Tag: lynch

The Difficulty in Interviewing

“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

Off the cuff 5 films I watch over and over again

Just quickly and off the top of my head, here's a quick response to Marc Fennell's top 5 films he likes to watch again and again. These are in no particular order:

  • Barton Fink: It's a lesson in how to write a screenplay about a man trying to write a screenplay. Kind of like a depression era Adaptation, but not really.
  • Wild at Heart: passion, tragedy and the American dream all there on the screen.
  • North By Northwest: It's a silly film but a hell of a lot of fun.
  • Mars Attacks: Just one of those films that I can walk in half-way through and always get sucked into watching the rest of the film.
  • The Exorcist: It starts so slowly and just builds up fear and doubt. Watch it in the dark and double it with Poltergeist for some great cushion clutching fun.

Of course there are so many more films to put in this list. It's not a top 5 of all time or a 5 favourite films of all time. But if you don't want me to bother you for a couple of hours, put one of these in the DVD player and I'll definitely stay out of your way.

Sometimes Marc and I can be so bang-on the same and sometimes not so much. Hmmm. Deep.