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    How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else
    How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else
    How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else

    By Jason Arnopp

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    About this ebook

    Want to learn how to interview people as a journalist? Or maybe you're a pro in need of a refresher course, with some fresh ideas thrown in. Let HOW TO INTERVIEW DOCTOR WHO, OZZY OSBOURNE AND EVERYONE ELSE be your guide!

    Drawing on 25 years of experience and with over 1000 interviews behind him, British writer JASON ARNOPP aims to tell you everything he knows about interrogating the great and good. He has spent these decades interviewing celebrities and rock stars for the likes of Heat, Doctor Who Magazine, Q, SFX and Kerrang!, but the vast majority of the principles described here will apply to ANY journalistic interviewing task. You need this book in your toolbox!

    Written in an engaging, conversational style, HOW TO INTERVIEW... packs in over 28,000 words of practical wisdom. You’ll learn about the craft of interviewing, all the way from deciding how you’ll record your interviews, to devising questions, to dealing with various types of interviewee, to writing and editing your article.

    Beyond that, however, you’ll get a real feel for what it’s like out there on the front-line. The surprises which PR folk may spring on you when you arrive to conduct your interview. The challenge of getting a reluctant, or even downright angry, interviewee to warm to you and open up. Even what to do when you realise that your recording device has failed to record the interview!

    Sections in the book include the following:

    Three Things You'll Need To Refer To During The Interview

    Five Qualities That Make For A Good Interviewer

    Seven Ways To Set Your Interviewee At Ease

    The Eight Types Of Interviewee

    Interviewing With An Audience

    Fandom Vs Professionalism

    The PR Establishes A No-Go Area

    Can An Interviewee Ever Become Your Friend?

    Underhand Tactics & Grey Areas

    Becoming A Fly On The Wall

    The Dreaded Roundtable Interview

    Alcohol

    Nightmare Situations

    Transcription: A Necessary Evil

    How Verbatim Do You Need To Be With Those Quotes?

    The Structure Of An Interview Article

    Author Arnopp even throws in a personal guarantee. If you buy this book and are left with questions, he’ll answer them via a Formspring account exclusive to purchasers.

    Learn the JOURNALISTIC SECRETS of interviewing, with this incredible, indispensable volume! If you sat the author down in a bar, bought him drinks and picked his brains, leading scientists estimate you'd pay ten times as much as the price of this book!

    TESTIMONIALS

    "This guide to interviewing is tremendous fun, with some genuine insight into the whole process. Fascinating stuff, and properly amusing too. Brilliant!" - TOM SPILSBURY (Editor of DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE.)

    "With a great sense of humour and a sharp ear for the telling quote, Jason Arnopp is an interviewer who always gets the goods. Read and learn” - ANDREW HARRISON (Editor-At-Large of Q, former Editorial Director of MIXMAG and SMASH HITS.)

    "Boy, I wish this book had been around when I started out. You can buy it as a PDF direct from the author for less than the cost of most magazines, and I'd advise new journalists to do so" - CATHERINE BRAY (FILM4.COM editor)

    "Jason Arnopp is one of those ludicrous, funny people who manages to get the most reticent of stars to tell him things that they really shouldn't. As a journalist, he is blessed with a remarkable bedside manner. He might be able to teach you a thing or two” - PHIL ALEXANDER (MOJO Editor-In-Chief and former KERRANG! Editor.)

    “It was my very happy experience to work with and read Jason Arnopp for a number of years on Kerrang! One singular thing marked Jason apart in his field – he had the invaluable ability to ask the unexpected question that caught both subject and reader off guard, and unfailingly meant you found out something new about whomever he was interviewing" - PAUL REES (former Editor of Q and KERRANG!)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJason Arnopp
    Release dateSep 20, 2015
    ISBN9781310263309
    How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else
    Author

    Jason Arnopp

    Jason Arnopp is a novelist, scriptwriter and sometime journalist. He has contributed fiction to the worlds of Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Friday The 13th. His most recent release is the Orbit Books novel Ghoster. Before that came The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, which is now in movie development at Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment.Arnopp wrote the 2011 Lionsgate US horror feature Stormhouse and script-edited the 2012 Peter Mullan film The Man Inside. He is also the author of books including Beast In The Basement, A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home, Auto Rewind and How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else. He lives in Brighton, UK, with a stupidly large collection of old-school VHS.

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      Book preview

      How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else - Jason Arnopp

      How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne & Everyone Else

      All material contained within copyright © Jason Arnopp, 2011. All rights reserved.

      Cover by Caroline Fish.

      Visit the author's website and follow him on Twitter.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Chapter One: Overview Of An Interviewer

      Chapter Two: Preparation

      Chapter Three: Arriving At The Interview

      Chapter Four: Conducting The Interview

      Chapter Five: Other Kinds Of Interview

      Chapter Six: Writing The Interview

      Chapter Seven: The Joy Of It All

      Appendix: 50 Handy Interview Questions

      About The Author

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      This book is the product of over two decades of talking to people while recording the conversation, then writing about it.

      With that in mind, I technically have a lot of people to thank. For your sake, though, I’ll keep it brief and general. After all, you’ve bought my book and are therefore my new best friend (unless you downloaded it off a torrent site, in which case I’ll still give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’ll find How To Interview… so damn useful that you’ll do the right thing afterwards and buy it, in order to help me do things like pay bills, etc), so the last thing I’d want to do is bore you.

      Thanks to every editor who commissioned me to interview people.

      Thanks to every person who allowed me to interview them.

      Thanks to all the photographers with whom I went on trips. Especially Ray Palmer, who will never be forgotten, and Paul Harries.

      Thanks to every PR person, manager, tour manager and entourage member who went out of their way to be constructive, as opposed to obstructive.

      Thanks to Chuck Wendig, Ray Zell and William Gallagher, who really helped with the development of this book, offering fine thoughts and critiques.

      Thanks to former Kerrang! art designer Caroline Fish for the splendid book cover.

      Thanks to my amazing girlfriend Esther, my friends, my folks and you – yes, YOU – for reading.

      And that’s enough acknowledgements. This book is all about telling you everything I know about interviewing – not waxing lyrical about my career. Although I’ll throw in a little of that from time to time, for flavour, to provide examples and, hopefully, to entertain you.

      INTRODUCTION

      Interviewing people is something of a dark art. Not because occult worship is involved – not in the vast majority of cases, anyway – but because outside of journalist school, there’s generally no–one to teach you how. You have to find your own way. This is actually a good thing, in terms of allowing you your own individual approach, but the fact remains that there are plenty of things about the interviewing process that not even journalist school will tell you. For instance:

      How to deal with a PR person sitting right next to you, while you try to establish a rapport with your interview subject. How to deal with an interviewee who hates your magazine, newspaper or website. How to deal with fly–on–the–wall assignments. How to cope upon discovering that an interview hasn’t actually recorded. How to cope when your interviewee produces a gun.

      (That last example has only happened to me once. If you’re going to interview Glen Benton, the frontman of a Satanic death metal band named Deicide, then you have to expect such wacky shenanigans. Blaze Bayley of the band Wolfsbane also once jammed a knife into the table between two of my fingers. Hopefully guns and knives are not things you’ll need to worry about these days. At least not in an interview situation.)

      This book aims to answer all of the questions about interviewing people that you could possibly have, plus plenty more that you haven’t thought of. It is mainly geared towards interviewing artists of various descriptions, since that’s my background – interviewing rock stars, authors, actors, directors, stars of TV and film – but the vast majority of principles and information covered here can just as easily be applied to quizzing the winner of the annual Biggest Marrow competition for your local ‘paper.

      I’ve been involved with journalism for 23 years. I started off on the UK’s rock weekly Kerrang! back in 1988, working for them as a freelancer for 11 years, then on the staff for three. I spent the 1990s travelling around the world, interviewing every musician I stumbled across. From 2000 onwards, I moved more into entertainment journalism, writing for the likes of heat, The Word, Q, Doctor Who Magazine, Bizarre, SFX, Mixmag and FHM.

      In Doctor Who world, I’ve interviewed Matt Smith, David Tennant, Peter Davison, Tom Baker, Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Karen Gillan, Elisabeth Sladen, Alex Kingston and plenty more.

      Rock–wise, I’ve pushed tape recorders towards the likes of Bon Jovi, Metallica, Slash, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Eminem (yeah, so he’s rap, but my rap sheet is quite short), Korn, Slipknot and Marilyn Manson.

      Over in Mainstream Celebsville I’ve quizzed such TV royalty as Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon Osbourne, Piers Morgan, John Hurt, Dermot O’Leary, Catherine Tate, Graham Norton, Michael Parkinson, John Barrowman and many more.

      Okay, that’s enough listing. I wouldn’t like to try and count the number of interviews I’ve conducted in my time, but it’s probably over 1,000. Hopefully, that qualifies me to pass on some meaningful thoughts about the various situations I’ve encountered along the way, the techniques I’ve used – both in terms of the interview itself and the writing of it – and the ways in which the business of interviewing people has changed along this long road. It’s a slightly different playground out there these days, and you need to be ready for it, Torchwood–style. This book aims to armour you right up, against whatever the sometimes fraught world of interviews has to fire in your general direction.

      No two ways about it – interviewing people for print (or web – for the purposes of this book, we’re going to take ‘print’ to include ‘web’) is an odd way to earn a living. You're essentially a gigantic conduit for the interviewee’s words, equipped with multiple filters – some of which you should actively use and some which you should arguably (and often legally) deactivate.

      You’re quizzing people about their lives. Stuff they've done, stuff they think about, stuff they think about stuff they've done... and then you're presenting these people as you saw them, via the written word, while (hopefully, if you don't want to be suspended from your newspaper for a spell) presenting their accurate quotes in the correct context. You are the lens through which your interviewee will be seen by thousands of people. With great power comes great responsibility.

      This book aims to help you prepare for an interview in the correct way. Conduct the interview itself like a smooth pro, then write it up in a manner which fully captures the magic of the chat itself. I’ll be mainly concerning myself with face–to–face interviews, as those are always ideal. Later, though, I’ll add some thoughts on chats via e–mail and phone, as well as many different types of interview situations and interviewees.

      I should mention the obvious caveat: this book is very much written from my point of view. There are many different ways to approach interview journalism and, while I’ll try not to be horribly prescriptive, you should bear in mind that I’ll often be telling you how I would do things myself. I wouldn’t say I was a particularly left–field journo, but nevertheless, just because I suggest something, it doesn’t mean you have to do that – especially if it gets you into trouble. I can’t be held responsible for celebrities or local MPs throwing tantrums after you follow my advice – although if my advice reaps you great rewards, then I’ll totally be responsible for that. Yes.

      If this book leaves you with questions unanswered, then I apologise in advance, but I’m going to endeavour to cover all bases and include as much detail as possible. If I fail, then I’ve set up a special Formspring account, exclusive to buyers of this book, through which you can ask me about anything I haven’t covered. Details at the end.

      Right, then. Ready? Is the recorder in your brain whirring?

      Good. Let’s

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