken thought near the chapter’s end. Both methods aim to get people speaking from the heart.
Watching an interviewee describe something important can be magical, and speech becomes action. Profound interchanges like this are at the heart of making documentary. Even in documentaries without dialogue, the director’s listening and interactional skills make the film possible.
The research interview is mostly an exercise in listening to see what you might build on subsequently. Refrain from pressing any question since you want to open it up later on camera. Often you’ll stop someone, saying, “Don’t tell me! Let’s hold on to that in case we want it for the camera.” Make notes, and if the potential interviewee questions you about the project, describe it in broad generalizations only. This lets you keep your options open and prevents you from creating impressions that subsequently prove misleading.
During research conversations, you often hear something that makes you think, “I must have this in the film.” Note it down. Later you’ll prepare questions that will elicit all this as naturally as possible. After listening to a number of people, you usually know by instinct who has the best experiences and the best way of telling them.
Busy directors often rely on a researcher, who runs ahead digging up facts and locating likely participants. They become trusted creative colleagues, and when it’s time to shoot, the question arises: Should researcher or director conduct the interview? Each may have advantages. The researcher is continuing a relationship already begun, and this will put a hesitant participant at ease. If the director interviews, however, the interviewee is addressing a fresh listener and may be more spontaneous and comprehensive. The team often decides on the spot.
Shoot interviews anywhere significant to the participant, but consider the likely effect of each. In their home, workplace, or a friend’s home, the interviewee is more at ease and will likely give more intimate responses. In public places, such as streets, parks, or the beach, he or she will feel more exposed and like one of many. Depending on the topic, this can be productive. Settings such as an old battlefield, childhood home, or first workplace may shake loose many emotion-laden memories.
The fact is that we are not fixed in whom we are. Ray Carney, writing about John Cassavetes’ method of characterization in his improvised fiction films, rightly argues that we are constantly negotiating our identity through interaction with others. 1 The context to each exchange and the personality of each interlocutor always draws something a little different. So expect different settings and different approaches on your part to catalyze different facets of your interviewee.
A documentary film is the sum of relationships—those that you and your crew forge with participants and those they negotiate with each other.
When you interview someone for whom you can expect little valid cutaway material, you can shoot the interviewer using a second camera. This, of course, makes the interviewer a featured player in the film, but you can get around this by using participants to interview each other, coaching them beforehand as necessary—and as ethical.
Whoever is present but off-camera affects an interviewee. Imagine you are interviewing a gentle, older woman whose peppery husband is forever correcting her. You wisely arrange for the husband to do something in another room so she feels free to tell her own story. On the other hand, their unequal relationship may be an important and visible aspect of what they represent. I once shot an interview of a farm manager sitting next to his wife. As he spoke, she interrupted and modified everything he said to make it “nice.” Of course this was funny, but it made you suspect her version of what paragons their employers had been.
Interviewing need not be one on one. A married couple, separately inarticulate through shyness, may prod each other into action and reaction very well. Friends or workmates can likewise provide mutual support. Putting two people together who disagree and interviewing them can be a highly productive strategy because antipathy reduces inhibitions. If you are lucky they will turn to each other and forget all about you. That’s ideal. To interview a whole group, try one of two ways:
When you bring a camera and talk to anyone in a public place—say, at a factory gate—others will gather to listen and join in. By not imposing control it often turns into a spirited conversation or dispute. The interviewer, now on the sidelines, can at any time interpose a new question or make a request, such as, “Could the lady in the red jacket talk about the company’s attitude toward safety?” And talk she will. You can remain happily silent because your task—to catalyze people’s thoughts and feelings—needs no further input.
Person-in-the-street interviews (called vox pops, short for vox populi, or “voice of the people”) are sometimes useful. You put the same few questions to a range of people and then string their replies together in a rapid and instructive sequence. Entertaining and useful for demonstrating a Greek Chorus of opinion, you can orchestrate diversity or homogeneity, thesis or antithesis. Sections of vox pop can lighten something essentially sober and intense, such as a film about political developments. They can also function as legitimate parallel action. When I had to compress the salient points of a 3-hour peace speech into less than 12 minutes, I used vox pops as a dialectical counterpoint between the man at the podium and people in the street. Each gave piquancy to the other—and we made virtue come out of necessity.
Before you interview, decide where each interviewee fits in with your film’s central purpose. That way you can politely set limits on what each contributes. I don’t mean prepare a script or anticipate specific statements, since that would mean treating a participant like an actor. Just say what areas you want to explore and ask the right questions. Ask ahead of time if you may redirect the conversation when it gets away from the areas you want to tackle.
Decide who represents what in your film’s spectrum of issues, then each issue and who best represents each underlying value.
Making a film usually means delineating a set of forces, each championed by one of your film’s personalities. Your job is to gather the material to articulate these archetypal forces. Is this a good versus evil situation? The one against the many? The righteous against the doubters? Decide what archetypal situation you are handling and what role each “actor” might play in your film.
Earlier we said that “plot” represents the rules of the universe, and the protagonist is often the person challenging those rules. There is usually an antagonist, as well as a major conflict. You’ll want to question in your mind whether the protagonist is fighting against timeless universal law or only societal norms that shift from generation to generation. All human situations have the kind of constants expressed in myths, folktales, fables, and ballads—for example, “Frankie and Johnny were lovers, but he done her wrong.” Their modern equivalencies march on in contemporary films, books, stories, and celebrities. Such sources, when you plumb them, help remind you what’s missing from your story. Finding the right analogies and metaphors (that you probably don’t share with anyone) helps you decide what role each player occupies in the framework of your story.
Before interviewing:
Because you must maintain eye contact and give facial reactions during the inter view, you can’t bury your face in notes. List your questions on an index card and keep it for security on your knee when you interview. With it, you won’t be afraid of drying up, and you’ll probably cover everything without ever needing the prompts. At the end, use it as a checklist to ensure you’ve forgotten nothing.
Good interviewing comes from really listening—to what people mean as well as to what they say or don’t say. Work intuitively in the moment, dig deeply, and always ask for stories and examples.
Some notes on camera placement appear in Chapter 29, Directing Participants. You’re going to set up a signaling method so you can determine when to zoom between shot sizes. Directors with plenty of material to edit in parallel will often shoot an interview in a one-size shot. Others incorporate different sizes of shots according to the speaker’s intensity, because varying shot sizes offers a greater prospect for seamless ellipsis (shortening) of the results. To prepare for this, you’ll need to develop an understanding with your camera operator about zooming in and out. Varying the image size allows the possibility of:
While you are lining up, look through the camera viewfinder and agree with your operator on three standard image sizes and framings. Place the compositional center (in interviews it is the subject’s eyes) in the same proportionate spot in each composition’s frame, so cuts will look balanced (Figure 30-1). From your interviewing position under or next to the camera, you are going to signal when and how you want each shot to change. I press different parts of the operator’s foot. Typically, for:
During a lengthy answer, alternate between medium and close shots. During a new question, however, drop back to wide shot. I try to change image size whenever a speaker shows signs of repeating something. Since repetition is normal, the subsequent versions are often more succinct. Then, if it’s in a different image size, you can cut between the two versions.
Ask the operator to match the speed of zoom-ins and zoom-outs to the speaker’s current rhythm, but never to make them long and lingering. Cutting into a slow-moving zoom looks hideous, so they should either be usably elegant or fast and functional during throwaway moments such as when you are asking a new question.
You have the right and even the obligation to say what you want. It helps put the interviewee at ease and guards against digression if you describe the general subject areas you want to cover and those you don’t. You can, after all, only cover what fits your film. Even though you may feel apologetic, make the limitations you want to impose sound reasonable—because they are.
Rookie interviewers are often timid about setting limits and allow interviewees to range far and wide. Ultimately, this is unkind, as interviewees sense when they aren’t fulfilling the interviewer’s hopes.
Another way to lower the interviewee’s anxiety is by explaining that you may occasionally interrupt or redirect the conversation. I usually say:
This is a documentary, and we always shoot ten times as much as we use. So don’t worry if you get anything wrong because we can always edit it out. Also, if I feel we’re getting away from the subject, I may rudely interrupt, if that’s all right with you.
Nobody ever objects; indeed, interviewees seem reassured that I take responsibility for where the conversation will go. This will only work if you have oriented the interviewee to the overall purpose of the film in the first place.
Put people at ease by giving them exploratory work in areas that interest them and by being relaxed and interested yourself. Don’t hurry, and don’t change your manner when the camera rolls because this signals tension. Give the interviewee whatever permission they seem to need and give your undivided attention.
Rarely has this ever failed to work, though inevitably one sometimes runs into trouble. In an interview I began with the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, 2 he became visibly uncomfortable, though he had been fine throughout the days when we were shooting him in political action. I needed a long interview as a bank of voice-over to explain all the footage we’d shot before returning to the United Kingdom, but his to-camera manner was now so strangely stiff and inhibited that we stopped the camera to ask what was wrong. He realized that he was used to talking to women. Someone suggested we put our production assistant, Rosalie Worthington, in my position under the camera lens. I then posed the questions, and Spock answered to Rosalie, his manner now relaxed and avuncular. Had reflexivity been an option (and had I possessed the imagination to use it) I could have included this oddly revealing information in the film.
Practice shooting a sophisticated interview using Project 4-SP-11 Advanced Interview: Three Shot Sizes.
There are two approaches to setting up the nexus among camera, subject, and interviewer. Each carries different implications and reflects a different philosophy. The interviewee’s eyeline tells you which is in use in any film. Either he or she is looking directly on-axis into the camera and addressing you, as Dr. Spock is doing in Figure 30-2, or he or she is talking off-axis to the left or right of camera, as the young man is doing in Figure 30-3. Another off-axis example showing the full crew is provided in Figure 9-13 in Chapter 9.
I like this approach because I prefer to edit out the interviewer and leave the audience face-to-face with the speaker (Figure 30-2). The interviewer’s role, as I see it, is to ask questions the audience would ask if it could. Once the interviewee is talking, my presence becomes irrelevant and distracting, so I edit it out. To interview on-axis, sit on something low with your head just under the camera lens. The interviewee who converses with you effectively talks directly to the audience.
In the more traditional approach, the interviewer sits to left or right the camera and in or out of frame. Even when all trace of the interviewer and her questions is removed, the interviewee’s eyeline shows he is addressing an invisible interlocutor (Figure 30-3). The farther the interviewer is from the camera-to-subject axis, the more insistent this impression becomes. Removing the interviewer’s voice does not alter this state of affairs; if anything, it magnifies an unseen, unheard presence.
Watching film is inherently passive, so you must do all you can to mobilize your audience’s involvement. During on-axis interviewing the interviewee speaks directly to the spectator, who responds with a dialogue in his or her mind. When the interviewee talks off-axis to a third party, especially an interviewer who is a celebrity, the spectator is more an onlooker than a participant.
If the questioner’s pressure and reactions are integral to the exchange, you need his/her presence on camera with the interviewee. Many television interviewers are masterly at this, and so the off-axis interview complements the interviewer’s function, especially when they interject appropriate reactions and questions as pressure.
When you intend to edit out your questions, prepare interviewees by telling them how to include your questions in their answer. Many will look puzzled, so you give an example: “If I ask, ‘When did you first arrive in America?,’ you might answer ‘1989,’ but the answer ‘1989’ wouldn’t stand on its own, so I’d be forced to include my question. However, if you said, ‘I arrived in the United States in 1989,’ it’s a whole and complete statement and that’s what I need.”
Everyone understands but most forget. So, while you interview, listen like an editor at the beginning of every answer. Is it freestanding or does it depend on the question to make sense? If it depends on the question, get your interviewee to start again. Sometimes you must even feed the appropriate opening words. You’d say, “Try beginning with ‘I arrived in America….’” That usually solves it.
Note that if you do remove the questioner, you can use no section where voices overlap. As an interviewer, then, you must consciously listen to ensure that each new answer starts clean.
When you shoot vox populi street interviews, off-axis interviewing is unavoidable because the camera, mobile and handheld, is not something you can sit under. Remember to alternate the sides from which you interview, since more interviewees facing one way rather than the other will set the audience wondering what this means.
You will need to shoot so you can abridge interviews in editing. If you shoot your interviews in a single size (as Errol Morris does), then you can only bridge different sections together by jump cutting. This is fine if you use such abridgements boldly and consistently as a style. Used intermittently they can be disconcerting; a subject’s face suddenly changes expression, or a head jumps to a slightly different position (Figure 30-4). Particularly in a transparent film—that is, one that hides editorial processes under the guise of continuity—the odd jump cut rudely breaks the illusion. You can mask potential jump cuts by cutting away to something pictorially relevant, but again, unless it’s a consistent style, it will reek of “cutaway.” Likewise, using a nodding interviewer as a cutaway reaction shot will seem equally bogus.
There are two other solutions. One is to run multiple interview strands in parallel, cutting between them and abbreviating each as you go. If you can sustain story momentum, this is an elegant solution. However, the other solution—varying shot sizes during the interview—leaves you with more options.
In this approach, the camera operator uses the zoom lens to make periodic image size-changes (see operational description in the “Briefing the Camera Operator” section, previously discussed). You can often cut different sections together (as in Figure 30-1) because the chances are good that what you want to use is in different image sizes. Screen conventions allow you to cut them together, providing:
Minor action mismatches go unnoticed when (1) you have a bold enough change of image size between the incoming and outgoing frames, and (2) talk or action flows uninterrupted across the cut. Be aware that the eye fails to register the first three frames of any new image.
Because of large image size difference between the three frames in Figure 30-1, minor mismatches will pass unnoticed, especially since persistence of vision means the eye does not register the first three frames of a new image anyway.
To face another human being while making a documentary means to probe, listen, and obliquely reveal oneself and one’s purposes as you follow up with further questions. Often, by challenging someone to deeply explore an experience, you become a sounding board to realizations that lead to change. Thus, the interviewer subtly supports and directs—quite a responsibility. This should never mean manipulating the interviewee into exhibitionism, but rather providing the special occasion, assistance, and creative resistance that allows another person to explore—sometimes for the first time—paths that are truly their own.
Working to challenge documentary participants is like narrowing and raising the banks of a river. You help the water run deeper and faster. Such shaping pressures help make visible—to both participant and the audience—issues that might otherwise have stayed hidden and unaddressed.
If you are formal and uptight, your interviewee will be more so. You’ll only get spontaneity by being relaxed and natural yourself. I try to lower pressure on interviewees by making my first questions deliberately slow and bumbling. That way I show my expectations are totally unlike the manic brightness of the live television show, where hosts chivvy people into performing.
In commercials that masquerade as documentary you often see a pseudo-sincerity that reeks of manipulation. Sometimes documentary interviewers inadvertently get the same effect. Either through anxiety or the need to control, the interviewer has unconsciously signified the reply he wanted by using a leading question. Look at the difference:
Leading question: | “Do you think early education is really a good thing?” |
Open question: | “What do you feel about early education?” |
A leading question corrals the interviewee into a particular response. “Did you feel angry coming home to an empty house?” is fishing for a particular answer. As the participant deals with it, he is embarrassed to find himself answering to prescription. His resulting staginess and self-consciousness devalue the film. An open question would be, “Talk some more about the feelings you mentioned when you came home as a kid to an empty house.” You are asking him to elaborate on something already mentioned in private. Open questions hand control to the interviewee and ask only for a sincere reply.
Some interviewers go fishing with catchall questions: “What is the most exciting experience you’ve ever had?” Devoid of preparation or focus, they throw out a big, shapeless net. Another habit, rampant in town hall meetings, is the rambling multipart question. The person answering can only tackle what she remembers—usually the last thing on the list. To lead your interviewee into a chosen area rather than trail him, make your questions specific and address one issue at a time.
To make an easy start, ask first for information. Facts are safe, while opinions or feelings take a more confident, relaxed state of mind. These you keep for later when your subject has become used to the situation and is even enjoying it. There’s no point in posing questions in the order you need for your film because you will reorganize everything in editing anyway. The only logical order for questions is that which your participant finds easy and natural. Listen to your instincts so you can maintain the pressure and flow.
Highly sensitive issues can be difficult. Preparing for a film I made with Alexandra Tolstoy, the twelfth and most controversial child of the great novelist Leo Tolstoy, I read in her autobiography that she had been an unwanted child. Worse, she had learned in childhood that her mother had tried to abort her. Understanding that such grievous knowledge would have affected her whole life, I hoped I could touch on it without offending or hurting her. Nervously, I delayed broaching this to the end. Her reply, when it came, was full of dignity and honesty and patently from the heart. In editing, however, I placed it early because it illuminates everything she says subsequently.
In my na ï vet é, I hardly supposed that an elderly lady of 86 could still feel the anguish of childhood so keenly. What emerges about a person’s private pain always leads to deeper appreciation of their strengths. There would be little justification for intruding otherwise.
During the interview, maintain eye contact with your subject and give visual (not vocal!) feedback as the interviewee talks. Nodding, smiling, looking puzzled, and facially signifying agreement or doubt all contribute the kind of feedback we normally give vocally. They sustain the interviewee in what might otherwise feel like an egocentric monologue. Errol Morris claims to get his extraordinary interviews by keeping expectantly silent and just letting the camera roll.
If an interviewee gives you objective fact or measured opinion when you need his feelings, he may be afraid of appearing self-indulgent. People will often give a general answer—for example:
Q: What was your experience in the submarine service like?
A: Oh, it was all right, you know, nothing great.
An older man, he belongs to the No Complaints school in which drawing attention to yourself and your needs is contemptible. You must draw this speaker out by asking for the specific. He answers, “Well, it was hard, and I didn’t much like the leadership in my company.” Now you need some color. By asking “Can you tell me a story about that?” he produces something you can see and feel. Success.
Turn interviews toward feelings every time. A question such as, “You said you had strong feelings about the fears suffered by latchkey kids?” works well because it signals your interest in how he feels. Narratives need specifics. Many people (men particularly, I have to say) produce not the stuff of experience but a wad of arid conclusions. The emotions attached to their memories are buried deep in a filing cabinet, each sealed in a folder inscribed with a contents summary. The buttoned-up interviewee gives you the summary, not the more photographic stuff within. If there is a way to break in, it’s by gently refusing generalizations and asking for stories, stories, stories.
Making documentary faces us with a precarious duality: We can create a liberating arena for discovery and growth, or we can intrude and exploit by violating invisible boundaries. The danger of exploiting participants is never quite absent, since without access to people and their lives documentaries are not possible. Much documentary making, thank goodness, takes place at a light-hearted level, but in this chapter we must examine the most demanding end of the spectrum.
As early as the research period, interviewing poses ethical responsibilities. The thrill of the righteous chase can at any time delude you into unfairly demolishing a person’s defenses. Although you have a second chance in the cutting room to recognize and prevent this from becoming public, the damage to your relationship with your subject (and your coworkers) may remain. More dangerous is when you don’t have editorial control. In spite of your objections, your superiors may use something that you regret shooting.
Here is another interviewing dilemma. You take a participant up to an important, perhaps unperceived, threshold in his life. In a revealing moment, the interviewee crosses into new territory. You see what Rouch calls a “privileged moment,” where all notion of film as an artificial environment ceases for participant and audience alike. It is a wonderful moment, but it hinges on the revelation of some fact whose consequences might become damaging if made public. Do you now lean on the person to permit its inclusion in the film? What if the participant is so trusting that you alone can make the decision whether or not it will damage him? Here, wise and responsible coworkers can help you carry the burden of decision. If, however, you decide to suppress the revelation, do you carry on as though you don’t know this important but confidential truth? Only you, guided by your own values and knowledge of the circumstances, can finally decide.
There’s always some risk in any relationship where you look for truth more than comfort. In filmmaking the danger is that the relationship is not one of equality.
Simply by arriving with an instrument of history called a camera, the interviewer has the upper hand. You may use it to intimidate or liberate, depending on how you handle your role. Your best safeguard is to find participants who appreciate your values and aims and are ready or even eager to make a journey of exploration with you. In return, you make yourself emotionally accessible and ready to give as well as take.
Good interviewing is a form of displaced authorship. Even with the ability as catalyst, selector, and organizer remains written all over the screen.
You aspire to create a partnership with your interviewee like the “poet as witness” that Seamus Heaney describes in a discussion of World War I poets. To Heaney, those writing about the appalling carnage of that war represent “poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the underprivileged.” The witness, he says, “Is any figure in whom the truth-telling urge and the compulsion to identify with the oppressed becomes necessarily integral with the act of writing itself.” 3 Those heroic souls who have since faced tanks in Tiananmen Square, stood in solidarity with Palestinian villagers in the Occupied Territories, or who, as members of Voices in the Wilderness, made themselves human shields during their country’s bombing of Iraq in 2003, are courageous people ready to live their convictions to the ultimate. I first met such people among World War I “conchies” (conscientious objectors). Said one, a Quaker, “We felt very strongly that we would rather be killed than kill other people.” Forty years later, this—said so quietly and matter-of-factly—still gives me the shivers. What courage it takes to live by this belief! Young though I was, I knew what he meant; it was an honor to record for posterity what he and the others did, which is the witnessing that Heaney asks us to do.
As documentary makers we try to find ordinary people living extraordinary lives and then to act as witnesses to what is special.
Every interviewer dreads the person who can’t or won’t talk:
Q: “You weren’t satisfied when you moved into this apartment?”
A: “Nope.”
Try asking, “Talk to me a little about how that happened.” If he doesn’t respond, it may be wise to abandon the attempt. He may be stonewalling or resolved not to speak of this or any upsetting experience. An old and dear friend, a pilot at 18 in World War II who crashed and suffered innumerable surgeries afterwards, told me almost with pride that he has never spoken of his fighter pilot experiences. When I tried pressing him to give details for history’s sake, he sent me an (excellent) autobiography—written by someone else. Some people simply won’t revisit emotions. Their experiences have left terrible marks that they can’t imagine revisiting.
Very occasionally it happens that you need to stop an interview because the interviewee is, for whatever reason, hopelessly unsatisfactory. Every crew sometime pretends the camera is running in order to avoid hurting the participant’s feelings.
In a memorable interview you will see someone cross an emotional threshold and break new ground. This gives what all stories need—a central character who is visibly in movement and developing—and it delivers the emotional content or even shock that we expect of dramatic art.
The best interviewers really listen and press for specifics and examples. Simple rejoinders—such as “How?” or “Why was that?” or “How did that make you feel?” or “Talk some more about that, would you?”—liberate the sentient being from the stoic observer. Asking the interviewee to take time and talk about pictures in his or her mind’s eye can also elicit a better kind of telling.
You confront the caretaking daughter with her contradictory feelings for her mother, and before our eyes she says she recognizes for the first time that she despises aspects of someone she thought she only loved. A man crossing a similar threshold might admit to himself that he was unequal to the job in which he suffered a humiliating demotion.
Both times the interviewee is experiencing an important realization for the first time. This is a breakthrough, and the suspense and sense of sharing it is electrifying. Under such circumstances your job is to remain expectantly silent. Wait and wait, if you need to—the silences will be full of drama onscreen.
Moments occur in interviewing when you sense there is more to tell, but the person is wondering whether to risk telling it. A gentle “And?” or simply “Yes, go on” signals that you support her in continuing. After this, stay silent and wait. That silence becomes gripping because imaginatively we enter the interviewee’s mind as she visibly and dramatically grapples with a vital issue.
The expectant silence is the interviewer’s most powerful tool for inducing the interviewee to go deeper.
To the insensitive or inexperienced interviewer, silence is failure, so they come crashing in with new questions. The underlying cause is not listening for the subtext and not trusting intuition, but there’s no risk to waiting because it is not live television. Your material is going to be edited, so you take no risks by trusting your hunches and waiting in silence.
Neil Sandell of Outfront (see end of this chapter) warns not to break out of your role and comfort someone who becomes emotional or distraught during an interview. To stem suffering is commendable, but it turns the interviewing relationship into something different. Often, the reflex to comfort comes from being embarrassed and wanting to slam a door on what you’ve precipitated. But people simply don’t go where they can’t cope. Let them handle it, Sandell advises, and just remain quietly present and supportive.
People in interviews don’t go where they can’t cope. If someone breaks down, be quietly present and supportive. It’s something that needs to happen, so don’t rush in to stop the flow.
The anthropologist Jean Rouch summed up the moments of naked discovery a person sometimes makes as “privileged moments.”
The most impressive windows on human life come as detonations of truth—what the anthropologist Jean Rouch called “privileged moments,” when someone on camera suddenly manifests a new awareness. You see these not only during action but sometimes also in an interview. In a film of mine it was a father realizing that, for all his love of country, he would leave it rather than let his sons go off to risk death in a foreign war the way his brother had done in Vietnam.
Here are a couple of nonthreatening ways to open up a delicate area:
Facing an unexpected question, the human memory yields its contents in stages, so interviewees often recount the same events in more than one way. It works like this: Your interviewee searches and struggles to explain. For emotionally loaded events, this is attractively spontaneous and dramatic. She goes back to explain, then to question herself forms a firmer picture and tells the whole episode again.
When it’s a matter of getting a few facts in order, this can be tiresomely slow. Many people sense this and spontaneously repeat their explanation in a more orderly and rapid form. When this should happen but doesn’t, you can ask, “Maybe you’d just like to go over that once more and give me a shorter version.” Usually the interviewee is grateful, and you get a nice short version. In editing you can choose or even combine the best versions.
Most participants enjoy collaborating in the making of a documentary and are just as sincere when redoing something a second or third time.
As you work with a central character in a documentary, you can often sense what their unfinished business is. Novice directors are often hesitant, fearful of rebuff, or too self-conscious to act on their intuitions in this direction. It takes no mystical powers to sense which way a person leans, only careful observation. It’s far easier, in fact, to see other people’s unfinished business than one’s own. If you elect to play a role—that of investigating and making a record—you must expand enough to become assertive and politely demanding in a way that people in regular life (wrongly, I think) might deem invasive. The more stoic and repressive of feeling a person (or culture) is, the more extreme are the pressures they hold behind the mask and the more your function as a catalyst can matter. People usually defer to this right if you act on your belief in it. They will journey inward and take you and your camera along to a degree that is surprising, moving, and humbling.
In your role as director you sometimes probe on behalf of the audience, on behalf of history, or even on behalf of humanity. This is both frightening and exhilarating.
When you have qualms about acting on your instincts, remember that it’s normal to doubt one’s authority. To the participant, your attention, your invitation to make a record, confirms that he or she exists and matters. What you give is recognition, something we all crave, and this entitles you to invite a partnership that is seldom denied. Why is this?
The camera is a little engine of history and a magnet to confession. Those who use it often get treated like priests or doctors.
Perhaps documentarians are the village conscience, the village storyteller, whose job is to remember the village’s history, reflect its opinions, and validate each person’s worth. When you begin, this role is hard to believe in and harder to act out. At first you ask favors with a groveling sense of apology and obligation, but you find you are welcomed and assisted openheartedly. If you press a little as you shoot, you will find not only that you are allowed to make incursions into your subjects’ lives but also that it is expected. This you must treat responsibly, naturally, but you must also resist those feelings of obligation that will skew your editorial decisions. Sometimes this too is painful.
Occasionally, filmmaking helps people make changes they never imagined possible. Tod Lending’s Legacy (2000, United States; Figure 30-5) chronicles an African – American family he followed for five years after the murder of a beloved family member. In a postscreening discussion I attended, family members said frankly that it was Tod’s support and filming that helped them work their way out of Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green projects (public housing). A film crew that began as witnesses became believers and supporters and upheld their subjects’ sometimes hesitant progress through an uncaring world. You can see the opening of this film at http://directingthedocumentary.com.
Before ending the interview, check your topic list to make sure you covered what you intended. Then, while the camera is still running, ask, “Is there anything else you want to add, anything we forgot to cover?” This records the fact that you handed the last word to the participant, should any dispute arise later. After you cut the camera, thank your participants and briefly appreciate whatever was successful about the exchange. Keep everyone in place so the recordist can shoot a minute or two of presence track.
When everyone rises to start dismantling equipment, give each participant a token sum (often the minimum $1) and the individual release form (see Figure 24-2 in Chapter 24), so you obtain a signed permission form for your records that explicitly allows you to use the material publicly. This is always an uncomfortable moment. I confess that, when I could, I gave this ghastly ritual to an assistant with instructions to carry it out as a necessary formality. It is normal, even mandatory among many organizations, not to pay any significant sum for interviews, since that would open you to charges of checkbook journalism.
Apply the self-rating checklist to your interviewing results in Project 5-PP-1 Assess Your Interviewing.
In the Appendix you will find a self-rating checklist to help you assess your performance as an interviewer (see project box). What did you forget? What do you need to work on? Confronting the blind spots and artificiality in your behavior helps you reach for the next level of interviewing. You see there are spontaneous moments of humor, inspired questions, and well-judged pauses, but also self-consciousness, persuasion tilting into manipulation, haste disguised as enthusiasm, and timidity masquerading as respect. What a rendezvous with the ego!
In most interviews, people speak in the past tense about events already concluded. They face an interviewer and give—or resist or deny—what the interviewer seems to want. The limitation is obvious: that it’s interviewer centered, and at some level inherently adversarial. Once I tried to break out by asking an interviewee to see a scene in her mind’s eye and describe in the present tense what she saw. It failed because she kept reverting to the past tense—she was an Auschwitz survivor and had every reason to thrust memories back into the distance. Probably the crew, the camera, the lighting, and my presence as an interviewer all made pursuing an inner monologue difficult.
The limitation of conventional interviewing is that it is interviewer centered and unavoidably adversarial.
However, the approach wasn’t completely misguided. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s radio story program Outfront (www.cbc.ca/outfront/) does something similar and gets superlative results. Of themselves they say, with winning moxy, “Outfront is where we hand you the microphone. You make a radio documentary, with our help. Then CBC broadcasts it—and you’ll even get paid!” Producer Neil Sandell described methods they use in the National Public Radio (NPR) Third Coast Audio Festival broadcast of February 2, 2008 (http://thirdcoastfestival.org/resound_february_2008). “Ironing Man” and “One Blue Canoe” are examples that will leave you with a lump in your throat.
An Outfront producer might say:
The radio producer’s prompts, spoken as necessary, might sound like this:
This can produce remarkable, freestanding description from which an editor can extract a spontaneous inner journey—very different from the conventional interview.
Radio documentary is resurging and even showing the way forward for film-makers. NPR’s Third Coast Audio Festival puts out wonderful work drawn from all over the world. Try the Australian work on Show #57 at www.thirdcoastfestival.org/re-sound.asp (rebroadcast February 23, 2008). For depth of social comment, listen to Claudia Taranto’s “A Tale of Two Townsvilles,” and for unforgettable sound design and sheer gut-wrenching emotion, listen to Kyla Brettle’s “000 Ambulance.” Before becoming an independent radio producer her training was in literature and music.
The Outfront approach is a wonderful way to generate film narration or voice-over. For more adventurous radio work and offbeat treatments, also try listening to Ira Glass and his NPR team in This American Life at www.thislife.org. Their forte is funny, quirky, and intimate first-person shows that look deeply into some aspect of popular culture. One show you might enjoy at www.thislife.org is:
Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire.
1 Carney, Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 21 – 22.
2 Dr. Benjamin Spock, in “We’re Sliding towards Destruction,” One Pair of Eyes series on BBC.
3 Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber, 1988, p. xvi.