The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft - Softcover

Grobel, Lawrence

 
9781400050710: The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1400050715 ISBN 13: 9781400050710
Verlag: Crown, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

THE ULTIMATE INSIDER’S LOOK AT THE FINE ART OF INTERVIEWING

“I had a fantasy the other night that this interview is so great that they no longer want me to act—just do interviews. I thought of us going all over the world doing interviews—we’ve signed for three interviews a day for six weeks.”
—Al Pacino, in an interview with Lawrence Grobel

Highly respected in journalist circles and hailed as “the Interviewer’s Interviewer,” Lawrence Grobel is the author of well-received biographies of Truman Capote, Marlon Brando, James Michener, and the Huston family, with bylines from Rolling Stone and Playboy to the New York Times. He has spent his thirty-year career getting tough subjects to truly open up and talk. Now, in The Art of the Interview, he offers step-by-step instruction on all aspects of nailing an effective interview and provides an inside look on how he elicted such colorful responses as:

“I don’t like Shakespeare. I’d rather be in Malibu.” —Anthony Hopkins

“Feminists don’t like me, and I don’t like them.”—Mel Gibson

“I hope to God my friends steal my body out of a morgue and throw a party when I’m dead.”—Drew Barrymore

“I want you out of here. And I want those goddamn tapes!”—Bob Knight

“I smoked pot with my father when I was eleven in 1973. . . . He thought he was giving me a mind-extending experience just like he used to give me Hemingway novels and Woody Allen films.”—Anthony Kiedis

In The Art of the Interview, Grobel reveals the most memorable stories from his career, along with examples of the most candid moments from his long list of famous interviewees, from Oscar-winning actors and Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prizewinning writers and sports figures. Taking us step by step through the interview process, from research and question writing to final editing, The Art of the Interview is a treat for journalists and culture vultures alike.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAWRENCE GROBEL is the author of eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Climbing Higher with Montel Williams, Conversations with Capote, and The Hustons. He teaches interviewing in the English department at UCLA and lives in Los Angeles.

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THE ULTIMATE INSIDER'S LOOK AT THE FINE ART OF INTERVIEWING
"I had a fantasy the other night that this interview is so great that they no longer want me to act--just do interviews. I thought of us going all over the world doing interviews--we've signed for three interviews a day for six weeks."
--Al Pacino, in an interview with Lawrence Grobel
Highly respected in journalist circles and hailed as "the Interviewer's Interviewer," Lawrence Grobel is the author of well-received biographies of Truman Capote, Marlon Brando, James Michener, and the Huston family, with bylines from Rolling Stone and Playboy to the New York Times. He has spent his thirty-year career getting tough subjects to truly open up and talk. Now, in The Art of the Interview, he offers step-by-step instruction on all aspects of nailing an effective interview and provides an inside look on how he elicted such colorful responses as:
"I don't like Shakespeare. I'd rather be in Malibu." --Anthony Hopkins
"Feminists don't like me, and I don't like them."--Mel Gibson
"I hope to God my friends steal my body out of a morgue and throw a party when I'm dead."--Drew Barrymore
"I want you out of here. And I want those goddamn tapes!"--Bob Knight
"I smoked pot with my father when I was eleven in 1973. . . . He thought he was giving me a mind-extending experience just like he used to give me Hemingway novels and Woody Allen films."--Anthony Kiedis
In The Art of the Interview, Grobel reveals the most memorable stories from his career, along with examples of the most candid moments from his long list of famous interviewees, from Oscar-winning actors and Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prizewinning writersand sports figures. Taking us step by step through the interview process, from research and question writing to final editing, The Art of the Interview is a treat for journalists and culture vultures alike.

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1. Kinds of Interviews

Print. Books. Radio. Documentaries. Television.

A good interview should have the character of a good novel.
--Harrison Salisbury


It's hard to imagine how a nonfiction book, newspaper, magazine, or radio or television talk show or news show could exist without interviews. One person asking another a question in search of an answer, looking for information, or an anecdote, or some shared gossip. An interview is the interaction between people. Most are one-on-one, but there are roundtable interviews and group interviews. I once interviewed a high school marching band inside their school gym--I'd ask a question and point to someone, or someone would raise a hand to respond. Another time I interviewed two dozen performance artists in my living room, feeling very much the performer as I tried to ask provocative questions to already provocative artists.

The work of interviewers is everywhere.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book called A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness. She went to Pretoria Prison to interview Eugene de Kock in 1997 for his role in the killing of three black policemen who had died when a bomb exploded in their car. De Kock was a reviled man: He had led a death squad and had tortured black South Africans. She spent six months interviewing de Kock, and then she interviewed the family of victims to prepare them for testifying at the Truth and Reconciliation trials. Her task could not have been an easy one.

Barry Mile's biography of Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Clarke's of Truman Capote, and Ted Morgan's of William S. Burroughs could not have existed without the interviews these writers did as part of their research. Each had access to his subject, as well as to the people who knew their subject. On the other hand, Richard Ellman never interviewed Oscar Wilde or James Joyce, A. Scott Berg never personally spoke with Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, or Charles Lindbergh, Norman Mailer never talked to Gary Gilmore, David King Dunaway didn't know Aldous Huxley, Albrecht Folsing didn't interview Albert Einstein, Jeffrey Meyers didn't live at the time of Joseph Conrad, nor Neil Baldwin when he wrote about Thomas Edison. And yet these writers wrote biographies of these subjects, using whatever interviews and articles that existed about them, and talking to people who could enhance their portraits of them.

One could list practically every biography ever written and make the same point: that even if the subject lived a thousand years ago, there is only so much research one can do before feeling the need to talk to someone about that subject--a scholar, a friend, an enemy, anyone who has passion about or insight into the person one is trying to uncover. And that need to talk is a need to interview. Can you imagine a Studs Terkel book that didn't involve his asking questions and someone providing answers? To get the story right, one must know what to ask, how to ask, and how to listen to the answers. Without the inclusion of well-done interviews, you'd still have fiction, sitcoms, dramas, and music, but when it comes to nonfiction, so-called reality TV, and National Public Radio there would be very little to read, watch, or listen to.

Print

The most in-depth interviews usually appear in print: in newspapers, magazines, books, or online. Makes sense: Print allows more space than radio or television. You can condense most TV interviews into a few paragraphs of print. As you will see in other chapters of this book, there is more to a printed interview than transcribing what has been said and handing it to your editor. Just as most writing involves rewriting, all interviews demand editing. Words, sentences, and paragraphs will have to be moved around, cleaned up, reduced, or deleted. And almost all interviews done these days in any medium are recorded for the simple reason that the technology exists and legal departments demand accuracy.

When Norman Mailer was asked how he felt about being interviewed, he said he always sat down with a general sense of woe, because "the interviewer serves up one percent of himself in the questions and the man who answers has to give back ninety-nine percent. I feel exploited the moment I step into an interview. Of course, once in a while there is such a thing as a good interview; but even then, the tape recorder eats up half the mood. It isn't the interview I really dislike so much as the tape recorder."

Truman Capote hated tape recorders and told me he never worked with one (though I suspect his aversion might have had something to do with a general antipathy to electronics, a fear of pressing the wrong button--Play instead of Record). When he was conducting his interviews for In Cold Blood, or when he interviewed Marlon Brando in Japan during the making of Sayonara, he relied on his memory. He said he would go back to his room and write down everything that his subjects said, filling filing cabinets with his notes and research. He was meticulous, he was slow (it took him a year to write the Brando profile), but he had a good ear, and few complained that he misquoted them.

Lillian Ross prefers to "listen carefully and take notes." Nicholas Pileggi and Thomas Morgan also don't like tape recorders.

For Pileggi, who wrote the book Wise Guy: Life in a Mafia Family (which was the basis for Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas) and worked for Esquire and New York, "the problem with a tape recorder is that it exhausts you. It's stronger than you are. It throws all that stuff back at you in exactly the same way. And if you try to fast-forward it, you feel you've missed something. Before you know it, you're going bananas and you're spending all your time with the tape recorder."

Morgan, who has published nonfiction and fiction, and wrote for Harper's, Look, Esquire, and Holiday, feels it's inhibiting. "The interviewee is inhibited by the fact that he's on record in a way that he doesn't feel when you're sitting there scribbling away. Part of that, of course, is understandable because he can always say, 'You got it down wrong.'"

Exactly. I once did a story about mail-order entrepreneurs and spoke to the owner of a business who proudly showed me a book he published for 60 cents and sold for $9. When the article came out, he called my editor and denied he had said the things I had him saying. I was in Florida on another assignment when my editor called to warn me: "He's threatening to sue us." "Let him," I said, "it's all on tape." The businessman must have had a lapse of memory and forgot that I was recording our conversation, because once he was reminded he withdrew his complaints.

A similar thing happened some years later when I interviewed Vincent Bugliosi for Playboy. This was after O. J. Simpson had apparently gotten away with murder (or so many people, including Bugliosi, thought) and the former L.A. prosecutor had a lot to say about that and other matters. But while the interview was still in galleys Bugliosi managed to obtain a copy and let the powers that be at the magazine know that he didn't say any of the things I had him saying. He was so upset that he crossed out most of the interview and rewrote his answers. My editor called to ask me if everything I had Bugliosi saying was on tape. I said it was. He then told me what Bugliosi had done and I said that if Bugliosi was allowed to change our interview then I wanted my name removed (this had already happened once before, I later found out, when Bugliosi was interviewed by David Sheff and Sheff had his name removed from the final piece). In the end, Playboy published the interview as I had given it to them. I never...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400050715
ISBN 13 
9781400050710
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Three Rivers Press
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