What Makes a Good Interview

Why is it that people enjoy watching and listening to specific interviewers like Anderson Cooper and Barbara Walters more than others? Many journalists who interview a specific person usually ask many of the same questions. So if interviewers ask almost all of the same questions, why is it that certain ones gain popularity? It is because reporters like Anderson Cooper and Barbara Walters obtain reflective answers and emotional responses from their interviewees that many of their peers are unable to obtain. How do they accomplish this? A good interview should never leave its audience wondering how the subject truly thought about something. Likewise, a good interviewer avoids this by injecting his/her own personality, opinions, and curiosities into the interview and through these is able to obtain a response from their subject that is more than just words. People enjoy watching the show “60 Minutes” because of how informative and how “emotionally charged” many of the interviewee’s responses are. The show’s reporters Mike Wallace and Morley Safer obtain these answers by infusing their personality, opinions, and curiosities on issues and forcing interviewees to step out of their comfort zones when answering their questions. Kazuo Ishiguro is a man who understands the difficulty of being an interviewee. After writing many award winning novels such as The Remains of the
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Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro said in an interview with Cynthia Wong, “It’s almost impossible to find the energy to treat each interview in a different way, to figure out what this person really wants to know, and to make [the encounter] a true meeting of the minds between interviewer and interviewee”(Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 205). Most interviewees do not know what questions they are going to be asked and therefore when asked a question, do not initially know how they are going to answer it. The best interviewers are ones that get more than just words from their subjects. As a regular interviewee, Ishiguro comments that a great thing about an interview is that you can “probably get some human dimension to the person interviewed: are they touchy? Are they insecure? Are they smugly arrogant?” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 204). He even comments, “these things can be more interesting than the actual statements that are made” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 204). Ishiguro is right because words sometimes aren’t always clear or thought through but personality traits and emotional displays are usually always comprehensible. Words are difficult tools to use alone because when reading a print interview, for example, a reader is never exactly sure what a person’s true feelings are about something. During the “Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” journalist Karen Grigsby Bates asks Ishiguro whether he considers himself Japanese or English to which Ishiguro responds, “Oh, I consider myself British I suppose, because, you know, I’ve grown up and I’ve been shaped by Britain”(Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 200). The problem with a words-only interview is that readers can assume that Sanfield 3
Ishiguro considers himself British, but they are unable to tell if his answer lacked confidence or assuredness. The advantage of an audio interview is that sometimes the listener is able to gage through the interviewee’s tone of voice and clarity whether or not his response is one that is confident or one that expresses doubt and uncertainty. From interviews that in the end will only be a transcript of words on paper to interviews that are purely listening based, the reporters in both situations must be able to obtain answers that leave readers and listeners with no questions on how an interviewee truly felt about a specific topic. The question that arises now is how does a reporter like Anderson Cooper obtain such answers? Great interviews are never solely about the interviewee and when interviewers question the responses of their subjects, it is during this exchange when the reporter can obtain a person’s true feelings on something. In an interview between Kazuo Ishiguro and Don Swaim, Swaim’s first strategy is his voice. Swaim’s easy-going personality and calm nature indicate that in an interview with a man of creativity such as Ishiguro, he isn’t looking for a specific answer to a question but rather an answer that is confident and well thought out. Secondly, Swaim makes sure that the interview isn’t all about Ishiguro and by doing so, Ishiguro provides responses to Swaim’s questions that a person won’t find in other interviews. For example, Swam tells Ishiguro about a time he was at a stoplight and two young girls were talking about a situation where a man had locked himself in a room. Swaim goes on to discuss with Ishiguro his feelings on the story and what he would personally do with the experience he had. He then turns it over to Ishiguro
Sanfield 4 and asks, “I mean, doesn’t that happen to you?” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 106). Ishiguro is then propelled to provide this unique answer on what he does with all things he sees in the world or imagines in his daily life. There is another instance when Swaim really gives a listener a glimpse on the true nature of Ishiguro when he makes a statement to Ishiguro, “I was interviewing the novelist Edward Abbey who died last year. He was telling me that someone came up to him once and said, “How long does it take for you to write a novel?” and Abbey said, “A lifetime. I thought that was a wonderful response in a way….”(Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 105). Ishiguro gives a fantastic response saying, “I think when I say it took me three years to write the book, of course, if I was confined to just the experiences for those three years, I’d write something retarded” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 105). By interjecting his own personality and opinions, Swaim allows for Ishiguro to provide answers that are anomalous and truly provide a glorious insight on how a brilliant writer like Ishiguro thinks. A good interviewer also makes sure that in his/her opinion, their interviewee leaves no stone unturned. By also injecting their personal curiosity into their interview, they force their interviewee to go more in depth into their answer or clarify their response to a question. In the interview between Don Swaim and Kazuo Ishiguro, Swaim asks Ishiguro to explain a part in his book A Pale View of Hills. Ishiguro then gives him an explanation about the part he’s talking about and Swaim responds with, “I’m still not quite satisfied with that explanation a little bit” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 99). By questioning what he means, Swaim does his
Sanfield 5 listeners a favor by forcing Ishiguro to clarify the scene in his book. In the interview between Cynthia Wong and Ishiguro, Wong again shows the value of being involved in the interview and following up with inquisitive questions on responses that could have gone more in-depth. Wong asks Ishiguro, “What are your views on the (Booker) Prize? (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 205). Ishiguro responds to the question by saying that the Booker Prize process “turned literary novelists into something that was much more received by the mainstream” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 205). Instead of moving onto the next question, Wong inserts her personal curiosity into the interview by asking Ishiguro, “Is that a good or a bad thing?” (Ishiguro, Shaffer, and Wong 205) The readers learn that although Ishiguro talks positively about the award in the previous question, he admits that it is both good and bad. By being involved in the interview and not being satisfied with an interviewee’s responses, an interviewer obtains answers that are clearer and can open up opportunities for the subject to elaborate further on previous vague responses. Interviewers become more popular when they make the interview less about the subject and inject themselves into the interview. Cynthia Wong, Karen Grigsby Bates, and Don Swaim all prove that by putting their personalities, opinions, and personal curiosities into the interview, they obtain answers from their interviewees that more descriptive, extraordinary, detailed, and one-of-a-kind.

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Works Cited
"Don Swaim Interviews Kazuo Ishiguro." Interview by Donald L. Swaim. Wired for Books. Ohio University. Web. 17 Sept. 2010. .

Ishiguro, Kazuo, Brian W. Shaffer, and Cynthia F. Wong. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2008. Print.