Workshops
An interview is a journey into the landscape of another person. Guided by a master of the form, learn how to ask the right questions to get you there.
Dates:
Sep 30, 2024 - Oct 4, 2024
Levels:
All
Workshop Fee: $1495
Workshop Duration: 1-week (Monday-Friday)
Workshop Location: On-campus
Class Size: 12
The art of the interview is a crucial storytelling skill for documentary filmmakers, podcasters and writers. In this workshop, we explore the techniques that enable you to make the empathetic leap into someone else’s experience and, as a result, tell stories with verve and originality.
What makes for a gripping interview? A revelation of character, an illuminating insight, a sense of intimacy? As an interviewer do you provoke or evoke? Is an interview an open-ended conversation or is it a series of strategic questions with a targeted end in mind?
In this cross-platform workshop, students will learn how to conduct background research and how to compose questions for rhythm and pace. We will analyze video, print, and podcast interviews, and screen relevant documentaries.
However, the emphasis will be on the act of interviewing. Students will practice interviewing people from the community, including artisans, farmers, and fishermen, as well as world-renowned filmmakers and photographers. Interviews will be recorded and critiqued. We will discuss problems you might face, such as tangents, silences, and time constraints. We will workshop useful techniques such as paying attention to non-verbal clues. We will also discuss the role that gender, race, and class play in an interview.
At its core, an interview should feel like a conversation, but it’s a conversation with an agenda. Leave the week having learned how to conduct interviews that will make your stories more original and more compelling.
Meet your Instructor:
Instructor: Belle Cushing (Teaching Jun 24-28 - Register here)
Belle Cushing is an Emmy-award-winning documentary film producer and journalist. She has made documentaries, shorts, and news specials for platforms including HBO, Showtime, Hulu, The Marshall Project, and Vice. Her work has taken her to Latin America, Europe, North Africa, and across the U.S.
She is interested in stories that explore the unseen and challenge conventional understanding. The search for hidden worlds often leads her to stories about power, how it is abused, and who is impacted. She approaches these questions with a combination of investigative reporting and empathetic storytelling: This has meant constructing narrative out of body camera footage and police interrogation videos; or infiltrating a criminal network with hidden cameras; while always working to create spaces of intimacy and trust on-screen. She understands documentary work, and the act of entering into people’s lives with a camera, as an immense privilege, which demands constant care and re-evaluation.
Instructor: Adam Harrison Levy (Teaching Sep 30-Oct 4 - Register here)
Adam Harrison Levy is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He specializes in the art of the interview. For the BBC he has conducted interviews with a wide range of actors, writers and musicians including Meryl Streep, Philip Glass and Paul Auster. His documentary directing credits for the BBC include Step Right Up and War Machine and he was the US Producer for Selling the Sixties, a film about advertising in New York in the early 1960s. He has produced and directed interviews for films such as Lou Reed Remembered and D-Day to Berlin. He has also made short films about the sculptor David Smith and the poet laureate Tracy K. Smith.
