A bad interview is like a bad date
The New York Times' new interview podcast, a weird Anne Hathaway interview, the Proust Questionnaire, and why we love Terry Gross.
Listening to actress Anne Hathaway, 41, coquettishly deflect the questioning of journalist David Marchese in the debut episode of The Interview, a new weekly series from The New York Times, I had the sense that I was eavesdropping on a blind date—the awkward kind, the kind where the woman immediately knows she has no interest in the man, but keeps things charming through a second drink out of respect for the mutual friend. Though the woman on this date remains at the table for longer than she would like, she gives little else up. She deflects and dodges the man’s questions about the things he has been told about her (“a people pleaser from New Jersey”); she won’t indulge his curiosity about her past. She insists she is not trying to be evasive—she just can’t believe anyone would want to hear her talk about her relationship with her body! Eventually, the woman has had enough of the man’s efforts to extract a deeper answer out of her. “It’s slightly rude” to be asked things so directly, she exclaims. The man laughs it off, but it’s at this moment that he realizes what has been apparent to the eavesdropper all along—that they will not be going on another date.
While this kind of date can provide solid entertainment to a neighboring table, it makes for a frustrating interview, especially when it is the debut episode of a series promising “in-depth conversations with fascinating people.” Hathaway prevents her conversation with Marchese from achieving any depth; her evasiveness is not particularly fascinating. Something “feels a little too exposed to discuss,” or she doesn’t want to get into “specifics” because she “likes to keep [her] personal things personal.” If Hathaway was trying to create an aura of mystique, her efforts fall flat. She comes off as more uncomfortable than confidently aloof, to the point where her circumspection often made me wonder not what she wasn’t saying, but whether she had anything to say at all.
The throughline of the interview is Hathaway’s persistent resistance to the very premise of an interview: a meeting in which one person asks questions of another. To Hathaway’s credit, its one-sided nature is a key element differentiating the interview from a date (at least not a good one), and there is some truth to Hathaway’s observation that an interview departs from the normal social expectation of reciprocity. An interview is something else. It is transactional. A glimpse behind the curtain is permitted in exchange for publicity. The interview stalls because Hathaway refuses to play the game. She will not be charmed into vulnerability by Marchese and so the interview emits a mutually-sensed lack of chemistry between two good-natured people who politely grit their way through a contractually-obligated ordeal.
It’s not clear to me whether the Times actually thought this was an interesting interview or whether Hathaway only agreed to be interviewed if she could appear semi-nude on the cover of the Magazine announcing “Anne Hathaway is done trying to please.”1 (The fact that Marchese spends much of the interview trying to prove this up lends credence to the latter, since politely suffering through a bad date for longer than one would like is actually a very people-pleaser thing to do.) Or perhaps the Times thought they could generate buzz by launching the series with an adversarial subject. But whatever the Times did with this debut episode, maybe it wasn’t a total flop, since over a week later I’m here writing about The Interview, which made me reflect on a genre that I’ve long loved, a genre that is based on the premise that the minds of writers and actors and musicians and film directors are worth knowing apart from their art and their work, that our experience of their art will be heightened by the chance to hear them in conversation.
I’m still chewing on Hathaway’s suggestion that the unnatural format of an interview is “rude.” Why does this make me bristle? An aggressive one-sided line of questioning might not be welcomed in a social setting (“It felt like an interrogation!” we might say of a bad date), but it’s a necessary feature of a genre that I believe has real cultural value! And is asking questions—wanting to know more—actually rude, regardless of the setting? Is curiosity rude? (Yes, we teach our children when they point at the person without any legs, but isn’t it really the pointing that is rude, not their inherent curiosity?) While a press junket in promotion of one’s new movie may be unpleasant for an actor who hates the spotlight, is it actually rude to be asked follow-up questions about one’s previously-alluded to somatic alienation? Isn’t it kind of rude not to ask? I can’t remember a time that I have been asked a direct question and perceived it as rude, but I know all of the people in my metaphorical Rolodex who never ask me questions about myself.
As a bored teenager at my grandparents’ house, I would read Vanity Fair—the lowest-brow high-brow periodical to which they subscribed—back to front, in order to start with the Proust Questionnaire on the last page. I rarely knew the subject of the interview (film directors, fashion designers, and an assortment of powerful men who have probably since been Me Too’ed) but that did not make their answers to the familiar and probing questions that reappeared in each issue any less fascinating—What is your idea of perfect happiness? What is the quality you most like in a man? In a woman? What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I was drawn not only to interviewees’ answers, but to the sheer fact that such questions could be asked and answered for public consumption. The notion that one could not only develop and cultivate such a specific individuality, but that someone might want to know the one thing you would want to change about yourself or when and where you were happiest was thrilling to me. It probably played a not insignificant role in my own construction of a self—to be sophisticated, the Proust Questionnaire taught me, was to be unique, with one’s own preferences and virtues and dislikes. Even if I didn’t know the person being interviewed, how radical it felt to encounter such vulnerability (even if now the curation of the self and performance of vulnerability is much more obvious to me than it was then) at a time in my life when one’s most significant defining trait was whether you were a Yankees or Red Sox fan2. How thrilling it would be to be asked about myself! (What is the quality you most like in a man? Inquisitiveness. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Vanity.)
But my interest in the interview extends beyond the fantasy of being the subject of one. Without the script of the Proust questionnaire, the interview is a literary genre in itself! The interview can be more than merely the raw material of a celebrity profile! A good interview can stand alone as a piece of art worth consuming, whether it’s on the page or on the radio. (This is the premise of Interview magazine, founded by Andy Warhol in 1969!) A talented interviewer is an artist, one that establishes trust and rapport and can weave a narrative thread through a conversation without needing to insert an editorial voice after the fact. She can make the subject forget that she is being recorded. It is with the interviewer as interlocutor that we meet the unscripted actor, or hear the voice of the visual artist.
Oftentimes, what is moving about a good interview has nothing to do with the subject’s work; it is the rawness of the conversation, the cultivated space to go deep in a way that we do not when we are merely sitting at a dinner table. I think of Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, comes to mind as the most talented, and one of the most prominent, contemporary practitioners of the genre. Gross’s interview with the children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak— an electrifying and candid conversation on aging and dying, made my father and I weep in the car on the Saw Mill Parkway when we listened to it many years ago. I think of Krista Tippett’s conversations with John O’Donohue and David Whyte on the On Being podcast, to which I have returned through the years. I think of all of the Michael Silverblatt author interviews I listened to in law school that made me realize I wanted to be a writer. I think of the Art of Fiction interviews in the Paris Review that I have pored over alongside my morning coffee. How lovely to be allowed to go deep, how flattering to be given a platform.
At its best, the genre creates an intimacy between the interviewer and interviewee that lends itself to deep reflection and revelation. (And okay, in its cheapest form, a celebrity rehabilitates their image in an interview on late-night television.) In an interview setting, it is appropriate to ask questions that you might not otherwise ask in ordinary conversation. And so it is by consuming interviews that we can truly get to know not just a particular person—the celebrity being interviewed—but the breadth and depth of the human spirit .
Anne Hathaway is entitled to keep her vulnerabilities and ambitions to herself; we all have the right to remain silent, to refuse a question that asks us to reveal something too raw, too precious. Some people are just more private than others, and there are certainly real stakes associated with answering a question that will be published in The New York Times. But Hathaway’s circumspection is disappointing because many of the struggles and sources of pain to which Hathaway elliptically alludes—somatic discomfort, a path toward sobriety—are relatable but not given the space to be explored in any depth by Marchese. There are also joys and turning points (motherhood? love?) which are alluded to but never named. Hathaway suggests she is not a very good celebrity, in part because she can’t imagine people would be interested in knowing her more intimately. Where Hathaway goes wrong is when she assumes that her celebrity is the purported source of intrigue, when in fact, it is because she is human too.
I wasn’t particularly interested in Anne Hathaway going into the episode—at least no more or no less than I am any other actor. But important context for the interview, of which I’m only vaguely aware, is the fact that the Internet had turned on her at some point in the past for no better reason than that she seemed annoying. .
A critical piece of growing up in Connecticut is whether you belong to a family that is oriented toward New York or a family that is oriented toward Boston.
I felt exactly the same way. I came away feeling flat in the sense that I wasted my time listening. Anne H gave nothing away and her repeated refusals to answer irritated me. I felt sorry for the interviewer who had to go back for follow up, equally unenlightening.
She was so guarded that I wonder why she even agreed to the interview. Thank you for all the background on good interviews/podcasts.