Chapter 6: The Interview

6.1 The Most Intimate Act

The documentary interview is the most intimate act in nonfiction filmmaking. You are asking a person to speak their truth, about their life, their losses, and their choices, in front of a camera, to an audience they have never met, for a purpose they can only partly control. That is an enormous ask.

The quality of an interview depends almost entirely on two things: whether the person in your frame trusts you enough to be honest, and whether you have created the conditions in which honesty is possible. Everything in Chapters 1 through 5, the positionality work, the access audit, the participant agreement, was preparation for this moment.

And here is the surprise for most beginning filmmakers: the most important interview skill is not asking good questions. It is listening. Beginners often focus so hard on their question list that they stop hearing what is being said, and miss the moment when a participant opens a door to something truer and more specific than anything they planned to ask. Your question list is preparation for listening, not a substitute for it.

6.2 Research Questions and Interview Questions

One of the most common mistakes is confusing the questions you need answered with the questions that create footage.

Two Kinds of Questions

Kind	What it is for	Example
Research question	What you need to know to understand your participant’s world. Answered through research and conversation, usually off camera.	“How long has she worked at the garden?”
Interview question	What creates footage: an answer the audience needs to hear in the participant’s own voice, with feeling and specificity.	“Tell me about the moment you decided you weren’t going to leave.”

Do enough research before the interview that you do not need the camera rolling to answer basic factual questions. That frees the interview to go deeper. It also respects your participant’s time and signals that you have taken their life seriously enough to learn about it first.

6.3 Writing Questions That Open

Four types of interview questions

Four Types of Documentary Interview Questions

Type	What it asks for	What it gives the film
Narrative	A story. “Tell me what happened the day…” “Walk me through a typical morning.”	The spine of the film.
Reflective	Interpretation of their own experience. “Looking back, what do you think that decision cost you?”	Depth and interiority.
Descriptive	Concrete detail about a person, place, or feeling. “Describe what the garden is like early in the morning.”	Visual and sensory texture.
Forward-looking	Hopes, fears, intentions. “What do you want for this place five years from now?”	Stakes, and what drives them.

Three rules

• No yes-or-no questions. “Was it hard?” gets “Yes.” “What was the hardest part?” gets a story.
• No questions that contain the answer. “Did you feel betrayed when the landlord sold the building?” puts your word in their mouth. “How did you feel when you heard the building was sold?” lets them find their own.
• No compound questions. Ask one thing, in one direction, at a time. When you ask two questions at once, people answer the easier one.

Openings, follow-ups, and closings

Begin with something easy and concrete that lets your participant settle in and get used to the camera, such as how they spend a typical day or how they came to the place you are filming. Save the most personal questions for later, once trust in the room has warmed.

The best questions are often not on your list. They are follow-ups: “Tell me more about that.” “What happened next?” “You said it felt like home. What does home mean to you?” Repeating a participant’s own words back to them is one of the most reliable ways to go deeper.

Close with care rather than an abrupt stop. Ask, “Is there anything I didn’t ask that you want to say?” Some of the most important material in any documentary arrives in answer to that question. Then thank them, and tell them what happens next.

6.4 The Practice of Listening

Documentary listening is active and patient. It means staying present with what your participant is saying, not mentally rehearsing your next question. It means letting an answer finish completely before you respond. It means following an unexpected thread even when it leads off your list.

Above all, it means becoming comfortable with silence. The most revealing moments in an interview almost always come when the filmmaker stops directing and simply waits. Silence after an answer is not dead air; it is an invitation to go further. Most people will fill a pause with something more considered, and often more honest, than what they said first. Learn to resist filling it yourself.

Listening also means noticing what is not said: a change in tone, a story begun and abandoned, a glance away from the camera. You do not have to chase every one of these. Sometimes the respectful choice is to notice, and let it be.

6.5 The Interview as Co-Creation

The conventional interview places all the authority with the filmmaker: you choose the questions, the setting, the framing, and later the cuts. The Co-Creation Ethic asks how some of that authority can be shared. Some options:

• Share your topics in advance. Not a script, but the areas you hope to cover, so nothing important comes as an ambush.
• Ask what they want to talk about. Invite your participant to suggest questions, or topics you have not thought of.
• Agree on limits. Ask whether any subjects are off-limits, and agree on a simple signal to pause.
• Let them choose the setting. Where a person feels at ease changes what they are able to say.
• Hand over the camera. As with the participants in Life After Life, a participant may record their own reflections, alone, when and how it feels right. Self-recorded testimony can reach places a sit-down interview cannot.

6.6 Field Ethics: When to Stop

The second of the five questions, What does my presence cost?, is never more pressing than in the field. Your presence changes a room, and in a community that has been filmed carelessly before, it carries that history with it. In practical terms, field ethics means knowing when to set the camera down.

Stop filming, or pause, when:

• Your participant shows distress beyond what your conversation prepared them for.
• Someone else in the space needs attention.
• You sense your participant has said something they may regret. (Tell them so. Ask whether they want it kept.)
• They ask you to stop, in words or otherwise.

The documentary will survive setting the camera down. The relationship may not survive your failing to. And as Chapter 3 showed, ongoing consent cuts both ways: sometimes a participant wants the camera to keep rolling through something hard, because the story and the choice are theirs. What matters is that the decision is shared, not made for them.

Some field situations deserve thought before they arise. Will you film your own family, and what happens to those relationships if the film goes badly? Will you ever film without someone’s knowledge? (In a values-based practice, the answer is almost always no.) Will you pay participants, and does payment change what they feel able to say? Bring at least one such dilemma, and your answer to it, to your preparation.

6.7 Setting Up a Phone Interview

A technically strong phone interview needs attention to four things. None requires expensive equipment; all require attention before you press record.

Phone Interview Setup

Framing	Eyes about two-thirds of the way up the frame. Camera at eye level, neither looking up nor down. Leave deliberate headroom and room in the direction they look. Use a tripod or a stable surface; never hand-hold a sit-down interview.
Sound	More important than the image: a great picture with poor audio is unusable. Choose a quiet place, turn off fans and appliances, and use an external microphone if you can. A phone three to five feet away picks up the room; closer is better. Test before you begin.
Light	Face your participant toward a window, never with their back to it. Avoid mixing lamp and window light. Overcast daylight is more even than direct sun. Lock exposure on their face so it does not drift during the interview (see Chapter 4 on lighting all skin tones well).
Background	The background says something about your participant: their workplace, their home, a meaningful place. Avoid blank walls that say nothing and clutter that distracts. Distance between participant and background softens it and keeps attention on their face.

6.8 After the Interview

Within a day or two, send your participant a short message thanking them and checking in. Let them know you are reviewing the footage and will be in touch as the film develops. This is not a formality; it is the continuation of the consent process. Someone gave you something significant. Acknowledge it. If anything they said in the interview worried them, this is when they are most likely to tell you, and when it is easiest to honor.

6.9 Practice: Preparing, Filming, Reflecting

The interview you record in this chapter is the primary material for your film. In Chapter 7 you will log it and find the sound bites that carry your story.

6.10 Filmmaker’s Journal

Key Terms

Research question

A question you need answered to understand a participant’s world, usually answered off camera.

Interview question

A question designed to produce footage: an answer the audience needs to hear in the participant’s own voice.

Story target

A specific moment, memory, or revelation an interview is designed to reach, tied to a place in the arc.

Leading question

A question that contains or suggests its own answer.

Active listening

Staying fully present with what is being said, following unexpected threads, and allowing silence.

Field ethics

The decisions made during production about when to film, pause, or stop, guided by the participant’s wellbeing and consent.

Review and Discussion

1. Why is listening, rather than questioning, the most important interview skill?
2. Rewrite each question to follow the three rules: “Was losing your job hard?” “Did the eviction make you angry and scared?” “What happened, and how did your family react?”
3. What does silence do in an interview? Why is it so hard for interviewers to allow it?
4. Choose two ways of sharing authority in the interview from Section 6.5. What might each change in the footage you get?
5. When might continuing to film be the more ethical choice than stopping? Who should decide?

Further Reading and Viewing

• DAWG, “Phase 4: Production,” in From Reflection to Release (2023), pp. 24–27. Managing power dynamics during the shoot: consent in the moment, care for participants, and the crew’s footprint in a community. docaccountability.org/framework
• Edwin Martinez, “Navigating the River.” On hidden colonialism in nonfiction work and the quiet power relations that shape an interview. Documentary magazine.
• Sheila Curran Bernard, Documentary Storytelling, 4th ed. A practitioner’s guide with practical chapters on interviewing. Often available as a library e-book.
• Watch: Outta the Muck (Bhawin Suchak and Ira McKinley). A model of community self-representation, in which the people on screen shape how they are seen.

Works Cited