People in music, movies, comedy especially… I’ve come to love interviews all by themselves, even finding leisure from those whose music or movies I might not like. Or people whose work I like, but who are even more interesting in an interview setting (Orson Welles, Sam Peckinpah, even Cassavetes, one of my favorites). I even keep a list of interesting people so that once every month or so, I can look up the latest interview, and it’s a great feeling when something is uploaded. I actually saw an Orson Welles Show (pilot) that was never made, but the video was taken down a few weeks later, and then re-uploaded right after Burt Reynolds, who he interviewed. The interview was good, and I think that could have been great, but the rest of the show was awful.
Here’s a great recent one with Mort Sahl being interviewed by Elliot Mintz (three-part interview)
I enjoyed Kevin Smith’s recent interview on Colbert, although it might be more properly classified as a monologue, because once pleasantries were exchanged, I don’t recall Colbert getting a word in. Not that that’s a bad thing, because Smith was in the zone. He spent the interview talking about the heart attack he had had earlier in the year. The type he suffered is known as being the most frequently fatal. Smith recounted with some amusement that the doctor told him that he survived, in part, because he was so high at the time. It meant that he was able to stay calm when most people would’ve been flipping out.
Adam Savage, from the Mythbusters is strangely a really good interviewer, though he has only done it a few times that I know of. This one with John Cleese, in particular, I thought was quite good, particularly considering that I’m not a Python fan and John Cleese has almost certainly given so many interviews in his life that I’m sure that bore him to tears, so just getting a moderately good interview out of him should be quite the effort:
