Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There were so many people after that first 'Colbert Report' interview that were impressed by the synergy we had during the interview. People everywhere we'd go would say, 'You should be the bandleader; it would be great for jazz. It would be great for the music.' But I was completely against it.
Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.
If you tell Canadians that you want to interview them for a critical piece on the Canadian healthcare system, they'll put on their best trophy-wife smile for the camera and list its many accolades. Catch them on a day with their guard down in need of actual care, however, and the truth comes out.
I think what's universal is the idea of auditioning. It's something that you do in every kind of job market. You audition every time you go on a date, you audition at a job interview, and it's always about trying to put the best version of yourself forward and seeing what sticks and what doesn't.
Get to know the job intimately that you're applying for. Don't just read the job description - study it and picture yourself performing every task required of you. When you interview, framing your responses so that you reveal your significant knowledge about the job gives you a massive advantage.
Back in the day, in '91 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, 'We'll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.' Which was their way of saying no.
Rather than use the term 'profiling,' the profilers prefer to say they engage in criminal investigative analysis. That is because, besides developing profiles, the analysts offer a range of other advice, including personality assessments and interview techniques tailored to a particular offender.
There was an interview that I actually listened to with John Cena where he says that he is an elite-level athlete - he is elite, and he needs to make people elite whenever he goes up against them - but I was like, gosh, as much as I hate to give him credit where credit is due, it is exactly right.
I liked Art Linkletter's way of conducting an interview while still keeping it light and I even admired Jack Bailey, host of 'Queen for a Day.' Particularly fascinating was how he could listen to all those awful tales of woe, then smile and slap someone on the back and declare her Queen for a Day.
I never realized it until I watched an interview, but sometimes my brain stutters between thoughts, and for some reason it comes out as an 'ummmm.' I'm hoping it's because I'm so smart, and there's just too much information to process, but it's more than likely just because it's a small processor.
An interesting way into the celebrity interview podcast is via their dogs. Celebs may not be keen to let us into their homes, because they don't like us to see how wealthy they are. However, tell them you want to go for a walk on Hampstead Heath with them and their mutt, and they're only too happy.
My biggest thing has always been privacy. With an interview such as this where the questions are about me, I struggle to express myself. I have an immediate answer in my head of what I'd say, but sometimes I feel that it would be too honest. So these wheels of censorship start going around my head.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but I read in an interview with Lil Wayne that he recorded a mixtape of something like 50 straight minutes of him rapping all of his material because he felt like he could never move on to the next phase of his musical exploration if he didn't get it down on tape.
Celebrity poverty, that's the hidden scandal in Blair's Britain. You can't help but worry for them. A girl I knew developed X-ray eyes for celebrity sorrows. She taught me to read the subtext of the down-market celebrity interview, she knew all the Hollywood codes, and followed the deep backgrounds.
In every interview, when they would ask me who should be a judge, I would always say Harry Connick, Jr., so I think I had something to do with him becoming a judge! He has a blunt, dry sense of humor. You never know if he's joking or not, and I think that's going to catch a lot of people by surprise.
My first audition as a little girl was 'Interview with the Vampire' for Kirsten Dunst's part. Back then, they were meeting all different kinds of girls, and I was one of them. There's got to be an audition tape somewhere on VHS. Who would have known that many years later I would be on a vampire show?
I quickly learned that asking if an interview space was wheelchair accessible was a bad idea; it gave a potential employer an immediate bad impression. It was either a black mark against my name, or a straight up discussion of why I wouldn't be able to work there because they had no wheelchair access.
When Phil and I started out, everyone hated rock n' roll. The record companies didn't like it at all - felt it was an unnecessary evil. And the press: interviewers were always older than us, and they let you know they didn't like your music, they were just doing the interview because it was their job.
'What is your desired salary?' The unwritten rule when it comes to salary is this: whoever proposes a number first loses. When you interview, you should never feel pressured to answer this question. Simply let your interviewer know that the most important thing to you is how well you fit the position.
One of my first questions when I interview prospective employees is, 'Do you know how big a sheet of plywood is?' Most people don't, and say they are different sizes, but it's 4' x 8'. Anyway, working with your hands is a very American thing that we kinda lost here, but it's an important skill to have.
Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of 'Dead Poets Society,' but actually no one really cared.
Most hiring managers interview a lot of people. So many that they generally have to go back to their notes to remember candidates - the exception being candidates with a strong hook. Sometimes these hooks are how people dress or their personality, but the best hook is a strong story that's work-related.
The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci used to say that for her, an interview was like a war. I get the sense that we've forgotten that here in the United States. You turn on the TV, and you see very bland interviews. Journalists in the United States are very cozy with power, very close to those in power.
When you are interviewing someone, never let your camera person turn off the camera. The second you turn off the camera, they'll say the magic thing that you'd been looking for the whole interview. People want to relax after the performance is done. Don't be afraid of awkward silence. That is your friend.
So much about 'Rookie' has been very organically familial among our contributors, among our readers. Yeah, if I interview someone like Lorde, who I do know outside of work - sometimes I'm just so happy; it's so cool that this is organically, effortlessly, the warm, supportive friend vibe that we want here.
My agent in Sweden used to send off interview tapes but I decided to take it upon myself and come to London to visit casting directors which is when things first started taking off for me. I love Sweden but the industry out here is quite small so when I was given the chance to go internationally I took it.
I remember I heard it in an interview with Michael Jackson one day, saying the art is gone, everybody makes records just to make a record. See, I always want the artist that try to build a whole body of music on one album, so you can enjoy it. So you could say, 'I went with him here, I went with him here.'
Everybody's always asking me about my blood pressure. They did an interview once where they hooked me up to a blood pressure machine and they'd rile me. I'd yell and scream, and then it would just go back to normal in a few minutes. Everything else is probably rotting, but the blood pressure is spectacular.
It strikes me every time I do an interview that I don't really sit around thinking about my goals and my life and my career. I do what I love doing and I get a lot of feedback. I'm free as a bird, you know? If I do something good, it's, 'Wow, that was brilliant,' and if I do something bad, it just goes away.
Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious.
I'll never forget my interview with Barry Humphries - one of the oddest I've ever done. He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna. So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly.
In almost every interview someone asks what does HIM stand for. I can't even remember our latest lie about that. When Hanson was hot, we said it means Hanson Is Murder. The name doesn't have a particular history. His Infernal Majesty was a totally different band. I think HIM derives from some death metal joke.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
Most of my fans know I love video games. I say it in every interview, so they know. But one thing that I like doing is skateboarding, I like jet skiing, skydiving. It's like a huge roller coaster ride. Like forty seconds of free-falling. That's some of the stuff I love, daredevil stuff. I like horseback riding.
Over the last half century the television interview has given us some of TV's most heart-stopping and memorable moments. On the surface it is a simple format - two people sitting across from one another having a conversation. But underneath it is often a power struggle - a battle for the psychological advantage.
I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college.
I can hardly tell you how boring it is to interview almost every politician among the multitudes I have ever interviewed (journalists can't say this, because if people knew how boring politicians were they wouldn't read what we write), how dead the conversation feels, how bald, flat, uninteresting the message is.
I started getting Twitter followers after I started doing press for 'Fargo.' One of my best friends from college is a librarian, and she started tracking after each interview how many Twitter followers I got. She and her librarian friends were like, 'We're going to make a graph.' And I was like, 'Alright, nerds.'
With the long-format interview, I can get into really interesting conversations with my guests. You know what it's like to get the opportunity to speak to really interesting people and pick their brain about things. To have time to let a guest actually speak and tell a story and get into detail is really exciting.
I'm a member of the American Chemical Society, and in its magazine, the 'Chemical and Engineering News,' there was an interview of Vince Gilligan when he had first started the television show 'Breaking Bad.' And in that interview, he was stating how important it was to him that he get the science right for the show.
Whatever it is, if you draw, you paint, you're a carpenter, you play football, the more you do it, you're a journalist, the more stories you write, the more people you interview and navigate your way through these different personalities to get your story, the better you're going to get at it. Acting's no different.
When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the New York 'Daily News,' and on 130 occasions while talking to 'The New York Times' during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class.
When I interview people that want to work with us, I often disregard their resume, because a piece of paper, it doesn't tell me really who they are. I'm looking for honesty, vulnerability. I'm looking for strength, I'm looking for weakness. I'm looking also for someone that wants to learn and is excited about learning.
We spend a lot of time on Skype and other video interviews, and it's funny how many people will prepare for a Skype interview by wearing a formal suit jacket with pajama pants on the bottom. Then suddenly, someone is at the door, and you have to get up, and you realize you're wearing reindeer boxers. Just put pants on.
It's interesting - a lot of what you accomplish in your lifetime either as an individual or as a company is determined by other people. I mean, you can do interview after interview and defend a point of view, but more often than not, the collective kind of opinion will be the one viewed historically and taken as gospel.
I figure no matter what interview I do, the real good 'journalists' are going to find the completely irrelevant quotes that will drum up some controversy and stick it on their page to get some clicks and completely miss the real context of what the interview is about. That's what we do nowadays and call it 'journalism.'
I'm 57 years old, and I host a quiz show every single day. I got asked in a recent interview, did I feel that hosting a quiz show helps keep my brain sharp? And I asked - would you ask Stephen Fry that question, who is exactly the same age as me? Somehow, I'm managing to stand up and stay cogent despite my incredible age.
The main difference is, in 'Cold Case,' the victim sometimes had been dead for decades - you didn't have the advantage of being able to interview the victim. You had to piece together the circumstances surrounding the crime from witnesses and other evidence. 'SVU' is much more immediate in that you can talk to the victim.
The problem with being a journalist is you go places and you're working. You don't get to appreciate everything. But I got enough of a sampler of South Africa; I thought, 'I want to come here when I don't have to interview people for a living so that I can really enjoy it.' Because I think it was just a magnificent place.
In all the time I was with L.T.D., I was never allowed to do an interview by myself. I wasn't even allowed to talk on stage between songs. I couldn't get a publishing agreement or a production deal because everyone had their own little role to play in the group... and the money, well, anything split 10 ways can't be much.