17 Interview techniques

Before reading this chapter you may find it useful to download the treatment for a factual programme from Chapter 8.

If you are doing an interview for either radio or television there are a number of tips which can help you to get the best out of the interview. In previous chapters we talked about the technical aspects of setting up an interview: the location, the shot composition, the ambient noise, the type of microphone, etc. This chapter deals with how you talk and relate to your contributor. The tips relate both to television and to radio; however, it’s worth remembering that radio is a very much more intimate medium. When you listen to the radio you feel much closer to the contributor than you do if you are watching a television programme.

Purpose of the interview

There are a number of different reasons why you might want to interview someone. A lot depends on the kind of programme you are making. If you understand the purpose of your interview it will help you to prepare the questions properly.

• Factual: You are asking the person to give you information or to demonstrate something.
• Explanation: You and the audience already know the facts but you would like to have them explained or elaborated.
• Opinion and controversy: You may be covering an issue over which there is some kind of debate and you are asking the interviewee to comment on one side or the other.
• Witness/experiential: Your interviewee may be a witness to or participant in an event. They may have some kind of personal experience which is relevant to your piece. In this case you might be looking to them to provide you with some kind of colourful description; this may also involve some sort of emotion, particularly if you are dealing with a sensitive subject.
• Celebrity interviews: You may be lucky enough to find a willing celebrity to interview. Some of these may be a vehicle for the celebrity to promote their latest work, or they may be involved in some kind of issue.

It is perfectly possible that the same person could give you different types of interviews or combine some of the above elements in the same interview. The main thing you need to be clear about is what you are looking for in the interview.

Preparation

• Preparing yourself: You should have a list of things you want to talk about and you should brief the interviewee on what the interview will be about. Above all you will need to know why you are doing this interview, the main points you want the interviewee to cover and how it fits into your piece. You should write these points down so that you can refer to them and make sure they are covered.
• Know about the subject: The more you know about the subject itself the better your interview is likely to be, so you should be well prepared. If the interview is part of a discussion or debate or where there is some sort of controversy, you should know both sides of the argument before you start the interview, and not find out all about it from the interviewee. You should also know any relevant facts about the subject. You can prepare briefing notes for yourself, making a list of the relevant points. Finally, you will need to know the name and position of the person you are interviewing. Sounds odd but it’s not unknown for the name of an interviewee to go flying out of your head the moment you meet them, so make sure you have their name and position written down. When you first meet, you should check with the interviewee that you have the right name and pronunciation and that any title is correct.
• Prepare the interviewee: You should have given the interviewee a briefing during the research and preparation stage, but it won’t do any harm to remind them what the interview is for, what kinds of areas you want to cover and how long you think the interview will take. It may also be useful for the interviewee to know who else you are interviewing.
• Prepare areas for discussion: You may want to make a list of questions for yourself. However, you will need to use this list carefully and selectively. You shouldn’t feel that you have to slavishly stick to the questions you have written, in the order you have written them. The interview will become rather wooden if you do this. If you can, it is much better to make a note of the areas that you want to cover, rather than a list of specific questions; it will sound much more natural if you can do this rather than read a scripted question, and it well put your interviewee more at ease. You should always be prepared for a follow-up question which should come out of the last answer you heard.

Questions

Listen to the answer

Oddly, the most important piece of advice when you are interviewing someone is to listen to what they are saying. This sounds fairly obvious; however, when you have got microphones, cameras to worry about and fretting about the sun or background noises you start to get distracted. Added to this you may start to get worried about what you are going to ask next and whether the next question is still relevant or whether it will sound stupid now. Perhaps the interviewee has answered the second question at the same time as the first, and now you can’t remember the third question; again you will start to get distracted and stop listening to the interview. If you stop listening to the interview you won’t be able to ask follow-up questions. You will simply have to read off your list. The interviewee will pick up on the fact that you are distracted and start to feel a little uncomfortable; they may feel that they aren’t doing a very good job. Your aim is to get a relaxed feel to the interview. Look at the treatment from Chapter 8 and think about the opening interview.

Opening question

Some interviewees may feel a bit nervous or take a little time to get into their stride. You may find it useful to ask some sort of general question to start with; it should be on the subject but should be a bit of a warm-up question. Sometimes it’s useful to repeat the opening question at the end of the interview; once the interviewee has warmed up a bit they will probably give you a better answer.

Follow-up questions

A follow-up question is one which arises out of the answer the interviewee has just given. You may want them to elaborate a little or there may a supplementary question you need to ask. It helps put the interviewee at their ease if you pick up on something they said in the interview as a starting point for the next question. For example:

I was interested in the point you just made about litter – can you tell me . . .

You just touched on something there which I’d like to ask you a bit more about.

The interviewee will automatically feel a little more relaxed as he or she realises you have been listening, and encouraged that you have picked up on something and want to know more.

Open and closed questions

A critical key to a successful interview is to avoid what are known as closed questions. A closed question is one to which the interviewee can answer with a simple yes or no. This is particularly important if the interviewer is not going to appear in vision. Thus, for example:

Question: Mr Smith, you are the environmental officer with responsibility for festival litter?

Answer: Yes.

If the interviewer is not going to appear in vision then the only bit of this interview you can use is the word Yes which isn’t going to be very helpful. Better to use open questions to which you cannot answer with one word. For example:

Question: Mr Smith, can you describe the role of the environmental officer at this festival?

Answer: The environmental officer is responsible for making sure the festival organisers have made adequate provision for the removal of tents. . . .

There are a number of different techniques for asking open questions. One easy one is to make sure your questions start in such a way that it’s impossible for the interviewee to answer yes or no. For example, questions which start:

• Tell me . . . or Can you describe ... will always elicit a better answer.
• Who, what, why, how, when, which: Why is a particularly good word to start with; it will almost always mean your interviewee has to offer some kind of explanation or judgement of an issue, rather than just give you a quick answer.

However, you will need to be careful with these types of questions as they can sometimes be answered too quickly. For example:

Question: Who is responsible for collecting the tents?

Answer: The litter pickers.

Again this is not particularly helpful. A better framing might be:

Question: Can you tell me how you organise the workforce to collect the tents?

Very open questions

It is possible to ask a question which is too open. These questions tend to leave the interviewee a little confused as to what you really want them to answer. For example:

Question: Tell me about waste at festivals ...

The interviewee could be forgiven for feeling a little at sea with this question; it’s so wide they probably won’t know where to start and are more than likely to stumble and ask you for some clarification.

Controversy

Sometimes, particularly in news and current affairs, the interviewee is giving you one side of an argument. You may have sympathy with his or her view or you may take the opposite view; either way you shouldn’t let your own views be obvious and you shouldn’t, as an interviewer, become involved in the discussion. This does not mean to say that you shouldn’t put the opposing view. You should do this but you need to make it clear that this is not your view. For example:

Question: Mr Smith, the pressure group Tidy Britain has argued that festivals like this should be banned as they cause environmental damage – how would you answer their criticisms?

Even if you can’t attribute the counter-argument to a specific person you should always keep a distance from it. For example:

Question: Mr Smith, some people have suggested that it would be better to ban festivals like this because of the environmental damage. How would you respond to them?

How do you feel ... questions

Sometimes it’s tempting to ask the question How do you feel ... about something. This can be a tricky question to answer. It can put the interviewee on the spot and they might just answer with a few rather banal adjectives. For example:

Question: How to you feel about so much waste at these festivals?

Answer: Well I think it’s terrible really, I think it should stop . . .

When you come to the edit, the only usable bits are Well it’s terrible really, I think it should stop. Again that’s not going to be very helpful. It might help to be a little more specific:

Question: What are the consequences for you personally, having to deal with so much waste?

Answer: Well for me personally it means a great deal of time is spent and it’s awful to watch so much stuff being destroyed when I know there are people out there with very little; I find it quite hard to deal with.

Anecdotes

In either television or radio you want your interviews to be engaging and colourful. Your viewer or listener will be much more engaged with your interviewee if they can give examples and anecdotes rather than just rather bland comments. They may not tell you any anecdotes to begin with but this is something you need to winkle out of them with your follow-up questions. For example:

Question: Mr Smith, what are the consequences for you personally having to deal with so much waste?

Answer: Well for me personally it means a great deal of time is spent, and it’s awful to watch so much stuff being destroyed when I know there are people out there with very little, I find it quite hard to deal with.

Question: Can you tell me the worst instances of waste you have come across?

Answer: Well yes, I remember there was one family, they had a six-berth tent and when we found it, it was still set up for supper – all the plates and cups were laid out – there was a pot of tea on the table and salad and condiments all laid out – it was a bit spooky, it looked as if they had just suddenly disappeared – but what had happened is that they had been called away to deal with their vehicle which was sinking in the mud and they had got so fed up by the time they got the car out of the quagmire, they just wanted to get home, so they just left everything and drove off – clothes, sleeping bags, everything was just lying there waiting for this family who were never going to come back.

One question at a time

Make sure that you ask just one question at a time. Long, wordy questions which are really about three questions rolled into one will become confusing to all but the most experienced interviewee. They won’t know which question you really want them to answer and the answer is likely to be a bit rambling, or they will probably just answer the last question and forget about the others. So, for example:

Question: Mr Smith, we’ve heard about the problem you have with the number of tents you’ve got left over at the end of a festival; can you tell us a bit about how you deal with the tents, who picks them up and what happens to them after you have collected them all?

You’ve really asked three questions here: how do you deal with the tents, who does the work and what happens to the tents after they have been collected. Your interviewee will be confused about which of the three questions to answer first; they will more than likely pick on one and forget about the others, but even if they don’t, the answers will become rather confused and difficult to edit later. It’s better just to ask one of the three questions and then use the other two as supplementary questions.

Vox Pops

This stands for the Latin Vox Populi (voice of the people). It tends to be used when you want to achieve a range of popular opinion on a subject. It is also used in some contexts to give eye witness reports on an event. In this case your interviewees won’t necessarily be experts and they won’t have been briefed. The questions therefore need to be fairly simple; you are really asking for a quick reaction to something. If the subject is controversial you should make an effort to get a range of opinions to reflect both sides of the argument. You shouldn’t be using Vox Pops selectively to support an argument you want to make, particularly if it is a news and current affairs type of programme; you should fairly reflect what you are hearing.

Start the answer with the question

It can be useful to brief your interviewee to include a little bit of the question in the answer. Again, when you come to edit the piece together it will make much more sense and will avoid you having to use clunky commentary. For example:

Question: Mr Smith, can you tell me about the methods you have for getting rid of the 5000 tents you have left here?

Answer: Well, first we go through and check that the tents are empty and there are no stray festival-goers.

This is not a particularly bad question but it may be easier in your edit if you brief the interviewee to add in a little of the question at the top of the answer. For example:

Answer: Well we have strict procedures for getting rid of tents at this festival, first we go through and check that the tents are empty.

When you get to the edit you will find that the second answer gives you more flexibility. You will have less work to do in your commentary to set up what the contributor is talking about.

Things to avoid before the interview

• Avoid scripts: Don’t let your contributor read from a prepared speech. It will always come across sounding staged and unnatural. Contributors do sometimes feel very nervous and want to prepare in advance. You should almost always prepare your interviewee: they should know what type of programme it is and the main points of the piece. It will help them if you let them know the areas you are going to want to cover.
• Don’t let contributors wear dark glasses: (television only) If your contributor is wearing dark glasses it’s a good idea to ask them to remove them. It is very disconcerting for a viewer. If they can’t see the person’s eyes, then they are likely to disconnect with them emotionally and stop watching. As a viewer, you don’t have the same visual cues as you do when you are talking to someone in real life. If the shot is a CU or MCU then you won’t see much of the body language. The eyes are a very important part of communication.
• Avoid bright sunlight: Again for television viewers someone squinting in the sunshine can be very off-putting. Sunlight can also cast quite a dark shadow across the eyes which makes it look as though the interviewee is wearing sunglasses. If you are interviewing someone outside, try to avoid having them face directly into the sunlight so that they squint.
• Don’t let your interviewee eat or drink when talking: There is nothing more off-putting, particularly on radio, than the sound of someone chewing or swallowing while they are talking. Your interviewees shouldn’t eat or drink while they are talking to you. If it’s a long interview then it’s likely that the interviewee will need some water, but its best that you stop recording in between questions and let them have a drink, and then resume the interview.
• Don’t use swivel chairs or rocking-chairs: For either radio or television, try to avoid putting your interviewee in a chair that moves. They are likely to be rather nervous and when this happens they are likely to rock or swivel more than usual. This will look very odd on screen and will mean that their voice is constantly getting nearer or further way from the microphone. If they are sitting, make it a firm, fixed chair.
• Pieces of paper: Try not to let the interviewee have pieces of paper with notes on in their hands during the interview. On radio they will start to rustle the papers and it will be distracting; on television it looks odd. Often interviewees will have made notes they want to refer to and that’s fine, but tell them to put the notes to one side during the answer and refer to them between questions.

Things to avoid during the interview

• Don’t interrupt the interviewee: You should not interrupt the interviewee while they are talking. Apart from being a bit rude it will make the piece difficult to edit. You should wait until they have finished the answer and then ask the next question.
• Don’t talk during the interview: Sometimes when we are holding a conversation we tend to interject with small comments – mmm yes . . ., oh really . . ., goodness. . .. You should avoid this during an interview. It will prove very irritating to the viewer or listener. You can smile and nod as encouragement but don’t speak. It’s sometimes a good idea to warn the interviewee about this in advance; it can look a little odd if they are not expecting it.
• Don’t use camera moves: (television only) You may want a number of different shot sizes; however, you should always change shot size between questions and not during them. It is very difficult to make an edit on a move, so generally you should avoid any zooms or pans. If you use them you are likely to be stuck with having to use the whole of an answer, however long and boring, and you won’t be able to cut anything out.
• Noddies (if possible): (television only) Noddies are cutaways of the interviewer, usually nodding or smiling. They tend to be used in the edit if you want to cut out a bit of what the interviewer says. They look very clunky and these days rather old-fashioned. It’s also surprisingly difficult to pull off a convincing nod. It is better to think of other ways to cover an edit.

Things to remember before the interview

• Communicate: Do make sure the contributor knows what is going on. If you need to set up the equipment, let them know and tell them how long it’s likely to take. Most people are happy to wait but quite like to know what they are waiting for. If you have to change something, like move position, tell them why the change is happening: too much noise, sunlight, etc.
• Check phones: Check that everyone has turned off their mobile phones and that there are no phones around that are likely to go off during the interview.
• Offer reassurance: Since you are unlikely to be transmitting live you can have as many goes as you have time for at getting the interview you want. Sometimes an interviewee needs some reassurance. You can tell them that if they are unhappy with an answer then it is fine to stop and start the answer again. Under pressure people can quite easily become tongue-tied and flustered, things come out wrong and they quite often want a second go at an answer. Unless there is a very good reason against it, you should let them do this.
• Check recording levels: You will need to check that the sound level is OK for recording. Settle the interviewee into a comfortable position and then ask them a few questions unrelated to the interview. You should use their answers to check that everything is recording at an acceptable level. The interviewee and the microphone should be in the position they will be during the recording. If necessary you can move the microphone and then check the levels again before starting to record.

Things to remember after the interview

• Get some wild track: Whether you are recording for television or radio you should get some wild track, sometimes referred to as atmos (atmosphere), usually about 30 seconds to one minute. Earlier chapters have discussed the importance of wild track and you should get some for each interviewee. In television the convention is to point the camera at the microphone which you are recording so that the editor will know what it is. In radio you should just say, thirty-seconds wild track, and then record the silence.
• Thanks: Do remember to thank your interviewee for taking part and thank them again at the end of the interview. It’s also nice after the interview to tell them that you liked the interview, or found it interesting, useful, etc. Even the most confident people like to know that they have done a good job. If you don’t say anything they will leave wondering whether everything was OK. If you didn’t rate the interview that highly perhaps a little white lie wouldn’t hurt.

Conclusion

Good interview technique is a combination of good research, knowing the types of questions to ask, listening to the answers and developing a good rapport with the interviewee. You will need to have all these elements in place to achieve an effective interview which will engage your audience.