Dealing with someone who doesn’t want to talk

You just persist don’t you really?

Yeah, you just have to keep trying really, I mean the one that I think of is: I was interviewing a musician. He was in his studio in Nashville and we were talking and then, at the minute I pressed record, he just didn’t say anything (laughs), he didn’t say a word and it was really horrible. I was just asking him lots of questions about music and in the end I thought, “OK, I’ll just ask him something completely different something about where he lives and something that’s been on the news or just something”, and that ended up getting a conversation rolling. But you just have to, as you would if you were having a normal conversation with somebody and you know they weren’t giving you much, you just have to keep trying (laughs) until they give you something.

I interviewed a chap called Dylan Moran. I don’t know if any of you have watched Black Books on TV, it’s a great comedy series and he is notorious for being horrible to interview and he’d been interviewed by one of my colleagues on another programme on Radio New Zealand last year, Jim Mora, who still cites it as one of the worst experiences of his life as a presenter, and I thought “I’ll give it a crack, I’ll see how I go”, and I talked to Dylan on the phone from Australia and we got on OK. I can’t remember … I found some kind of obscure way to come into it. The worst thing when you’re talking to famous people or celebs, is to ask them the same question that they’ve just been asked. I think I was the seventh interview in a row that he was doing and you’ve got to be mindful of that so you try and come up with a way in that differentiates you from the other journalists. I can’t remember what it was, but it got him laughing and then about half way through I said “Oh you know Dylan, you are well known for being, you know, difficult. I know you don’t enjoy this part of the job being a comedian”, and he said “No”. He said, “I don’t cause you know I’m interviewed by a lot of idiots” but he said “Lynn, you’re a relatively intelligent interviewer”, which I took as high praise indeed, and it worked quite well, but he said, “Look on another day I could’ve given you nothing. I could’ve been in, you know, in a bad mood or something like that and given you nothing”, so he was aware of the fact he’s difficult.

Yeah, I think with us we quite often interview people who really don’t like being interviewed, so (laughs) that’s definitely a challenge because with other kinds of journalism obviously you’re talking to people who really do want to have their opinions known, but for us we have to work a little bit harder (laughs) a lot of the time.

And sometimes they’re shy. I mean there are visual artists like ‘Et Al’ who is anonymous. We know what her name is but she doesn’t like to use it, and so she just really essentially wants to do her art, and she will not be interviewed, Bill Hammond, one of our foremost artists will not be interviewed and that’s his right. Pretty difficult when you’re trying to get a story, especially on tape. So you’re working with people. I find visual artists and crafts people, sometimes dancers, are the hardest thing to talk about on radio because we don’t have pictures, we only have their words and if they’re not comfortable talking, I’ll have artists say to me “Look, everything I want to say is on that picture on the wall”. Well, you can’t really argue with that. That’s how they communicate, not in words, so that can be an issue sometimes for us.