Long, Long Before I Became A Filmmaker

Interviews, When They Are Just Simply An Exercise In Hearing What You Want To Hear, Are Of No Interest. And Many, Many, If Not Most Interviews Have That Character. The Interviewer Who Comes In With A List Of Bullet Points They're Going To Address One After The Other. Interviews, Properly Considered, Should Be Investigative. You Should Not Know What You're Going To Hear. You Should Be Surprised.

Recently It's Become Much To My Surprise, Something That Does Happen. For Example, I Used To Get Almost All Of My Stories, And It's Probably Still True, From Newspapers. Primarily From The New York Times. No One Ever Really Thinks Of The New York Times As A Tabloid Newspaper And It Isn't A Tabloid Newspaper. But There Is A Tabloid Newspaper Within The New York Times Very, Very Often.

I Used To Say That Interviewing Others Was Perhaps The Way I Could Stop Talking And Start Listening. It's A Kind Of Enforced Silence.

I've Done Interviews In One Day That Went On For Fifteen, Sixteen Hours. And At A Certain Point, The Control Over What They're Saying Breaks Down; It Becomes Different. It Becomes Really Powerful, And For Me, Real. It Becomes Out Of Control.

We Falsely Interpret The World Around Us. We Ignore Evidence That Doesn't Support Our Prior Beliefs And We Convince Ourselves We Know Things We Don. We Think We Know Things We Don't Know.