The art of the interview
A man's story, and the junket jungle
Hi, thank you for subscribing to this newsletter! I hope you’ve been enjoying it so far. At the top of each one from now on, I’m going to pop in some sort of recommendation that reflects what I’ve recently been listening to/reading/watching.
First up, it’s XTC’s 1986 album “Skylarking”, produced by Todd Rundgren. I’ve always had a hard time making it all the way through a single XTC album despite enjoying individual tracks—the yelping delivery and occasionally hectoring lyrics of main frontman Andy Partridge, and the frantic thudding of the music has made the Swindon new-wavers a strictly small-doses affair for me. But I’d never really sat with this LP before, and only came to it via some algorithmic fortune—I’d been hammering Rundgren’s hypnotic “Healing Pt. 1” after hearing it on the soundtrack of Joachim Trier’s film The Worst Person in the World (2021), and Spotify sent me in the direction of “Skylarking”. Anyway, it’s great—a more restrained affair than usual, and blessed with a loose but compelling conceptual structure based around the four seasons. Deceptively simple (or deceptively tricky? I’m not sure), poetic, hook-laden songs above love, loss, memory, and mermaids. There’s a terrific piece about “Skylarking” written by Pitchfork’s Jazz Monroe that I found incisive, funny and informative; a perfect complement to the record. (Personal favorite moment of the record so far: the inspired transition between tracks 1 (“Summer’s Cauldron”) and 2 (“Grass”).
This week I’ve been bingeing on episodes of Scene By Scene, the brilliant interview show hosted by filmmaker Mark Cousins, which ran for 24 episodes on the BBC between 1996-2003. (Cousins himself kindly began tweeting out episodes in late 2021.) The concept of the show was simple yet effective. Cousins would sit down with a major figure from the filmmaking world—usually a director or an actor—and would have an in-depth conversation with them about their art, steered by a selection of clips that they would discuss in detail.
I remember some of these interviews from the time, but some were new to me. I hadn’t seen Cousins’ charming 1998 chat with the rakish Terence Stamp (which is worth watching for the Toby Dammit star’s Federico Fellini impression alone), nor the episode from the same year featuring the late, great director Jonathan Demme (Something Wild, The Silence of the Lambs), who is a perfect foil for Cousins’ unstinting enthusiasm and earnest nature. There’s a particularly lovely moment near the end when Cousins confesses that he doesn’t understand a quote by Oprah Winfrey, star of Demme’s Toni Morrison adaptation Beloved. Says Mark:
Oprah said something that I didn’t understand: “This film should make you try and feel what slavery was like rather than just look at it.” She also said we would be “liberated” as a result of feeling that. What did she mean by that?
Demme replies:
What that means to me as a white American is that if I am prepared to accept that my ancestors, the slave-owning class, did unspeakable, horrendous human damage to people by either enslaving them or tolerating the existence of the slave class … that if we’re not in touch with that horror, we’re functioning behind some kind of denial … that if we were to confront that denial we would be liberated from the unexpressed guilt that surely we must feel as human beings.
The exchange is striking for Cousins’ honesty and willingness to be educated, and for Demme’s eloquence and insight. It’s hard to imagine such an open and tender moment being broadcast today, and harder still to imagine it existing within the context of a BBC show solely and seriously dedicated to film craft—a crying shame.
Cousins’ terse, spiky 1998 interview with Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill, Scarface), however, is riveting for other reasons. I won’t say too much about it, because it’s better experienced than re-capped, but it all hinges—in one memorable exchange—on the two men’s fundamentally contrasting understanding of why they are sitting there, on that couch, in uncomfortably close proximity, talking to each other. For Cousins the enthusiast, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to poke and prod a master stylist (and master sadist) into elucidating their craft; for De Palma the pragmatist, it’s just another promotional opportunity for his new film Snake Eyes.
I interviewed De Palma myself once, for The Guardian, on the occasion of the release of Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s documentary De Palma in 2016. It was a mostly uneventful affair, although De Palma did perk up slightly when I told him about the under-reported music career of Craig Wasson, star of his ultra-sleazy 1984 thriller Body Double. It was clearly news to him. (If you’re in the market for synth-washed cod reggae and truly baffling music videos, Craig’s got you covered.) The main reason that our interview was uneventful is because it was performed strictly within the confines of the press junket format, wherein the (often jetlagged) talent is there to promote their new product, and the interviewer has 15-20 minutes to try to get some moderately interesting quotes to spin into a workable feature. These junkets are aggressively scheduled. It’s OK if you’re interview #1 of the day. It’s less fun (for both parties) if you’re interview #15.
Back in my time as a jobbing journalist, I had one or two memorable junket experiences. Once, while reporting on 2012’s The Sessions (IMDb reminds me of the plot: “A man in an iron lung who wishes to lose his virginity contacts a professional sex surrogate with the help of his therapist and priest.”), I interviewed its star John Hawkes in a tiny room in a West End hotel. Hawkes did not meet my eye once in the entirety of our eight (felt like eighty) minute chat, and instead stared unblinkingly at my dictaphone with the force of a thousand suns—I thought it was going to explode.
The real cake-taker, though, was fashion designer Ozwald Boateng, the first Black tailor to have a shop on London’s iconic Savile Row. Boateng—don’t get me wrong, an important, influential and inspirational figure—had starred in a moderately entertaining but auto-hagiographic puff piece doc about his life entitled A Man’s Story. (I reviewed it for my old blog.) A bunch of us journos (this was a group junket) were ferried up to another West End hotel room, this time a lavish suite, where we were arranged in a semicircle around a vacant throne. A few minutes of awkward silence passed before the elegantly-shod Boateng strode in, took his place at the head of this bottom-feeder horseshoe, and began to speak. (What follows is a slight paraphrase, because I don’t have total recall, but I’m sure I’m not a million miles off):
Thank you for coming today. What I’d like is for us to go around the room, and each of you please tell me your favorite moment from the film. You [pointing to journo #1] can begin.
With the tables turned, us journos did the best we could to improvise. But when journo #5 mumbled something to the effect of “Well, like journo #2, I also quite liked the bit where you had the cheese, chocolate and vodka in the back of a limo in Russia,” Ozwald wasn’t having it. He needed us all to provide a separate, discrete moment. Eventually, some painful minutes later, we got there. At which point Boateng rose to his feet, exhaled, and said:
Thank you. I think this proves what a rich and multifaceted film you’ve all watched.
Then he walked out. And that was that.
I’ve never forgotten it, I never will, and I hope some filmmakers are reading this and taking notes. You, too, can bestow a rich and multifaceted experience upon an unsuspecting journalist!
Thank you once again for reading, if you made it this far. See you next time.