How Callum Learned to Let an Interview Breathe

Callum joined the Interview and Story Craft course in the early autumn, after two years of filming local events for a community channel. He was a careful operator and a keen reader of the news, and he arrived with a notebook in which every question was written out in full, numbered and underlined. He told me in the first session that his interviews always felt stiff, and that he could not say why.

I asked him to bring a recent piece to class. We watched it together on the editing suite, with the sound low, so that we looked only at what the pictures were doing. The interviewee, a woman who ran a small repair workshop, sat in the same frame for four minutes. Nothing in the shot told us what she did for a living, and the story lived entirely in her words.

With the sound back up, the problem became easier to name. Callum asked his questions in the order he had written them, and each answer was cut off politely while he moved to the next number. The woman had mentioned, almost in passing, that she repaired things people were told could not be mended. He had nodded and carried on. That sentence was the story, and the piece never returned to it.

I try to be gentle about this in class, because it is the commonest habit among people who prepare well. A written list is a safety net, and it is useful for exactly that reason. It becomes a fault only when it matters more to the interviewer than the person sitting opposite. We agreed that the notebook would stay, but that he would learn to look up from it.

• Write fewer questions, and rank them by what the story needs
• Mark the one answer you hope to hear, then listen for a better one
• Keep a blank line at the bottom of the page for what surprises you

The second change was about pictures. Callum treated the interview as one task and the cutaways as another, to be gathered afterwards if time allowed. We reversed that. Before the next shoot he drew a rough list of what the audience would need to see to believe the words: hands at work, the bench, the tools, the objects waiting on a shelf. He gave himself ten minutes for them at the start, while the interviewee relaxed.

This did two things. It made the interviewee more at ease, because filming her work is easier than being questioned. And it gave Callum a visual vocabulary for the story before a word was said. When she later described a particular repair, he already had the close shot to lay over it, and he knew which detail to ask her about.

The hardest habit to change was the urge to fill silence. In his second practice interview, a man who coached a youth football side gave a short answer and stopped. Callum began to speak, and I raised a hand from behind the camera. We waited. After a few seconds the man added the sentence that ended up opening the piece, about the boy who had stopped coming to training and what the club did about it.

Afterwards Callum said the wait had felt like a mistake in the moment and like the best decision of the day on playback. I told him that was a fair description of the whole craft. You are rarely certain while it is happening. You trust the preparation, you stay quiet, and the person across from you often finishes the thought better than any follow-up question could.

Back in the edit, we worked on structure. Callum had a habit of opening with the most general statement available, a line about repair culture that could have introduced any piece on any subject. We cut it. The new opening was the woman's hands turning a screw, then her sentence about things people were told could not be mended. The context followed, only once the viewer cared.

A news story has a small amount of time in which to earn attention, and the order of what you show matters as much as the choice of material. We rebuilt the piece around one person, one problem and one outcome. Two answers that were interesting but unrelated came out. He found that losing them did not weaken the story, and that it made the remaining material easier to follow.

• Open on a specific image or sentence, never on a general claim
• Keep one thread from start to finish
• Cut good material that belongs to a different story

Callum finished the course a few weeks ago and has since filmed two interviews for his community channel using the new approach. He sent me a link to one of them, with a message saying that the interviewee had spoken for longer than he expected and that he had kept his mouth shut for most of it. The piece is shorter than his earlier work and clearer, and it has a first shot that tells you where you are.

I do not want to overstate what a few sessions can do. He still rushes the opening of some interviews, and he still reaches for the notebook when he is nervous. But he has a method now, and that is what we aim for: a way of preparing and listening that he can take to any shoot, and refine on his own as the work comes in.