What kind of psychological processes are at work when we point a camera at someone and ask them questions? Interviewing subjects has long been a refined art, and as more and more media creators all-in-one-operators, often being director, producer, interviewer and host, there's a lot to think about. So what should we do to prepare? In this chat, with cinematographer, director, and documentary filmmaker Peter Teys, we show that so much of the process is about knowing who YOU are as a creative operator.
In today’s episode we speak to Peter Teys, a master of many, many creative disciplines - he’s media he is cinematographer, director, editor, producer, and highly accomplished stills photographer, and in the music world he has spent 3 decades as a drummer and percussionist, performing with scores of artists and performer, and he’s also studying the intricacies of percussion and complex polyrythms in west africa.
Peter is also one of my best friends - we have known each other since 1992 and have done a whole range of creative things together over the years, we have played in multiple bands across thrash metal and electronic music, as well as worked on a wide range of travel documentaries for World Nomads - so we have both been in the trenches together in terms of our relative creative development and evolution.
Peter is now moving much deeper into observational and factual documentary, coupling his love for rich imagery with the potency of capturing the essence of the human condition. He is working on a feature doc about the challenges and intricicaies of complex post traumatic stress disorder, interviewing a wide range of subjects about their experience with this terrible affliction.
A documentary like this requires emotional sensibility out the wazoo, and in our discussion, we find that to show up to be able to capture the meat and potatoes of a heavy topic, we need to be not only at a relatively optimal point of our own personal physical and mental wellbeing, we also need to know who we are as creatives.
This episode is called ‘the psychology of the interview’ and is for anyone who is taken with the task of pointing cameras at people, and asking themselves questions of any capacity. It seems easy until you start to do it, and you realise - quite quickly - that theres so much more going on in the interview than meets the eye. Enjoy!