[MUSIC PLAYING]
I am nervous before every interview,
because I feel that, any time there is a kind of arrogance
or a sense of "I know how to do this,
I'm a good interviewer" is where something always
inevitably goes wrong.
And so I remember the sheer terror of the first interview
I did in January 1972, when I was,
you know, not even 19 years old.
I was 18 years old.
And I try to not recreate it.
I just want to be humble enough to realize that we've
got to put our position and our people in the best light,
and I have to put myself in a position
to get the best possible stuff.
And I can't take anything for granted.
That's the most important thing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Part of the reason that I consider myself
a student, every time I do an interview,
is because interviews can go wrong.
And you can have a conversation with somebody
beforehand and think, oh, this is
going to be a great interview.
And then it's not.
And sometimes it's stuff that's going on in them,
and sometimes it's poor questioning or poor listening,
or whatever.
I always will take the blame.
If somebody doesn't work, it's all my fault.
What I always do for every interview is also,
I realize, for those who are nervous,
a process of relaxation.
I say, I'm not Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes."
I don't have your tax returns for the last 10 years.
And I'm not going to ask you a tough question.
Here's what it's going to be.
I'm sitting next to this camera, but you can ignore it.
In fact, I don't want you to look right directly
into the camera, but I'm going to be right up
next to the camera.
And hopefully, you can forget that the camera and all
this other stuff is here.
And then I'm going to ask you a question.
And I don't need a one-syllable answer, a yes or a no.
I need you to talk, but I don't need a chapter.
I need a paragraph.
And just remember that my question isn't in it.
So if I ask you, do you like chocolate ice cream?
If you say yes or no, it's meaningless to me.
But if you say, I love chocolate ice cream,
you've just put my question into the answer.
And then you can say why for however long you want.
And I am able to edit.
And there are no mistakes.
We have more than enough film than you
will have energy to talk.
Let's get started.
And I've sometimes stopped in the beginning of a roll,
and I say, look, the light is not right.
And then the light's fine.
But when I turn to them and I say, you're fantastic.
This is great.
Even if they're not, if you see they're nervous,
I said, this is great.
Are you a pro at this?
I mean, do you know how to do?
You've done this before.
And they're going, no.
I say, well, it's just great.
Let's just do that.
And we'll go.
And I've just used the excuse of making a technical adjustment.
Or often, it's at the end of the first roll, if I need to.
Or in the case of somebody, you just are struggling
and you don't know what to do.
And then you find a way in, and you
ask something that prompts an emotional answer.
And then, once that happens, then
these sort of artificial walls break down--
the fourth wall, the third wall, the second wall,
and the first wall.
And then it's you having some kind of exchange
with somebody else.
And so you look to just put them at ease.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The single most important thing about interviewing
is listening, is hearing what they're saying.
You come with a list of questions,
and you're trying to work your way through them.
And there's a kind of anxiety and there's an imperative
to oh, I've got to get through all of these things.
And what you want to do is listen, because sometimes
that Question 7 also suggests 7A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
And you need to be prepared for it.
It's not like, uh-huh, uh-huh, OK now
let me ask you about this.
If you haven't heard what they've said or seen
the twitch in their cheek, you're
going to miss the possibility to go off and get some gold
that you didn't expect.
And that's happened a lot with us,
that we've been able to pull some really interesting things
that we didn't know that they were going to talk about.
I listen hard, and I listen visually hard.
So I'll sit there, and I'll listen to the question,
and I'll nod like this.
And the reason why I do that is to keep the beam
and focus of what they're saying,
so that they're not beginning to meander.
If they do meander, then I cut that off,
and I end the contact with them.
And it has a disconcerting effect for them,
is that they tend to wrap it up, if I've got an exaggerated
uh-huh, I'm hearing, yes, that's-- you know,
like that's so interesting.
That's great like this.
Because I don't want to interrupt.
The worst thing you can do is say, uh-huh,
because that blows the thing.
But you know, listen hard.
That permits you to also lean back or to lower your question.
And then you can actually get people to slow it down, get
people to shorten it, get people to stop,
without being rude and saying, you know, look,
that was way too long.
Can you say it again?
Which I will never do.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is an old thing.
It's called a fax.
It's on shiny paper of an interview
I did with Wynton Marsalis.
Let's see if there's a specific date.
There's not.
And I get a set of questions, and they're
kind of listed general.
And then we move to some specifics.
But what I've done is, after I've received them,
I start writing in other things.
And I then begin to order.
I don't like that order.
I start off, and I say to him, completely made up by me,
why are we compelled to study jazz?
Why are we drawn to it?
And he gave whatever response he gave.
And I just then said, well, what is jazz?
Which was the first question originally.
And then the question was the blues.
I thought I'd cross that out.
And I said, I'll get to that.
The third question, what does the word jazz mean?
Because there's lots of definitions.
And then, you said that jazz is the distillation
of the American spirit and the truest mirror
of our national identity.
Why?
It was something he'd said to me.
So I'm still-- the only thing that I've
asked that was a question is, what is jazz?
I've now done other things.
And I said, is it improvisation?
Is that the most important aspect?
Is it about America?
So you're going to start, in your questioning,
pretty general.
And you can end up with something that is as absurdly
simple as, what is jazz?
But I need to be able to listen to Wynton and just pursue it.
And so what we got out of him is unbelievable.
I mean, he was sitting there with just his horn and his hand
patting, and he was the entire Count Basie orchestra for us.
And he would say-- and then, you know, Count Basie goes,
blink, blink.
And then it's this person, da da.
And he's either doing it with his mouth.
And it is-- nobody said, ask him about how the Count Basie
orchestra sounded.
It's something that happens, because you
create certain conditions in the questions that you ask.
But it's real relaxed, but everybody's just
swinging and grooving.
Then you've got the trombones, ohh, bah dode, dode dit.
Different ones.
Trumpets-- dit, dit, dit dit.
Look at this.
The saxophone-- (SINGING) Doo, de doo, diddly.
Then you got Sweets in there-- (SINGING)
Do doo-doo dit, dit, bee boo, doo-doo lit dit
deedle, doo-doo lit dit doodle.
I mean, you're swinging.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You come into an interview.
You've got a set of needs.
You know, I need this person to cover this.
And you hope they do it well, and you don't know.
And you're going to accept whatever it is,
whether that it's terrible, and you're not going to use it,
or whether it's great, and it's going
to be a central figure in the film.
But the one thing you can't do is
have this lack of respect for what the process of photography
is.
Susan Sontag's written about this, and there is a sense--
and many native peoples feel this, too-- that,
when you take a picture, you've stolen the soul,
and that there ought to be some exchange.
There's some huge moral and ethical dilemma
that faces any of us who are in the business of acquiring
imagery.
Somehow you have to begin to create in yourself--
and this is where my teachers at Hampshire College, particularly
Jerome Liebling, who was a still photographer, as well
as a filmmaker, and insisted on a kind
of ethical and humanistic relationship to the people
that you're dealing with.
Now, maybe this is going to be a commercial exercise
for some people.
And then it is just squeezing whatever, you know, blood
you can get out of that stone.
But for us, it's not.
I can't be engaged in that.
And so I have certain obligations.
I can't not be connected to the people.
The veterans that were in the Vietnam film,
we're continuing to see films going back years and years
and years of people are still alive.
They're part of the family.
And I think maybe you ought to conduct
an interview is if you're going to bump into them again
after the film is out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One of the greatest bites I've ever
had in my entire life, that's set, in some ways,
my career in motion, which is the last comment
of the Brooklyn Bridge film, was a comment
made to Arthur Miller.
And I had been bugging him for months and months and months
to give us an interview.
And he kept turning me down and turning me down.
But he'd written a play called "A View From the Bridge,"
and every edition I'd ever seen had a picture
of the Brooklyn Bridge on it.
And finally-- and this is a lesson
about doing your homework-- he finally said, yes, I'm
sure just to get rid of me.
He gave me directions to his Connecticut farm.
We're driving up there.
I pick up a copy of "A View From the Bridge,"
and realize it has nothing to do with the Brooklyn
Bridge, nothing.
So I arrive.
I'm 5'8".
He's like 6'7", and he opens the door, and he leans over,
and he says, I don't know a goddamn thing about
the Brooklyn Bridge.
And I'm there, like, just end it now.
Just kill me, whatever.
And I guess he took pity, and he said, OK, come on.
Now, we were expecting to spend an hour or two hours
setting up in his living room or his office, or whatever.
And he said, come around.
It was the late afternoon.
The light was fading, the fall.
And I get on an apple crate to get up
to his height, but not his stature.
We don't even have time to change the camera
from the morning shoot, so we've got maybe three
minutes in the magazine, and the same
with the reel-to-reel tape.
And I don't know what question I asked him,
but his answer, 100% of it, is in the film, and the very
last comment of my very first film, which has
kept me going as a polestar.
I became friends with Miller.
He became a voice in all my films.
And we stayed in touch until he died.
I would go to his house and share finished films.
But it was that one terrifying moment.
And my question is irrelevant.
It's what you get.
Because my questions get edited out.
So if that's your style, that it isn't a true interview,
in which you're seeing the person who's asking questions,
it ain't about you.
It's about the answer.
And then you've got something that you may
be able to use down the line.
See, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian
invention.
And it always was.
And suddenly, you see this steel poetry sticking,
and it's a shock.
It-- It puts everything to shame,
and it makes you wonder what else
we could have done that was so marvelous, uh,
and so unpresumptuous.
It carries its weight.
It does what it's supposed to do.
And yet, I mean, they could have built another Manhattan Bridge,
couldn't they?
And he didn't.
He really aspired to do something gorgeous.
So it makes you feel that maybe you, too,
could add something that would last and be beautiful.