Sam Spade Book

This book came along right around when I was talking to other people about wishing I was a better interviewer. I showed up at a booksale, and there it was, for $1. Terry Gross is a spectacular interviewer who I rarely listen to, but still her name has seeped into my brain. She asks insightful questions that are based on solid research and the ability to make connections others may not have made.

The book is almost entirely transcribed interviews from between 1976 and 2004. Anyone looking to learn more about interviewing will have to learn by observation rather than direct information. The introduction has a few tidbits in it, but almost all of it ended up repeated in the Marc Maron WTF Podcast interview with her. (I wonder if he knows she presented him with so little new material?)

The best moments, to me, are moments of resistance. An actress (Uta Hagen) who refuses to discuss her craft until Terry Gross can explain how it connects directly to her own. A musician who can't answer a question without sexual innuendo or dismissing her because she is female and can't understand the male psyche (Gene Simmons at his most obnoxious.) But what do you do when you lose control of an interview? This is more informative than everything going right.

Fresh Air is heavily, heavily edited. I sometimes chop chunks out of podcast episodes too, and knowing this about her reputable program made me feel better. As she says, "I violate many rules of polite conversation in my interviews... You know what it's like when you're cornered by someone who can't stop talking? There's just no polite way of telling them to stop.... That kind of graceful getaway isn't an option for me in the studio - in addition to which, the problem isn't really that I'm bored, but that my listeners are going to be... I risk momentarily embarrassing someone I regard highly enough to have on the show, because I trust that this little bit of advice will help him or her keep the attention of our listeners." Preach, Terry. I need to get better at knowing when to do this and when to just edit later. She had some other practical advice in that paragraph that I just cut for the sake of my readers. Ha!

One little tidbit I loved comes from an early interview with Jodie Foster:

"Everything that you do as an actor is about reading. Everything you do as a direction is about reading. It's about reading deeper, and reading between the lines, and perceiving more than just what's on the surface. The study of literature is just about looking deeper."