by Lynn Barber
Some beginner journalists, especially men, I think, have difficulty with the ‘stance’ of interviews – they find it obscurely humiliating to be taking all this interest in someone else without getting any reciprocal interest back. They hope that an interview will be a meeting of minds, or, alternatively, a debate. It should not be. An interview is not the time to show off, or to express your own opinions. You are there to draw someone out, to get their views, their memories, hopefully their confessions, and the less you talk yourself, the better. Outsiders often don’t realise how constrained by time most interviews are. Nowadays you’re lucky to get any more than an hour with your subject. So any minute spent talking about yourself is a minute wasted. I remember years ago Julie Andrews, being friendly, asked if I had children and I said no. I knew that if I said I had two daughters she’d start asking their names and ages and five minutes would have gone. But also I think you are more effective as an interviewer if you divulge as little of yourself as possible.
To be a good interviewer you have to know yourself pretty well, and obviously age is an advantage here. To some extent I use myself as a sounding-board. I know how I normally feel, so if I come out of an interview feeling atypically depressed, or humiliated, or elated, I know it must be something my interviewee has said or done to make me feel that way. So when I transcribe the tape, I try to identify the moment when my mood changed, and what triggered it. I believe that emotions are to some extent catching, so I know that a depressed person will make me feel depressed, and an angry person will make me angry. The reason my interview with Martin Clunes (see next chapter) ended so badly was, I think, because he was seething with repressed anger from the beginning, and increasingly his anger transferred itself to me.
You can never hope to do a ‘definitive’ interview because interviews, by their very nature, are of the moment, and at the mercy of happenstance. You can convey what someone was like on the day you met them, but they can be very different on different days. When I interviewed the actor Rhys Ifans in 2011 I found him amusing, pleasant, sharply intelligent, and willing to talk candidly about his love life and his hopes of fatherhood. But Janice Turner interviewed him for The Times two years later and found him boorish, foul-mouthed and unwilling to answer any questions at all. Her Rhys Ifans was the exact opposite of mine. So was I wrong and she right? Was he putting on an act for me? Or was he, as his publicist said, suffering from ‘a bad reaction to antibiotics’ on the day Janice Turner met him? I don’t think there’s any clear-cut explanation. Rhys Ifans no doubt has different moods on different days – as we all do, but perhaps actors more than most – and I caught one mood and Janice Turner another. But that’s the joy of interviews – their infinite variety.
CHAPTER FOUR
Actors
Oh God, actors are difficult to interview. The trouble is they’re so fluent. They babble away unstoppably and you think you’ve got some quite interesting stuff, but when you transcribe the tape, and strip out all the funny accents, and the expressive gestures and the whole actory business, you realise you’re left with some very stale old anecdotes, which might work fine on a television chat show, but not on the page.
I should also confess that I have some psychological ‘issues’ with actors, stemming from my childhood. My mother had dreamed of being an actress but trained as an elocution teacher instead, so all her hopes of a thespian career were loaded on to me. She dragged me round poetry reading competitions from a very early age – I always hated them because I never won. But whereas she kept hoping I’d win next time, I recognised quite early on that I didn’t deserve to win, that there were people who were better than me and far more committed. But still my mother wouldn’t give up.
She was a big cheese in Richmond amateur dramatics and often found small parts for me in her productions so I spent a lot of time as a young teenager sitting quietly in the dressing room while actors carried on – and they did carry on – around me. It was almost like bird-watching – I could see these dramas unfold without ever being expected to participate. I observed then, and believe still, that actors almost by definition have to be self-deluding. They live in this strange optimistic bubble where they are still hoping to play Juliet in their fifties (of course in Richmond amateur dramatics circles they sometimes did) or believe they will be discovered by a great Hollywood producer while they are playing fourth spear-carrier from the left. They keep the whole bubble afloat by telling each other they are wonderful, darling, when quite patently they are not. I hated the whole falseness of it and it upset me that my mother fell for these delusions. I wanted to say, ‘Look, why can’t you be realistic like me and Dad, why do you fill your head with this mush?’ Theatre was like a lover who lured her away from us and I resented it. So that is why I have a problem with actors.
And having a problem with actors is quite a big problem in my job because there are so many of them – hardly a week passes in which I am not offered an interview with the latest hot new thing, and when all other efforts fail, it is very easy to fall back on them. And then they tell you that really they’re very shy, and playing this role is like climbing Everest, and you want to bang your head on the wall and scream, ‘Shut UP!’
I also find it difficult to tell which actors are any good – I have to take other people’s word for it. I never go to the theatre. (Was it Martin Amis who said why go to the theatre when you can stand on a street corner in the rain and watch the cars go by? My feelings precisely.) Consequently I never know their ‘work’ or, basically, what they are talking about. Obviously if they’ve made films, I can watch them on DVD, but I still don’t really know why some actors are considered good and others rubbish – it all seems much of a muchness to me, unless they’re so bad they’re funny.
All journalists dread the hotel circus, when a film company puts a herd of actors in a hotel for a day to plug their new film and expects them to give interviews from dawn to dusk. The journalists are corralled in one suite, a sort of holding pen, with pots of cooling coffee and stale buns, and then led out one by one for their allotted ten or fifteen minutes with the star, with the proviso that they also have to interview the lesser fry along the corridor later. There’s a fairly accurate scene of a hotel circus in the film Notting Hill, where Hugh Grant is given ten minutes to interview Julia Roberts with a PR breathing down his neck – except the big inaccuracy is that he is given ten minutes when he is only meant to be from Horse & Hound.
The other problem with actors on these publicity treadmills is that they’re often talking about a film they made two or more years ago, which they’ve almost forgotten. Sometimes they’ve made three or four more films since then, and often they’ve made a better film which is the one they want to talk about – which is precisely why there is a PR sitting in the room to prevent them doing that.
They are so zonked by doing non-stop interviews that often they will repeat an anecdote they’ve already told you word for word, or else start an anecdote and then forget the ending. Often they have no idea what country they are in. At least twice (once with Audrey Hepburn, once with Lynn Redgrave) I’ve felt that my interviewee was so exhausted and emotionally fragile I really should be calling an ambulance rather than asking questions. But still the PR sits there stony-faced, forcing these poor knackered ponies to jump through their publicity hoops.
The only question I’ve found that occasionally works in these hotel circuses is to ask the actor what they would be doing if they were at home this minute. Of course they are so disoriented you often have to tell them what time of day it is, but you are sometimes rewarded with a rush of homesickness, and they will talk nostalgically about collecting the kids or going to their yoga class or taking flying lessons, which at least gives you a glimpse into their real lives. But then the PR cracks the whip and they are back to talking about their wretched film.
And of course it’s an article of faith that they never slag off the director, or other actors – everyone they work with is always ‘wonderful
’, at least while they are plugging the film. I’ve found a fairly fruitful question is: Which other actor on the film did you most admire, or most enjoy working with? Invariably they nominate someone who had such a tiny part you never even noticed them. (Though when I interviewed Robert Redford about The Horse Whisperer he couldn’t bring himself to praise any of his fellow actors, not even the horse.) So then you ask: What about your co-star? And they go into a predictable rap about what a joy it was to work with Meryl/Judi/Jessica, whoever. At this point, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty: Which of you knew your lines best? And you can see doubt and confusion spread across their perfect features, as they struggle between the Scylla of saying that of course they knew their lines best, and the Charybdis of dissing a fellow actor. Eventually they arrive at the formula ‘we all knew our lines perfectly’ but it can take a long time.
Another good question is: Who did you have dinner with most nights on location? They daren’t say their co-star because it would sound as if they were having an affair; on the other hand, they don’t like to say their stunt double because it sounds as if they’re gay. Safest answer is the director – though actually the last thing most directors want is to spend evenings with their actors. The truthful answer is probably with room service but again, they don’t like to say that because it sounds pathetic.
Basically, there is almost no way into the inner life of actors and God knows I’ve tried. But it’s maddening because I think that, even if their personalities are dull, their lifestyles are hugely interesting. I like the fact that they’re essentially nomads, prepared to go almost anywhere for a part, who will spend weeks or even months in some backwoods town in Romania or Newfoundland where I will never go. But when you ask them what Newfoundland was like, they start talking about the bloody role, and it’s obvious they’ve never noticed Newfoundland. I suppose it’s inevitable: they get collected from their hotel before dawn, and driven to the location, back after sunset, they probably only have the vaguest idea what country they are in.
But because actors are so international they’re often in the vanguard of all the latest trends. I remember Oliver Stone telling me about sweat lodges and Ayurvedic medicine long before these were common currency, and Ruby Wax showing me her Notting Hill house done up in ‘Sante Fe style’ before I’d even heard of such a thing. I saw my first-ever glass washbasin in Elaine Paige’s penthouse. There is often a time lag of two or three years before such innovations begin appearing in the style magazines. And of course actors are always up to speed with the latest forms of psychobabble and rehab-speak which I always enjoy hearing.
I can’t now remember who was the first actor I ever interviewed, but I do vividly remember my first trip to Hollywood in 1983. It was to interview the actor James Stewart, who was seventy-five and long retired, but Universal Studios was reissuing four of his major Hitchcock films – Rope, Vertigo, Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much – which had been suppressed at Alfred Hitchcock’s request for twenty years. (One theory about why Hitchcock withdrew them was to keep them off television.) The studio paid for my trip which was fabulous – first-class flight to Los Angeles, limo to meet me, suite at the Bel-Air Hotel – but when I arrived there was a note from the studio to say that unfortunately Mr Stewart had a slight cold and would like to postpone the interview till the day after tomorrow. Fine by me.
The PR rang and asked how I would like to spend my free time, and I said I’d like to see Los Angeles, and he said of course the limo was at my disposal, so I spent an idyllic day being driven round Los Angeles. I asked to go to Venice Beach and the chauffeur seemed a bit reluctant – he said that last time he’d been there he was driving a famous director’s children, and they’d seen a man shot dead as soon as they arrived. The children loved it apparently, but the driver was pretty shaken. The next day the interview was postponed again – Mr Stewart was still ill – so the PR suggested I go on the Universal Studios tour which was good fun, seeing the Psycho house and all the rest of it.
Eventually Mr Stewart was fit for interview and I went to his house in Beverly Hills. I must say the house was disappointing – a sort of Tudorbethan Agatha Christie job that could just as well have been in Esher. But he was as lovely as everyone said he would be. He was rather deaf and of course famously slow-talking, so he didn’t exactly gush away but he talked fondly about his father, who kept a hardware store. His father came to stay with him in Hollywood after the war and asked, ‘Where do you go to church around here?’ James Stewart confessed he didn’t think there was a Presbyterian church around there so his father went for a walk and came back forty-five minutes later with four men who were elders of the Presbyterian church. They explained that they didn’t have a church building, but they had a minister and a congregation and they held services in private homes. ‘Wa . . . all,’ said Mr Stewart, ‘to make a long story short, I ended up helping to build that church, and Gloria and I were married in that church.’
Towards the end, I raised the question of when he would do photographs. The studio had been pussy-footing on this, never giving a straight answer. Mr Stewart explained that he was awaiting a new hairpiece, and he couldn’t be photographed till it was fitted. (This might have been the reason he postponed the interview.) But, I told him, he looked fine without it. Yes, he said, but he looked old. But, but – how could I frame this tactfully? – given that he was seventy-five, who could really expect him to look young? ‘Fans,’ he said soberly. ‘It upsets the fans. They want you to look exactly as they remember you. If you look old, it makes them feel old. It is unkind, it is selfish, to let oneself go.’
It turned out that he wasn’t willing to do photographs at all, and when I persisted, he turned suddenly grouchy and said, ‘The studio must have photographs, what happened to all those photographs? I can’t be expected to sit around all the time doing head shots, I just won’t do it.’ So afterwards I asked the studio if they had any recent photographs of Jimmy Stewart, preferably without his toupee. I might have said without his clothes on, they were so shocked. ‘Without his lid on? Oh no. He IS a star, you know.’ James Stewart himself once said of being a star, ‘I take it as a sort of responsibility,’ and for him it seems that responsibility included not only keeping his private life immaculate, but also never allowing himself to be photographed without a toupee. We used an old studio portrait in the end.
Dirk Bogarde gave me a similar lecture about the need to maintain film-star standards. When I interviewed him in 1987 he had stopped being a film star and had forged an excellent new career as a writer. Consequently I expected him to behave like a writer – but he didn’t, he was still a film star. He insisted on having a chauffeur-driven limo deliver him to Claridge’s for tea, where the Penguin publicist would be on hand to greet him and his personal publicist would sit in on the interview.
He told me that when he did his first book publicity tour for Chatto, they were gob-smacked at the expense. ‘But I was a film star and I wanted what I’d always had – the black limo, the best hotels, everything on the dot, and every door opened for me so that I would never, ever be late. The publishers couldn’t twig it at all. I warned them. When Lauren Bacall came over to publicise her book, I said, “Look, she’s not used to sitting in the back of the rep’s car with a lot of dirty nappies. She wants the full treatment.” Of course, they didn’t believe me – until they sent the Datsun and she simply refused to get in.’
But why do you have to be like that, I wailed – is it just vanity? ‘No, because it’s more efficient that way. And image counts – of course it does. It doesn’t matter to me if I travel in the rep’s car, but it does matter to the public who expect you to arrive like Cinderella in a coach. They’re disappointed if you don’t.’
Ah, the public, the public. Who are these mysterious people? They never seem to include me, or anyone I know. And yet actors are forever talking about the public, or even their public, these anonymous cohorts of little people whose very happiness depends on seeing the
ir stars in toupees and limousines. I notice that pop stars, artists, writers don’t do it – they might talk about their fans, but they never claim ownership of this mysterious entity ‘the public’. I asked Dirk Bogarde: What is the role of the journalist in all this? To puncture the image or to sustain it?
‘I never know what the role of the journalist is,’ he sighed.
I don’t either, but one thing I’ve long suspected is that all actors secretly hate journalists. This was confirmed to me when I interviewed Martin Clunes.
From the Sunday Times, 1 April 2012
This is the story of a love affair and its ending. My love affair was with Doc Martin, the ITV series about a brilliant surgeon who has to resign his hospital job when he develops a phobia about blood, and moves to a Cornish village (Portwenn in the script; Port Isaac in reality) to become a GP. The first series went out in 2004, and there have been four more since, but I only discovered it about a year ago, and caught up on DVDs. At first it was my guilty secret but then I asked a few friends if they’d ever seen it. No, was the sniffy answer, often accompanied by some hurtful remark on the lines of, ‘But I do sometimes watch Poirot.’ Poirot indeed!
So then I casually asked on Twitter whether anyone apart from me loved Doc Martin and was bombarded with tweets for days. It turns out there are millions of Doc Martin fans, not just the nine million who watch it here, but millions more in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They make little YouTube compilations of their favourite Doc Martin clips and discuss whether the doctor and Louisa can find lasting happiness. There is even a docmartinstore website offering Doc Martin toffee and blood-effect mouse mats and mugs saying ‘Stop talking’ and ‘Make an appointment’.