“It’s treacherous talking with you,” Holdengräber said at one point. Lynch responded with surprising candor. “The words, they’re not really necessary,” he told the crowd…
via Paris Review 'David Lynch, Hiding in Plain Sight' by Dan Piepenbring.
I've spent a lot of my life interviewing people to retrieve some sort of information that an audience might find interesting.
Most of the time I take a single path: If I'm interested in the answer, the audience will be too. I don't like to ask questions I already know the answers to. It feels intellectually dishonest.
I've seen some live interviews absolutely bomb. Thankfully I've either not experienced such a thing or have blocked it from my memory. Most of the time this is the interviewer's fault.
The interviews I've conducted that have bombed (particularly a Regurgitator one from 1995, thankfully lost to the ages and one more recently with some local TV actors) still haunt me, wondering what I could have done to save them. In 1995 I think it's because I was just too inexperienced, like a foal struggling to stand but nowhere near as cute.
The mess that was the interview with the creators of Twentysomething, however, came down to something really rare: Sometimes people just don't get along.
But it's more than that. We didn't get along and I didn't want to put myself in a position where we would get along. I think the failure of that interview was that I didn't like their TV show and I was too proud to pretend, which is what the subjects needed in order to feel comfortable answering questions.
When I read this review of a live interview with David Lynch in Brooklyn I felt for the interviewer. Lynch is, no doubt, an awesome presence and a peculiar communicator and he gives what he is comfortable giving, and he doesn't strike me as a man who is comfortable with much.
That statement, though: "The words, they’re not really necessary." He's lying, of course. He knows the words are necessary. He pays close attention to the words, but they shouldn't be the focus. The interaction is what's important; the being on stage and investigating each other. As Fran Lebowitz put it so succinctly:
The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
via Goodreads
Good. You know how you don’t like asking the answers you already know the answer to? Well, that’s one of my favorite tricks to keep the interview going to where I want it to go. And that’s often the fun bit of when we interview somebody together in Devil’s Avocado I keep doing it and you keep avoiding it. Makes good chemistry most of the time and probably why we work well together. It’s like good cop bad cop but different.
Another thing about interviewing is that it takes lots and lots of practice and is so satisfying when you get it sort of right.
That Paris Review piece is absolutely terrific and, like you, felt utterly for the interviewer. I think you’re right when you underline the lie in his statement about the necessity of words.
The inherent theatricality of being interviewed often leads to answers and lines that are there more because they have the shape and rhythm of truth or profundity. It’s the hardest thing about interviewing someone on the publicity trail for something; breaking into the rote and rehearsed answers to get something that vaguely represents insight, or honesty or genuine chat.
Also, you are a thoroughly terrific interviewer. I want to see the 1995 Regurgitator one.