milk114 wrote:How do email interviews work? Do you typically send a list of questions, get responses, then send more questions that follow up to the responses? When sending the follow-ups do you include the initial question/response as reference?
Email interviews vary, just as phone and face-to-face ones do. Guy Maddin is the only person I've interviewed on separate occasions via email and phone, and the resulting pieces read quite differently. For the email one (
Vertigo, Spring 2004, published online
here), I deliberately (over-)wrote the questions in an absurdly florid style, hoping that he'd respond in kind. He did, with a vengeance!
In that particular case I sent him an initial question, by way of testing the water, then half a dozen in a single clump, and then we had a bit of email back-and-forth to tidy things up. By contrast, the last telephone interview (
Sight & Sound, last summer, not available online) was much more of a friendly chat, and there was no follow-up - I'm sure that wouldn't have been a problem, but I knew that I had exactly what I wanted when I hung up. (Much more than I needed, in fact, as the commission was 800 words versus
Vertigo's 2,500. Even then, the full phone transcript was 4,000 words, so there was a
lot of sometimes quite painful cutting!).
Perhaps the most logistically challenging email interview I've done was with Andrzej Wajda in 2007 (published online
here). There, I was limited to twelve questions, and they all had to be asked in one go. (He was in post-production on
Katyn, and very busy, though keen to talk to
S&S as the mag had been very supportive of him in the past, especially in the historically/politically crucial late 1970s/early 1980s period). A further complication is that he doesn't speak English, so my approach to devising the questions was pretty much the exact opposite of the one with Maddin: knowing that they'd have to be translated, I went for maximum clarity and simplicity. (I also cheated outrageously, I have to admit, sometimes fusing two or three distinct questions into a clump and passing it off as one!).
Originally, the questions were going to be translated at Wajda's end, but when my friend Kamila offered to help we decided to do it together. In the end, she did far more than mere translation: she also watched lots of unsubtitled interviews on my Polish DVDs, and researched printed interviews in Polish publications, feeding me tons of useful stuff that would have been off-limits otherwise - so I insisted on her taking co-writing credit and half the fee.
Wajda took a couple of months to reply, but we couldn't have been happier with the results (I still treasure his letter of apology for the delay: Poles are famously polite, but this was ridiculous!). Kamila then translated the answers literally into English, I rewrote and edited, and she double-checked my version against the Polish original to ensure that I hadn't inadvertently distorted anything. Finally, I wrote an intro (having finally seen
Katyn in the interim), and that's what got published. (Or rather, there was a further sub-editing stage, but the piece was out of my hands by then!)
Other recent email interviews were with Jan Svankmajer (
Vertigo, Spring 2007, published online
here) and Tony Gatlif (
S&S, mid-2007, not available online), though in those cases I just sent questions in English and got replies in English - someone else did the translations at their end. I can't remember much about those two, which suggests that they went entirely smoothly - though in both cases I had to send questions in one go, with no follow-up.
If you publish an interview done via email, do you edit the questions/responses for flow? Same thing if you were to follow up via a phone interview?
Yes - this is pretty much unavoidable in print journalism, because you're usually given a word count upfront. This will also dictate the depth of the questions: with Gatlif I knew that the piece would be very short (500 words, I think, maybe even less), so the questions were simple one-liners. With Wajda, I had five times as much space, so could be more expansive (as could he!). Even then, I still had to cut about a third, though this was less painful than you might imagine - he gave the interview in summer 2007, and it wasn't published until May 2008 (
Katyn's British premiere and a BFI Southbank retrospective were announced during the editing stage, so delaying it made a lot of sense), by which time a splendidly splenetic rant about the Kaczynski twins had become irrelevant since the intervening Polish general election booted one of them out of office and severely clipped the other one's wings.
Actually, here's a Criterion Forums exclusive: this was the other Wajda response that I removed in its entirety, though it's probably of more interest round these parts than it would be to the average S&S reader!
In the 1980s, you sounded ambivalent about the video revolution, saying that it ruined the communal experience of cinema, but that it was important because it allowed access to work outside "the official programme". Today, the DVD revolution allows reasonably high-quality copies to circulate more widely, even beyond national borders. Although your films are barely distributed on DVD in Britain, they are widely available in Poland, in most cases with optional English subtitles. Given the lack of theatrical distribution (Korczak was the last of your films to open commercially in Britain, and the UK distribution rights to most of your older films have expired) do you think DVD offers them a valuable new lease of life?
In 1984, under martial law, I met somebody who told me that he paid the most expensive ticket to see Man of Iron. I was surprised, because I remembered that according to Lenin's famous slogan 'cinema is the most important of all arts', the price of a cinema ticket was around the price of a box of matches. But what happened was that my film was secretly copied onto a VHS and shown around private houses. One of such illegal meetings was suddenly visited by a police [Milicja at that time], they arrested everybody and they only let them go after paying a high penalty.
What change took place in the last few years? The costs of film distribution went up significantly and releasing films in cinemas – especially the low budget ones, often equals the costs of film's production. Who in Britain is then going to risk showing on a big screen a film by an old Polish director, even if it was some kind of a political pornography. I know that my films exist on DVD but it is not the same as seeing them in cinema. Sitting alone in front of a TV, one cannot share emotions on a scale of a social revolution – this is good only for the football fans. A cinema full of viewers, who expect to see a film that will become their voice it is something worth living for to the Polish director, especially if the same audience gets up from their seats and sings the national hymn at the end of the film, as it happened on the premiere of Man of Iron in Gdynia in 1981.
(NB: That was Kamila's literal translation - I ditched this passage before my rewrite. And in case Kamila or a prospective employer of hers is reading this, her written English is normally much better: I specifically asked her to stick close to the structure and style of the original Polish!)