If it is at all possible, avoid setting up your interview in New York or Los Angeles, because your famous person will invariably be overscheduled and distracted. In a different era, celebrities would occasionally grant a “personality profile” when they didn’t have a movie or a TV show or an album to plug, but these days, they are told by their handlers that to give an interview without something to sell just looks needy and sad. So when it is time to push a product, the public relations team usually loads up their star with multiple interviews per day over the course of a week or two.
The deadliest occur in an airless conference room of the movie company at their Los Angeles or New York headquarters. If this happens, all you can hope is that the chat takes place in the morning, when the star is freshest, rather than at the end of the day, when the star is deranged from answering the same five questions about gaining weight for a role or “what it was like” to work with various costars. It can be especially awkward when a movie was made years ago and was shelved or delayed (this happens a lot). The star will have trouble unearthing the obligatory anecdotes from the set because he or she will have made three films in the meantime, and will end up repeating the same two stories for each visitor, and you are left with nothing.
With musicians, it’s always wise to pick a tour stop where there are no media for miles. Often publicists will try to combine a photo shoot and an interview to get it over with, but the subject is always being pulled in different directions, so you must grab five frantic minutes as they get changed, or have their makeup done, or you shout questions over the noise of the hair dryer. If a star is uncomfortable or too distracted to come up with a clever answer to your question, she’ll get her entourage to participate and turn the question on a member of her glam squad (“I don’t know. Chrissie, did I ever want to quit the business?”) so that the answer is unusable.
Thus, it is always a good idea during the negotiations process to fish around and see if your subject is going to leave town for any reason. If he or she is a musician and they are on tour, pick a place like Kansas City for your interview. If he or she is a movie star and on location in a nonglamorous spot, try to wrangle your way in. Why? Because the star might actually be glad to see you. You will be a fresh new face, and if they are neurotic about being away from the public eye in a remote outpost, you will bolster their ego by conveying that the world still cares about what they are doing. Yes, a gang of screaming fans gathered by their hotel entrance can buoy them up, but a journalist who dramatically flies into a distant location is just that little bit more legitimate. The welcome will be warmer, the focus sharper, and if your celebrity is bored by seeing the same faces on tour or on set, you may get some extra time, rather than just the promised hour and a half.
The only roadblock becomes actually getting to the location. With Brad Pitt, in the Rockies for his mountain-climbing movie Seven Years in Tibet, I flew from New York to Vancouver, then on to the mountains in a twelve-seat Beechcraft terrifyingly named Wilderness Air, whose pilot spent the entire shaky barf bag of a flight with her head swiveled around, chatting animatedly with the passenger behind her. Her copilot, meanwhile, had his head buried in a book. So who, exactly, was flying the plane? The Lord? A computer? I knew that DC-10s had them, but Wilderness Air? I looked around for dibs on the meatiest-looking passenger to eat if the plane crashed.
Against the odds, we landed in a remote field and I wandered over to a diner, awaiting a van that was to pick me up for a three-hour journey up the muddy mountains. I supposed I should eat. I was constantly afraid of long stretches without food. As the waitress slapped a burger on my table, she gave me a hard look and said, “Been a lot of moose attacks around here lately. Mothers protecting their babies. They just come barreling out of the woods at ya.” Then she shuffled away. Moose attacks? The only wildlife I had to worry about in my neck of the woods were squirrels, and rats. Which I hated. Yet I missed them.
After a long, vertiginous van ride with one stop to let a herd of caribou cross, I arrived at the far-flung mountain camp, one of the few places on earth where Brad Pitt could walk around unmolested. He was dressed for the six inches of mud that surrounded the camp, in boots, sweatpants, and a black suede coat. He was so friendly and positive, so free of attitude, that my palms were barely moist when I shook his hand. I was relieved that I didn’t have a crush on him; this would make the proceedings go a little more smoothly. I was drawn to scrawny, tubercular indoorsmen, while Pitt was more of a hot ski instructor/beach bum type. His favorite expressions were “Yeah, right?” when he agreed with you on something, followed by “Yeah, man” (when he agreed with you on something but perhaps less stridently), followed by “Excellent.” He referred to his costar, the British actor David Thewliss, as Thew-lie.
After I gamely followed him on a long hike, he invited me into his trailer. Yes! I quickly looked around, scribbling everything down on my pad: Scientific American magazine, a black Prada tote, a carton of Camels, a book on Frank Lloyd Wright, and a huge box of strawberry Twizzlers. Aha, a CD collection. The Dave Matthews Band, Shawn Colvin, and Soundgarden. As I got situated, Pitt decided to blast a few tunes from the Soundgarden album, and that is when it started to rain. In my palms. For as “Burden in My Hand” cranked up, Pitt began to rock out.
Chris Cornell’s voice rang majestically over the mountains, exhorting us to follow him across the desert, as thirsty as you are.
Pitt thrashed around.
This has happened to me a couple of times, and I never know what to do. When someone is playing air guitar, do I play guitar as well? Whip my head around? Do I fill in on air drums? Pick up something and examine it? It’s the same situation as being in the studio with a band and they play you some new tracks from their upcoming release. They all stare at you expectantly. Do you bob your head? Do you close your eyes, presumably lost in the music? You can’t sing along, of course, because you never heard the words before. Maybe you give an OK sign and a big smile?
As Pitt leaped around the trailer and continued to rock, I stood there helplessly. Do I yell, “This album is so great”? I fast-forwarded ahead: He can’t hear me, so he turns the stereo down, I idiotically repeat, “This album is so great,” he is annoyed because I have cut his moment of abandon short. I opt to go to the trailer door and take in the spectacular view of the peaks. I assume an awed, but slightly mellow, expression to match his low-key manner. After a few more songs, he joined me at the doorway to remark that he never got tired of the view. I, meanwhile, exhaled in relief. And because this wasn’t in Los Angeles, I was able to spend the entire day with him—hiking, eating lunch in the commissary, even watching Sling Blade in his trailer with him, just the two of us. It wasn’t necessarily that I was spectacular company, it’s just that the deep mud around the set had suspended the shoot, and he didn’t really have anything else to do.
Sadly, most interviews do not have the option of taking place in the wilderness, but with a little ingenuity, even the most common of settings can work. Hotel rooms, for instance, are a music-world cliché, and not all that interesting unless they’re filled with used crack vials, but if your rendezvous takes place in a hotel, all is not necessarily lost.
The San Antonio hotel room of Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood offered a perfect peek into his everyday life. He and the band were in the midst of a U.S. tour and I joined him during a night off. He opened the door to the coziest scene imaginable. Ron’s blond wife, Jo, was bustling around doing the laundry and throwing out the occasional wisecrack. Candles were burning, scarves were draped over the lamps for a softer effect, and the TV was turned to an old interview with Katharine Hepburn (“Tough old broad!” Wood cackled appreciatively). My affable host, meanwhile, had set up a keg of Guinness beer in the bathtub of their suite and would periodically amble in there and fill ’er up. He urged me to join him, and he was so casual about it that after a while I unself-consciously headed to the bathroom to avail myself. As I filled my glass, I surveyed the surroundings. Draped over the shower curtain was a row of dripping black socks. Ron rinsed them out in the sink at night like an old British pensioner! This is a man who could have paid someone to lick them clean.
When I returned to the living room, Ron showed me a large sketchpad full of artwork that he had done, flourished here and there with an occasional guest doodle by Mick. We spent a delightful evening paging through the book and drinking Guinness while he reminisced about the Stones’ early days, told stories about the band’s visits to the homes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino (whose wife wouldn’t allow him to stay in the house, he had to sleep in a shed in the garden), and talked proudly about his kids. He was one of the most unaffected people I’ve ever met. At the end of the night, he led me over to the balcony of his room and threw the doors open to a Texas sky that seemed impossibly huge. A few nights earlier, he told me, he and Jo had come out there and spent a long while watching a spectacular electrical storm. “It was beautiful,” he said quietly, gazing out at the stars.