A big part of people interested in DiY Filmmaking is people interested in documentaries, so I’ll be posting documentary-specific things on the site occasionally.
Reccently I came across this video from TED of a talk by Marc Pachter, who did a series of interviews for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The interviews were of people who had led extraordinary lives.
In this talk,Pachter talks about something you don’t hear a lot about – getting a good interview. A lot of people assume it’s easy – you sit down with someone and ask them questions – how hard can it be? However, Pachter gets much deeper into it – into the art of it – and comes up with some really fantastic advice.
Some of it is not applicable to documentarians, such as waiting until subjects are 50 and older, or battling for the audience’s attention on stage (the interviews were conducted in front of an audience), but give it a look, and you’ll find some fantastic bits of advice on how to approach your next interview.
