In Documentary Interviewing - Ask Simple Questions

As a documentary editor, I’ve seen one problem crop up again and again: interviews that skip the basics. We forget to ask simple questions — and it shows in the edit. Here’s why starting with “What is this?” might be the smartest move you make.

Don't be too Smart

This is the beginning of an actual interview in a documentary I worked on:

Cameraperson: So I'm rolling.

Interviewer: Great, okay, So tell me what exactly are the challenges you encountered in (doing this thing that this part of this documentary is about)?

In the documentary interview process, I think sometimes directors are hesitant to ask the dumb questions. Part of that might be wanting to establish a rapport of mutual respect, by letting the interviewee know that they, the director, has done their homework and know the ins and outs of the subject.

But then we get into the edit and it’s the answers to the stupid questions we are often missing. What’s going on here? What’s that thing? What are you doing today? What are you making? Who are you? Why?

The structure of the questions an interviewer asks helps us construct the story arc in the edit.

It’s not just “how did this start?”which will elicit an answer like “this started because ….” As storytellers we often want to go back even farther than that: “what is THIS?” We need to know THAT it started even before we can ask WHY did it start.

If you are a parent, you are probably familiar with a child asking "why, why, why" everything, to the point where you get frustrated and say "because I said so!" I've noticed that that moment of frustration is exactly where the answer to the question "Why?" starts to get really interesting. If you stay with those "why" questions, and really try to answer them, you start to question a lot of basic assumptions about our shared reality. That might be exactly the place you want to get to with your interviewee, with you as the why-asking child.

Back when we narrated everything, we just wrote the line to get into the scene, and set the drama, and frame the story. The narrator said the topic sentence and then the interviews with people would elaborate. But we don’t really do that much anymore, so we need our interviewees to give us those topic sentences. They need to do all the starting off and grounding the audience and getting us up-to-speed on the story we are embarking on. 

Why the dumb questions are essential

A lot of times you have people in interviews saying things like “today we’re doing x because y.” Contrast that to “situation y exists, so to deal with it we are doing x.” Usually, the latter better facilitates the drama for a scene. In the edit, you are going to want to dole out the story slowly, dramatically, beat by beat, and that means setting up the problem first, being with that tension, and then working on solving it. Again, the narrator used to do a lot of that, but now our documentary participants have to handle that task, preferably with minimal frankenbiting. (Although you’ll need some, because people don’t talk that way.)

In the edit, you’ll be taking what they said and molding it into a narrative arc that works in the confines of a movie. 

You can try to facilitate that in the interview by being aware of what the story beats of the relevant scenes will be, and asking questions that hit each one individually. So instead of asking “tell me about what you are doing” try to ask questions that will get them to structure their answers to fit closer to a narrative arc: What's the problem? Why is that a problem? Who are you? What's that? Why, why, why? Simple question structure at the start of the interview, bordering on naive, will help to get the signposting you’ll need in the edit. Maybe.

Then you get to meaty questions.

Look back again at that question from the beginning of an interview: "Tell me what exactly are the challenges you encountered in (doing this thing that this moment in the documentary is about)? 

In that edit, we struggled with this exact moment of telling the audience THAT this thing was was happening, before we got anywhere near wondering about the challenges. Every interviewee started from an assumption that "it" was happening, but we needed someone to define what "it" was.

If you want your interviewees to be a principal storyteller at each point in the narrative arc, it can help to ask really simple, basic questions, even if it makes you feel a bit stupid. 

Want help shaping a more powerful narrative? I’m available for freelance editing, post-production, or story consulting.