On-Camera Interviews Are An Adventure

The majority of the stories we tell at CBN and what I’m most interested in as a director and producer rely on interviews to illuminate complex ideas or feelings. That’s a challenge. So how do we make these interviews great? What can we do to perform better while conducting them?

MY GENERAL APPROACH

If you know me, there’s a good chance you’ve spent some time (hopefully) enjoying my stories of outdoor adventures. So as I sat down to collect my thoughts for this blog, it was through this lens of adventure that my concrete principles emerged.

SET YOUR INTENTIONS BEYOND A SIMPLE GOAL

No great adventure story goes like this:

Since she was a child, Stacey’s dream was to climb the great Morder Kliffe that rose like a dagger from the Northwest edge of her industrial hamlet. One day, she did. The end.

The purpose of the adventure is to be a vehicle for self-discovery. What makes climbing worth doing is what you experience.

Extending this idea to on-camera interviews, the key point is: don’t make the information you need to extract from your subject your only intention. Yes. This is the summit, but you must pay attention and set your intention beyond this. What’s going to be interesting and engaging for both me and the subject in this interview? How am I going to communicate this whole person to our audience and not just the information...

PREPARE YOURSELF

No climber takes on a challenging mountain without preparation. No surfer would jump into the ocean on a big day without a deep understanding of the break. And no director or producer should sit down for an on-camera interview without meaningful preparation.

Do your homework. For some subjects, this will mean doing a pre-interview. When this isn’t possible or advisable, do other research. Going into an interview, I’m prepared if I have two crucial things.

1. I have a discussion guide, a list of questions I’ve drafted and revised a couple of times. Beware, information can be a trap. You must be prepared to go beyond the questions you’ve drafted and discover something new.
2. I have stoke. I want to go into an interview excited and curious. To prepare for that, I practice by talking with clients, colleagues, crew, and even my family about what interests me about the interviewee. So much of our communication is dictated by emotion and unconscious cues. If the subject can feel your genuine curiosity, they are more likely to explore ideas and experiences with you.

Day of, I also prepare by:

1. Making time to meditate.
2. Sharing the intention of the shoot with the entire production team.
3. Giving away my phone. Sorry production team! Can someone hold onto my phone for me?
4. Stepping away from the set’s hustle about five minutes before I begin.
5. Being caffeinated. La Colombe, let’s collaborate.

GET INTO THE FLOW

Why do we climb mountains even though it’s hard? It feels good to be in the flow. Why do we direct and produce even when it’s hard? It feels good to get into the flow state and create, and usually when we are in this state, we produce great interviews. But unlike climbing or surfing, two people need to flow to make this happen. So what can be done?

For the Subject:

They’re often going to be nervous and while a little bit of nerves can go a long way to increase focus, they can also make their interview feel canned. A few tips to avoid this:

1. Make it clear at the beginning of the interview what you’re trying to do. Your goal is to have a conversation, and outline what you’ll be talking about. Make it clear to them that you’ll edit this interview, so they don’t need to be perfect.
2. Start with the easiest questions they could answer, even if they were half asleep. Who are you? Tell me what happened? I usually expect the first 5-10 minutes of an interview to be establishing rapport and getting the subject to forget the cameras and just talk.
3. Make yourself approachable. Depending on the subject, this may mean sharing your own personal experience, projecting your experience and confidence, or even cracking jokes. Whatever you need to do.

Great adventure involves risk. And great interviews usually have a moment where the subject will risk a new thought—even an unfiltered thought. You see that spark in their eye… They restate something in words they’ve never used before. All of this preparation is to get them there.

For You:

I want to do four things during an interview to elevate to that flow state.

1. Concentrate on the mechanics of active listening. Eye contact, steady breath. Jotting down notes for clarification so that I don’t have to hold them in my mind.
2. Embody my audience. When appropriate, point to or talk directly with the subject about who we are making this for.
3. Be sensitive to the rhythm of the interview. Invite pauses and have a few stock ways to introduce them. “Let me just check my notes.” “Do you need any water?” “Hold on a second, let me check the camera.” A pause at the right contemplative moment can often help the subject go on that journey.
4. Ensure someone else is following the discussion guide I prepared, so that I don’t have to be anxious about ensuring we have the right information.

I love that our work provides the opportunity to interact with people at all places in society, treating their experiences with equal dignity. If I’m following my approach, I finish an interview or a day of interviews with two important results: having learned something new, and having changed how I see the world. It’s this same desire for a perspective shift that drives me into the mountains and the ocean. Until our next adventure…

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