[ad_1]
I started working at the Guardian in the summer of 2000 – not to write, but to look after a key. The key to the fashion wardrobe to be precise, ensuring that no clothes are stolen for the fashion shoots. That was my main role as a fashion assistant. Or, as I preferred to call myself – and say it with me, fellow Ghostbusters fans – the Master of Keys. And I will never deal with more responsibility or power.
Nevertheless, soon after I started, the section editors asked me which celebrities I would like to interview. I was too young and stupid to appreciate how utterly unbelievable it was for editors to even know the fashion assistant’s name, let alone care who they wanted to interview. But so was the Keeper and, my God, how lucky I was to be here. But my perspective in this, my last piece for the Guardian, is that among all the different jobs I’ve held at this newspaper, ranging from the incredible (northern news reporter) to the downright incredible (World Cup columnist), one thing I’ve never what hasn’t changed is that I’ve always interviewed celebrities.
On some level it’s as surprising to me as being sent to follow Wayne Rooney around Brazil in 2014, because I’ve never really cared that much about famous people. I never went to concerts as a teenager, I never wrote to fan clubs asking for autographs. I’m an enthusiast, that is, me really like the niche little things I like (80s movies), but it never occurred to me as a kid to write to, say, John Hughes and ask him questions about his movies. Why would he talk to me?
Well, the one lesson I learned at university that has stuck with me is that famous people love to talk about themselves. I was writing for my university newspaper and sometimes a famous person would come to speak to students and I would be sent to interview them. I’ve learned that some famous people are surprisingly delightful (Ben Affleck), some surprisingly not (Stephen Fry, probably having a bad day), but they’re all perfectly fine with me, a random 18-year-old, asking them really, really personal questions because I’ve interviewed them .
It was a real insight. Because as well as being an enthusiast, I’m curious and that sometimes gets me into trouble in Britain. In New York, where I’m from, it’s almost standard practice for two strangers on the subway to talk about what prescription drugs they’re taking; there are people in London I’ve known for over 20 years and I wouldn’t dare ask them if they dye their hair. I quickly learned that interviews are a context in which unpleasant teasing is not just accepted, but expected. This is where personal information is traded as a publicity commodity, and although it still amazes me that so many celebrities will answer the most direct questions about their unhappy childhood/deepest trauma/ugly divorce in exchange for mentioning their movie in a newspaper, it’s a transaction I’m constantly excited to use. This has been the rare week in the last 22 years that I haven’t thought to myself: I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.
Thanks to two celebrity interviews, I got my job at the Guardian. My mum noticed a writing competition in the Daily Telegraph and told me to enter it. So I dutifully submitted two interviews I had done for the university paper, one with Richard Whiteley, the hilarious and now sadly deceased host of Countdown, and the other with Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye. I won, and with that I became the Guardian’s key. So the moral of this story, aspiring journalists, is always enter writing contests. And listen to your mother.
But I initially had some concerns about interviewing famous people for the Guardian. As I said, I’m an enthusiast and while I felt fine writing about my utter love of Countdown in my university paper, I wasn’t sure if my taste would really appeal to Guardian readers, the people who bought the paper to read Polly Toynbee on social housing and Jonathan Steele on foreign affairs. The bigger problem was that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, as one glance at the transcript of my first newspaper interview proves. It was with Simon Amstel and Mikita Oliver, hosts of the Channel 4 show Popworld, which I adored, and luckily for me, as well as being my first interview, it was also theirs, so the three of us were equally clueless.
Me: Why did you want to become a TV presenter?
Simon: Because it looked like fun. Is this a good answer? what to say
I do not know. Was that a dumb question?
Mikita: Yes. But it’s good.
Others have been less understanding. When I made the rookie mistake of turning up to interview shoe designer Christian Louboutin in a pair of very sleazy ballet flats, he sniffily informed me that if I were a shoe, I’d be a “DM boot”. Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t impressed either, and took one look at my not-so-polished twenty-something face and expressed astonishment that the Guardian had sent “the girl with professional experience” to interview him (it seemed unlikely that I’d tell him that actually i’m a fashion assistant would tone it down). As a people pleaser, these types of interactions initially made me nervous. But I soon learned that they make good copy, and it helped me get over my childish people-pleasing ways. Often the best interviews contain little grit.
Besides wanting to know what Marina Hyde is like (terrifying), the most common question I get from readers is what celebrities I’ve interviewed are like. That’s easy: they’re weird. All celebrities are a little weird because wanting to be famous is a weird thing, and living your life as an object instead of a subject is a really maddening way to exist. Some celebrities are very good at being celebrities, like George Clooney and Tom Hanks, who maintain such a commitment to their brand image (the old smoothie and the modern Jimmy Stewart, respectively) that they keep up the facade even during interviews. It must be exhausting to be them – all the time On – but at least they make being famous seem more fun than most. Shortly after I started my job, TV shows like Popstars, Pop Idol, Big Brother and so on began their television dominance, with fame rather than money being offered as the real prize. I had already learned what a scam this was from interviewing famous people: there was the time I went to LA to interview Nicole Richie, then so frail she could barely walk, and I watched her frantically devour a huge cooked breakfast; or the time I got a five-minute interview in New York with Justin Timberlake, who looked so unhappy I wondered if he was being held hostage. It was great fun writing about all of this, but it made me think that living in a cave as a hermit is perhaps an underrated lifestyle.
It took me a while to let readers know how weird I am. It happened inadvertently when the editor of G2 at the time sent me to the US to interview Michael J. Fox about his new sitcom. Reader, I adored it. I was so caught up in my lifelong fandom of Marty McFly and my current deep love for Fox himself that I let my full enthusiastic nature show in the article. I was a bit worried the night before the article came out – would I be laughed out of the paper? Would CP Scott come back to haunt me in disgust?
To my surprise, the readers seemed to like the piece, and it was at that moment that I learned one of the most useful lessons of my life: I am not unique. If I like someone, chances are others will like them too. I’m pretty basic that way. I’ve since gone wild with my enthusiasm: I’ve interviewed almost all of my childhood idols – Mel Brooks, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, Frank Oz – and been blown away by how a) wonderful they were and b) how much Guardian readers shared my love of them. When I was so overwhelmed by Keanu Reeves’ beauty that I could barely ask him a question, Guardian readers gave me sympathy, not the derision I expected. And when I giddily ran around the Academy Awards every year, vainly begging Eddie Murphy for quotes (although Kevin Hart always obliged for his friend – thank you, Kevin), Guardian readers didn’t roll their eyes too much. It turns out they can be just as interested in social issues as they are in the Oscars.
In addition to writing interviews, I also wrote columns, and as a columnist, the temptation is to be categorical about an issue, to focus on the stark black and white rather than the more complex shades of gray. But people are rarely black and white, which is why they are so interesting. Charlie Sheen was an amazingly gray interviewee, a man who had done terrible things but was smart and surprisingly self-aware and trying to figure out how to live with HIV. Woody Allen is now widely described as the Bad Guy, usually by people with only the best knowledge of skating about the 30-year-old allegations against him. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to interview him and later his son, Moses, and for giving me the space to review the allegations. Journalism is about asking questions and refusing to accept whatever narrative is currently accepted, whether it’s politics or celebrities. It’s not about getting likes on Twitter.
There is now a mentality – popular in some progressive circles – that to give someone a “platform” (ie interview them) is to endorse them. But that’s only true if you’re writing interviews, whereas I like to have what Mrs. Merton called a “heated debate,” or what I call a conversation. So I argued with Jeff Koons in New York about politics and art, and I argued with Margaret Atwood in Toronto about gender. PR people, of course, hate this because they think it’s a journalist’s job to copy exactly what the celebrity said, but I know that’s not what readers want. Definitely not what I want when I read an interview.
There have been other changes in the world of celebrity interviewing in the 22 years since I started at the Guardian. Back then, people largely laughed at celebrities when they made political statements; now they’re yelled at if they don’t, and so they nervously flood their Instagram pages with their thoughts on social justice. And of course, social media didn’t exist back then, so journalists were the only way celebrities could talk to the public; now celebrities like Beyoncé and Harry Styles see us as inappropriate middlemen and generally bypass us completely, which is a relief to me because such famous people rarely say anything interesting. Give me Steve Guttenberg reminiscing about Police Academy while Justin Bieber talks about his journey every day. Harvey Weinstein was once so powerful that he managed to write a newspaper column complaining about me when I wrote (correctly) that his Baftas party was boring; now, well, we all know how that story ended.
God, it was fun. I know some journalists hate dealing with celebrities, hate covering celebrity events, and I’ve never understood that. If you’re in journalism because you want to tell interesting, quirky and very human stories, well, what’s not to love about spending a day with Pete Doherty on a beach in Normandy? Or ponder the power of the vagina with Aerosmith in LA? Or chatting with Helena Bonham Carter about divorce over cups of tea? Thanks to everyone I’ve interviewed for putting up with my awkwardness.
But most of all I want to thank Guardian readers for putting up with me. You tolerated my excesses, patiently corrected my mistakes, often made me laugh, and I will miss you terribly. If I use a quote from a movie that I mention on average once a week in this paper, I had the time of my life. This is the truth. And I owe it all to you.
[ad_2]
Source link