How Spinal Tap gave me a case example in interviewing technique
As rock managers went, Ian Faith always looked for the best way to frame a situation … and to take advantage of a poorly worded question, too.
Ian Faith, of course, never existed. Played by Tony Hendra, the British expat who upended comedy in America with the National Lampoon and many other projects, Ian Faith was the manager of the fictional, hilarious metal band Spinal Tap.
This is one of my favourite scenes from 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, when supposed documentary maker Marty Di Bergi (actual director Rob Reiner) quizzes Faith about the self-evident facts of dwindling attendance.
The scene features a common interviewing mistake and Faith’s answer (I’d like to believe that, in keeping with much of the film, Hendra and Reiner improvised it all) is a familiar path that subjects will take to get out of a sticky spot.
Here’s the scene.
The question is the root of the problem. It’s not only loaded with language that basically belong in the answer, but it all comes to a closed-end question.
“When Tap toured America,” Di Bergi asks, “they were booked into 10,000-seat arenas and 15,000-seat venues and it seems that now, on the current tour, they’re being booked into 1,200-seat arenas, 1,500-seat arenas, and I was just wondering does this mean the popularity of the group is waning?”
The immediate response? “Oh no,” says Faith immediate, before uttering “no, no, no” and again (and yet again!), with a tell-tale “not at all!” before uttering one of the funniest lines in a very funny film.
“I just think that their appeal is becoming more selective.”
The “no, no, no, no….” part is a tell; it’s a way that people downplay what is very much on their mind.
Putting the subject on the back heel
Years ago, I liked using this clip when I would do workshops on interviewing for student journalists.
Di Bergi has front-loaded information into a question, and this puts the subject on their back heel. He finishes with a closed-ended question — they typically guide someone to either “yes” or “no” — and in this case he gets the latter, with a telling number of repeats.
Open-ended questions are better. They typically start with words like “how” or “why,” rather than “is” or “did,” etc.
In this case, there would be much better options for an interviewer, such as “how have the band’s venues changed over the years?” or “how does this tour compare to prior tours?” or “how would you describe the fan base now?”
The details Di Bergi has observed about venue size are useful, and could be used in follow-up questions.
A better interviewing tactic is to open up the lines of inquiry in the interview.
Closed-ended questions, the ones that yield yes/no answers, are often clip-killers, by the way. That is, they yield very short answers that don’t tell us much. I learned this powerfully through several workshops and courses I did with John Sawatsky, a journalism professor and author who had a profound effect on many journalists with his insights into interviewing technique (and the human nature of how people answer questions).
Quotes (in print) and clips (in broadcast) are the energy sources that power stories. Quotes bring us inside the subject’s thinking, providing insight and a perspective that the journalist cannot furnish on their own.
Even though this is comedy, this Spinal Tap clip speaks to a couple of problems that can beset an interviewer … and sometimes even derail an interview.
I hope to do more posts about things I learned over the years as a journalist, especially as a trainer. (I’m reviving the somewhat cheeky blog tag of “craft singles” to group them together.)