Initial Interviewing During Research

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.

Who Interviews

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.

Types of Situations

Preparation and Basic Skills

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.

Metaphorical Thinking

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.

Rehearsing

Before interviewing:

• Work out how to phrase your questions so they become direct and unambiguous.
• Speak each aloud and listen to your voice. Does it sound direct and natural?
• Could anyone interpret any question in the wrong way?
• If the answer is “Yes,” alter the question until only the intended understanding is possible.
• Listen to your questioning again for signs of manipulation and eradicate it.

Freeing Yourself to Listen

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.

Briefing the Camera Operator

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:

• Cutting between different sized shots and thus a good chance of abbreviation
• Restructuring an interview
• Removing what’s redundant
• Eliminating the interviewer’s questions
• Longer stretches of uncut interview on the screen—when the camera intensifies and relaxes scrutiny, it answers the spectator’s need for variation.

Preparing for Image Size Changes

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:

• Wide shot (to cover each question), I press the ankle.
• Medium shot (used after the answer has got under way), I touch the top of the foot.
• Close shot (for anything intense or revealing), I press the toe.

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.

FIGURE 30-1 Three sizes of image. Note that each compositional center—the subject’s eyes—must be in the same part of the frame if any two compositions are to cut together well.

Say What You Want

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.

Establish Your Right to Interrupt

Another way to lower the interviewee’s anxiety is by explaining that you may occasionally interrupt or redirect the conversation. I usually say:

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.

Relaxing Interviewees

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.

Interviewer and Camera Placement

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.

On-Axis Interview

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.

FIGURE 30-2 On-axis interview—the speaker looks into the camera because the interviewer’s head is just below the lens. Once the interviewer’s voice is removed, the speaker seems to be talking directly to the audience.

FIGURE 30-3 Off-axis interview—speaker looking off to one side of the camera.

Off-Axis Interview

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.

When the Interviewer Should Be On-Camera

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.

Preparing to Edit Out the Interviewer

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.

Voice Overlaps

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.

Vox Populi Interviews

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.

FIGURE 30-4 A jump cut is when two similar images mismatch so footage between them appears to have been removed.

Varying Shot Sizes

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:

• There is a bold change of image size, either larger or smaller.
• The subject is in a roughly similar physical attitude in the two shots.
• Speech and movement rhythms flow uninterrupted across the cut.

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.

Interviewing and Directing

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.

Lead by Example

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.

Framing Questions

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:

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.

Focusing Questions

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.

The Right Order for Questions

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.

Maintain Eye Contact and Give Behavioral Feedback

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.

Aim to Elicit Feelings

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.

Going Where Angels Fear to Tread

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.

Temptations When Interviewing

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.

Having Power

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.

Witnessing

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.

The Interviewer’s Nightmare

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.

Dummy Run

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.

Crossing Thresholds

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.

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.

Your Most Powerful Tool

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.

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.

Don’t Catch Them When They Fall

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.

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.

Being Adversarial Without Being Offensive

Here are a couple of nonthreatening ways to open up a delicate area:

1. The devil’s advocate approach— If you say, “Some people would say it’s not frightening for a kid to get home before his mother,” then you are playing the devil’s advocate. The words I’ve italicized invite the interviewee to discharge his feelings about those who don’t realize how scared a young kid can be when he must enter an empty house. Tim Russert used this approach notably when he asked President Bush, “How do you respond to critics who say you brought the nation to war under false pretenses?”
2. Starting with generalized comment—Let’s say you want an interviewee to say on camera what she’s told you in private, that she opted to nurse an ungrateful mother instead of getting married. You’d like to ask, “Didn’t you resent your mother’s demands when you saw the love of your life marry someone else?” But this is too brutally direct, so you start more generally and at a safe distance: “Our society seems to expect daughters more than sons to make sacrifices for their parents, doesn’t it?” She nods and starts talking. She can stay with an impersonal opinion or, when you invite her to tell an illustrative story, she can get closer and closer to the injustice that ruined her life. When she ventures an opinion, you simply ask for an example. By mutual and unspoken agreement, you steer toward the poignant testimony that both you and she want to put on record. How did this work? By starting with general questions, you help frame her situation as a sad injustice that overcomes women unprepared for a societal trap. This is an easier place to start than asking her to flaunt a sense of personal victimization. The distinction matters: Many who are too proud or realistic to admit pain will do so when it might save someone else from the same fate. Without this beautiful and generous human impulse, much documentary would be impossible.

Getting Briefer Versions

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.

Believing in Your Authority

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.

Give and Take

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?

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.

FIGURE 30-5 Legacy chronicles a family making it out of the notorious public housing projects—with the belief and support of a film crew. (Photo courtesy of Tod Lending.)

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.

The Release

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.