Andrew Denton
Andrew Denton asks us: "Life's tough, how are you going?"
Thursday, 25 August 2005
I've grown up watching Andrew Denton's shows on TV, always appreciating their wit, originality and strong human thread. So it made my decade when he agreed to be interviewed for ANZAPT.
The interview didn't disappoint. What I met was a fiercely intelligent, articulate and generous man whose motivation is a passionate belief in what he does. When Denton created " Enough Rope" he set out to establish a forum where ideas from across the moral and political spectrum could be discussed.
When I caught up with him earlier this month he and his team were coming to the end of a grueling 3rd season. I met a man who, despite a frame that spoke of agency and vigor, was starting to have the world weary look that we see on psych reg's at the end of a long stint in the Emergency Department, where they have been steeped in life's truths, trauma and triumph.
This is the fall out of the deep commitment Denton and his team have to really understand the people they are interviewing, in all facets of their life, all in the service of "connecting in a moment of honesty".Despite the fatigue, the usual wit plus an extra dose of black humor has been appropriated to cope, as the team roll on to provide our weekly digest of what is -the very best kind of reality TV.
What follows is a conversation loosely themed around " the art of the interview". I hope you enjoy
DK: There's obviously a lot of interest about people and personality in your interviews. Reading your book the interviews are so thoughtful and so informed about people and behavior. Where did you learn to interview?
AD: On the job. I had some key lessons from my father who was a very good writer and interviewer and, even as I was growing up, he used to talk about who was a really good interviewer and why. I remember that he used to talk about a man many years back on four corners called Michael Charlton who's famous technique, when he asked a politician a question and they gave an answer that he didn't think was likely, was to sit there, raise an eyebrow and leave a silence just long enough for them to fall into. If their next answer wasn't any better he'd raise the other eyebrow.Dad used to tell me the importance of not having a list of questions. Now everyone has a list of questions but he spoke about that not being the only thing you have. If you're not listening it's no good. I'm fortunate, not many people have "in house" training like that.
DK: It seems that before you even get to the interview stage there's a pretty good hypothesis about what makes the person tick. Where did you learn to formulate or construct hypotheses about people?
AD: I couldn't put a time on it. I always liked interviewing and from my earliest days I always felt I was capable of having a good take on people. I felt naturally that I could hear not just what they were saying but actually often hear what they meant, which is a different communication.So I always had various theories about interviewing. I find interviewing very interesting. I think it's a craft, I don't' think it's just a talent. I think it's a real craft and I think that Australian television is littered with examples of people who are asked to do interviews for programs and aren't equipped to do it.I have always been really interested in how to get people to open up in a way with which they're comfortable and I always found that comedy was a good way of doing that, but it was a limited way.It was good in some ways but not good in others and I suppose probably the first time I really applied my own thinking to a major interview was one I did with Paul Keating when he was Prime Minister. I had about an hour or so with him and I just prepared that by myself and that's the first time it's a mixture of an intellectual and instinctive approach. It's the first time I applied all of this plus comedy, plus a lot of research, because I think that's important. I think you want the person you are talking to feel honored that you've gone to the trouble to know a lot about them.So, look this might be a very bad interview, there is no short answer to your question, there is nowhere I learnt it. It's stuff I developed over the years and, particularly with this group of people, especially with a bloke called John Casmir. I happen to be working with a group of people who are prepared to do it the way I like to do it, which is that we approach every guest and every interview with a clean slate. With every person we ask, " what's their story", " what do we think is their story?" " What story do we actually want to address?" , so that for every interview there's kind of a map for it.
DK: "Hearing what people say and understanding what they mean". That's really related to tuning into everything that's going on, which also involves imagination while you're sitting there, letting your reverie work a little bit while you are actually there in the place and time. I don't know how you do it in front of an audience and studio. It's a tough performance!
AD: It can be, the toughest is when it's boring and sometimes it gets to just be boring. That's tough. Look I think it's much tougher to the guest than it is for me. I'd find it very difficult if the positions were reversed. But you see, and there's stuff I just can't explain Deeta, I can't explain it to me let alone anyone else. I think it is a difficult ask of the guest.There's something that happens in that transaction between us which is like I turn on a radar which is just for them and somewhere in that space between us I try to send out a message by looking them in the eye, by telepathy "we can talk, it's alright we can talk" and I don't know how I send it out and I am conscious that I send it out and I don't' know how they receive it, but often they do and I can't explain that. I don't know if it's to do with body language or tone of voice or what ever but I'm very conscious of doing it and I'm also conscious when I don't do it. There are days when I'm tired or when I've got a lot of nervous energy or I'm not relaxed in myself, we all have variable days at the office. I do too. And there are other days and other interviews where I feel totally locked into that person and I've got to say that long before I worked professionally I've always felt capable of doing it.
DK: I guess that comes back to the idea of attunement and, as a parallel in life, it starts between a parent and an infant. Children can't speak until they're 2 and you don't get a decent conversation until they're 3, but there's a great wealth of exchange that happens in those incredibly formative years.You can make connections and then there is a very pure flow between people, there are also the barriers and the boredoms. You can have continuities and discontinuities, which are something that we have to train to handle and to also, pick up and understand why they're happening, and why now. You say you have variable days at the office. But I imagine you're experiencing discontinuities or disconnections in some sort of way. What sort of approaches do you do to try and break that down or try and reconnect?
AD: That's actually the part where doing it in public becomes very difficult. When you have discontinuities in a private one-on-one situation, ultimately you can work very intensely with that person and the scrutiny is their own scrutiny and they're scrutinizing themselves and they're resisting themselves. So that's hard to work with privately, but it's really hard to work with in a public arena.I'm keenly aware that if they're blocking something, they're not just blocking because they don't want me to know, they don't want all these other people to know.There are various techniques, the most obvious one being to just let it rest, go somewhere else and come back and ask it a different way. Some times humor does it, sometimes there is a difference between what I do and what you do. You're analysing a person for their benefit. I'm interviewing a person for the general benefit and there are just some areas where I have to let it drop. It's not appropriate to keep pushing because I'm aware that what I'm trying to get is an overall interview and the worst thing that happens is that the guest just doesn't want to participate any more so it's a feel thing too. Sometimes someone might be hesitating or blocking but it's alright to push through, other times you think no they've come here with a big shield and it's not going to give anyone pleasure to see me get around it.
DK: Well that's the line call and that's the art, and I guess even though we engage in a therapeutic style interview (we do lots of different ones, risk, assessment etc.) often at that point we can't push either because it's a matter of trust and to do that would be experienced as a violation.
AD: The other thing I do and I think it's really important, and I actually think it's the key, which gets back to sending out signals, I very much believe that when a guest comes onto a show they're not coming onto my show or my set, they're coming onto a show where we're both on the set, we're both being scrutinized and I will try and react very honestly to what they say and if it will help the conversation I will say things about me.I will share my prejudice or my fears or my joys or what ever, some of which is done comedically, which is also a way to say to them (and I guess this is a technique you wouldn't use but is very effective in public) it's a way of saying to them "we're both being open".Some years ago I was launching a book of interviews that a friend of mine wrote called "Profiles" by a very good interviewer and journalist David Leser, and I said in the launch that it presents 20 profiles, but in fact there are 21 because the 21st one is him. He says he would hate to be interviewed but his voice is so clear throughout in everything he asks and I think it's really important for the guest and the audience and me to feel that I'm just as vulnerable as the guest is. So it's important for me to be prepared to be wrong, to be caught out, to be prepared to be embarrassed or shocked or surprised or moved or whatever. If I was to find one key thing that makes an interview like this work, when it works, is that. Because the theory of interviewing is that the interviewer is neutral where as I think it's important to show vulnerability.
DK: It's very interesting that you've come to that point organically because in parallel there's movement in analytical thought, (and they always use dreadful words that remove you from the actual meaning) it's called the analytic 3rd but it's basically that when 2 people come together in analysis that as a result of the conversation a new unique subject is unconsciously created that has been contributed to by both parties. In a way it creates this space, this unique human space.Along similar lines, I had the opportunity to talk to Don Watson earlier in the year about words and conversations and it was coming to that same point, that honest or authentic communication between two people not only constitutes the best kind of writing but is almost the engram of humanity. That if you're in a space where there is honesty and vulnerability you have something that is quite beautiful, very important and unique.
AD: You've just used the key word for me, which is honesty. Television is set up not to be honest, everything about television is false, from the lighting to the make up to the set. Everything is false and everybody kind of enters into that compact where it's just made up. But when you see an honest moment on television you are gripped by it because you know it, everybody knows it, straight away.Even though I have great reservations about it and refer to it as "exploitainment" I really think that is why Big Brother works because in part we know we're seeing the real thing and we know we're not meant to be seeing the real thing on television. The fact that it's crap is another story. It's appropriate that you mentioned that word because that's what we're going for, moments of honesty.A moment of honesty can be a pause, I remember this year, and this isn't a question I came up with one of our contributors, a very excellent writer Chris Beck, from the Melbourne Age, it was a question he came up with for Michael Stipe, the lead singer from R.E.M. And the question was relating to 2 of his closest friends, Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, both of whom died, and the question was something like " what was it about you that gave you the strength to survive when they didn't?" and his silence was about 12 seconds and that silence told me that what ever he was going to say next was going to be genuine, because he didn't have a ready answer and I don't think he'd been asked that or had even asked that of himself. Maybe he had and was trying to work out how to process it. And it's moments like those that are the core of what we are really trying to do.
Everybody is entitled to his or her view because that's all it is , ¦it's like a snap shot of a waterfall. We've just frozen that bit of the waterfall for a moment but life is cascading before and after, it's just that frozen moment and you can find great things in that frozen moment but it's not life, it's a representation of it.
DK: When I was talking to some friends and colleagues about coming to you they said "if religion is the opium of the people then television is the Valium" and, really, juxtaposed to all the other stuff you get on the other stations you have this honesty that you talk about, but you actually talk about the show being a forum, ¦ there's conscience, there's consciousness, morality and humanity as well. This is a bit of a rare space on television and it's been so tremendously successful and popular, were you actually surprised at that success at all?
AD: Look, I was surprised at the level of success, I think everyone was. So in terms of numbers and in terms of the machinations of television yes, I was surprised. But I wasn't surprised that it was responded to because it came from, ¦ virtually every TV show I've made, I've made it from the point of view that if I were the viewer, what would I want to see? That might be a selfish, arrogant way of viewing it but I have no other line to draw. And it came from taking time away from the media, seeing the rise of things like Big Brother and feeling very strongly that the most powerful medium of communication we have didn't seem to be addressing the most important things in any of our lives, particularly at a time when the world is fracturing and when community is more desirable and more elusive.I feel very strongly that we should have something that addresses the concept of community and the words you just used, morality, honesty, vulnerability, that wasn't a construct to sell to people, I really wanted to create a theatre where lots of different viewpoints could be heard, not just left wing or liberal view points, a whole range of view points, ¦ and it was really good to take time away because I was very influenced by 2 shows one on ABC Radio "A Search For Meaning" I bought a book of it and every time I would dip into it, it would make me think that people have the most amazing stories. Whoever you sit next to, if you care to listen, there is always an amazing story .there. That's something that I find very reassuring on one level and overwhelming on another -the intensity and potential richness of life.
DK: And the suffering too, you don't shy away from that. The show has often been a forum for people to tell their tale, give a tragic narrative -to show they've survived?
AD: That's right. And I think one of the things , ¦and I have certainly been, in the past, an angry guy about all sorts of things, outspoken, and I like to certainly make a comment about what's what, so one of the really good things about doing this is I have to strip that away from myself, and sometimes that's where I need to remember to be, ¦the realization that everybody has a good reason for what they've done, even if to me it doesn't seem like a good reason . The question is not "do I think is a good reason", surely a more interesting question is "what was your good reason, explain that to us," it doesn't mean that I'm going to agree with the reason or that anyone else will, but that's what I want to know.Pauline Hanson was a very good case in point and we spent an awful lot of time thinking about that. Politically I found her politics to be offensive, though I had admiration for her as a courageous woman. I really respected that, and even before she went to jail, I respected the fact that most Australians just whinge but she got up and took the slings and arrows and copped all that.We knew with our audience it was a very high risk interview.. But I thought what came out of it was a woman who, in her own heart, thought she was doing the right thing, but actually wasn't very smart. Which is a far more useful observation than was she right or was she wrong. Everyone's going to have an opinion about that anyway.What I wanted to know was "what was it like for her in the middle of that?" and in the end, remember, she was standing for the senate and if she got that senate position she would now hold the balance of power. I though it was a far more instructive interview for those that may be considering voting for her to see that she's out of her depth, than to see someone in the media having a go at her for being a racist.
DK: I picked up exactly that feeling and I got the feeling , ¦I sort of felt very sad at the end of the interview. I thought either "you can't look at the possible harm that has come from your views or don't' understand". You said in your book that before the interview you wanted to explore if she had been able to learn from what she'd been through and she hadn't really, except in a very clubbed way.
AD: No, but I think she is a good-hearted woman. She's the sort of person that if you were in trouble and she was your next-door neighbor she'd be the first there.
DK: And she'd organize all the other neighbors.
AD: I reckon, so I don't think of it as evil but I do think of her as a representative of probably quite a number of people in Australia. Not very well informed, scared, but far more dangerously in her situation, easily manipulated by people with a broader and darker view of the world, and to me that was the relevant thing.
DK: I guess that comes back to this idea of the authentic and honest narrative that resonates so strongly, because we live in such a sophisticated media, advertising and spin that allows us to tolerate all sorts of injustices. I wonder if there's almost this relief at reconnecting with a true and honest narrative.
AD: I think that there's been a lot of that and if you go to our website there's an incredible range of views" Love it", Hate you", ¦whatever, but they're talking and that's what it's meant to be.We're closing down with fear, we're closing down.The Palestinian woman, Suad Amiry, we had on the show, who had been in the siege of Ramallah, that's an example to me where I think the show's really good because one of the things we try to do is try to look to the left or right of news. And again we copped the predictable vats of boiling oil. You can't do the Middle East with out getting that, it sort of goes with the territory. But to me it's kind of like "You know what, where in the media do you hear a Palestinian voice and where do we hear reasonable Palestinian voices?"What I really loved about Suad Amiry was that she was not a zealot. The fact that she could sit there and say." Of all the people, the Israelis should know what this feels like", said everything about her. She understood them, could empathize with them and that made her view so powerful. So it was interesting. One of the nice emails we got was from an Israeli soldier who now lives here, that "that was the most balanced interview with a Palestinian and it's great to see it." And to those who objected, and there were many, my response is " You go and tell her, her life hasn't happened". It's her story. It's not the story of the Middle East, but it is her story.
I just think it's very useful to have a place where a lot of views are discussed without it being a slanging match. I'm prepared to wear the criticism of the show that it's too soft because I don't view things as soft and hard. I'm going for a different thing.I've grown up as a fan of people like Kerry O'Brien and a prosecuting interview. That's a great skill but that's not what I'm trying to do.
DK: It's not everything either, it has a tendency to polarize things rather than demonstrate the shades of grey.
AD:I actually think it does something else. I think we've got so used to that adversarial style that we tune out because in the end it's a tennis match. It's two base-liners slogging it out. We want to see someone come to the net, see somebody make something up, see somebody respond naturally and not do something they've been training to do 8 hours a day, 7 days a week.
DK: And there's no tolerance of not knowing, there's no space for that. Everyone's opinionated or a consultant. We see people who have to learn to tolerate not knowing, ¦
AD: I think not knowing is a very important thing. That's what I said before about my vulnerability. I can't go into an interview thinking I know. What I would rather is that I didn't know. I know I've done a lot of research but to me the great interviews are where I head somewhere I never expected.Recently I interviewed Kris Kristofferson and he started crying. It was total news to me about these two adopted children he had, I was just curious, he'd had so many children, then he adopted 2 more, particularly when he'd had such a chequered history with his own.And that was an astonishing moment. I felt very honoured, I don't know if that's the right word, I felt we'd shared a moment in his life, not a television moment. It was lovely the way he dealt with it and with that Johnny Cash comment and could laugh at himself and that was even more honest in a way.
DK: I guess quite a few of your guests "well up" or cry.
AD: Well, funnily enough I don't know what's happened in the last 5 or 6 months, so many people have started crying that we've started to edit it out. Everyone ends up being type cast and I don't' want to be known as the show where people cry. This sounds crass but it means we're doing our job. But I'm also aware, I've been working in the industry most of my life, how things can be viewed. I think it's great to have a cry, I love a cry, I think a cry's good.
DK: I think with the crying the better you get, the more it's going to be a hazard for you. You're basically exploring people's belief systems and the formative events in their life that got them there, and the more on your mark you are, the closer you're going to get to their core value system and their deeply held beliefs.
AD: Well I also think for a man like Kris Kristofferson they've been around and they've done a lot of interviews. It must be very different that someone goes to the trouble of understanding them.You say, " This is very important to you, tell us why, we'd like to know why?This is so important and I think that's a really nice thing to do for somebody because in the end, ask the same question of everyone: Life's tough, how are you going?" And that, ultimately, is what it's all about.I can honestly say that that is both my motivation and vulnerability in an interview: I really want to know what they're doing about getting through life because I'm buggered if I know the answer, and I don't even want to be, within myself, in judgment or some sort of superior position.I don't know, -and they've done things that I couldn't do or which I don't think I could do. So I ask them " How did you do that, or, how did you come to that point?"
ANZAPT are grateful to Andrew Denton for his generous contribution.
Deeta Kimber