How to Conduct Documentary Interviews, Part 2
I’m excited to share my own special interviewing technique, which will provide you with succinct answers that you can use in post-production to structure your film. This blog is part 2 of my series on conducting extraordinary interviews with your characters and experts.
After you conduct ninety percent of your interview using techniques designed to get full-bodied answers (see last week’s blog at https://newdocediting.com/2011/06/how-to-conduct-documentary-interviews-part-1), it’s time to switch gears. You’ve already gotten the meaty, thoughtful answers you need to make sense of your film’s story or material. Now you want to elicit powerful one-liners that you can use to set up your film’s major plot points or intellectual points.
Tell your interviewee that you’re going to ask a series of fill-in the blank questions. You want the first answer that pops into their head. What you’ll get are single sentence responses that you can use as on-screen introductions to topics that then transition to voiceover. The voiceover answers will come from earlier parts of the interview, or possibly from pick-up interviews conducted at a later date.
Here are some examples from my recent interview with a story consulting client who is making a personal documentary. These questions are designed to get at three important structural concepts:
- Protagonist’s statement of desire
- Protagonist’s statement of transformation
- Central question
I told her that I wanted her to repeat the following sentences and fill in the blank. (Her film was about her quest to solve a public policy issue.) Here are the “starter sentences”:
“I wanted …”
“My goal was to …..”
“My intention was to find …
If you are interviewing a character who is NOT the protagonist, you would modify the phrases to something like:
“John’s goal was to…”
Next, to evoke one-liners that describe a character transformation, ask your interviewee to fill in the blank about the film’s protagonist. (Or about themselves, if it’s a personal documentary). Again, here are some examples from my recent interview with my filmmaker, who was also the film’s protagonist.
“In terms of my personality shift, I used to be ______, and now I’m _________.”
“In the end, I realized that ….”
“In terms of my search, ultimately I came to the conclusion that….”
Note that in post-production, the editor might only use the last part of these powerful, set-up sentences.
If you are making a character-driven documentary, you can also anticipate the plot points and set up a line to introduce each of them, such as:
John decided to team up with Audrey because…
John flew to Saigon in order to…
If you’re making a topic-based documentary, structured around ideas rather than a protagonist’s quest, consider ending your interview with fill-in-the-blank sentences designed to set up the film’s major intellectual concepts. You can even pit your interviewees against one another. Here are some examples:
My contention with Daniel Pink is…
The biggest reason Sam’s plan is doomed to failure is because…
Finally, if your essay-style film is structured around a central question, see if you can get your experts to state the question succinctly. Ask you experts to fill in the blanks to these sentences in regards to your film’s topic:
The most important question we can ask ourselves is …
The key question …
The fundamental inquiry is …
Eliciting such a powerfully stated question can help you begin or possibly end your documentary with a query that orients the viewer. For examples, check out the beginning of the Sony documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car” or the end of the PBS documentary “Herskovitz At The Heart of Blackness”.
Armed with these types of soundbites, you’ll be able to set up various sections of your film with expressive, on-camera, one-line zingers. If you’ve already conducted your interviews and don’t have the budget for reshoots, try to get at some of these one-liners through an audio-only recording.
For more information on how to structure award-winning documentary films, check out my most popular online seminar, priced at $237. “The Ultimate Guide to Structuring Your Documentary” is at:
