I heard Larry King interviewed on the radio the other day and I thought he offered a great insight into interviewing or at least his way of approaching interviews. Mr. King said he has always approached interviews from the point of view of wanting to know what it feels like. For instance he has never thrown the winning touchdown in a Super Bowl game, so what was that like, what did it feel like or if you were in a major Broadway production what was that like? What did you feel and experience? He approaches his interviews with curiosity, never in awe and always wanting to learn from the person whom he interviews. The people who I have learned the most from in terms of approaching interviews are, Larry King, Tavis Smiley and two Canadian interviewers, the late Brian Linehan, from whom I probably learned the most by watching and listening, as well as George Stroumboulopoulos. What you will notice about all four of these individuals is they have conversations with the people they are interviewing, there is an exchange of ideas and thoughts and all of them, whether they do / did the work themselves or someone else did it for them, a ton of research and preparation went into each and everyone of those interviews. Two thoughts stick out in my mind. I remember as a child watching Brian Linehan interview someone and I do not remember who it was and they stopped and they said to him in a complimentary way, how do you know these things about me? You know more about me than I do? Brian just smiled. The second interview was when Tavis Smiley was interviewing Harrison Ford about seven years ago and halfway through the interview Harrison Ford said to Tavis Smiley, this in really enjoyable. We are having a conversation and you care about what I have to say. He then said, I go on these other shows and people have questions written down on a card and they are going to get through all of those questions and ask me them regardless of what I say and they really dont care what I have to say. Anyway, I just thought I would share that with you, because these are the people whom I have patterned my interviewing style after. :)
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 21:25:16 +0000
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