My least favourite part of my job as a journalist is preparing for interviews. I like to imagine a snow-capped mountain peak in the distance: this peak is your basic level of knowledge about the life of your interviewee and it takes many hours to scale. Once you get to the top, grumpy and low on oxygen, another peak emerges: “stuff the interviewee, in all their years being interviewed, hasn’t talked about before; anything to make this one different”. Whether you ever reach this peak is another matter.
If your subject is very old, the research process is five times as long. I have an aversion to notes in interviews, and an obsession with making them look like spontaneous conversations, so I drill myself like an actor learning lines. I have also noticed the strange and unavoidable transference that occurs with the elderly subject: you become the child or grandchild, sitting at their feet. It feels almost disrespectful trying to draw them back to difficult psychological experiences that occurred decades earlier, when they’ve lived so much more of life than you have.
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