Now engaged in a marathon publicity junket for his new film "Up in the Air," director Jason Reitman ("Juno," "Thank You For Smoking") has been flying around the country doing interviews. Lots of interviews. Gang-bang interviews (as they are known in the trade) and one-on-ones. Through the magic of Twitter, he published two pie charts listing the most-asked questions. (Thought experiment: Imagine being asked the same questions over and over for days or weeks and answering them so that you sound like you care what you're saying.)
Roger Ebert has posted his questions here. After the jump: The 11-20 most-asked questions, and my own Venn diagram!
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I'm trying to work out if your diagram makes sense. In it, you have the set "Unheard Questions" and the set "New Questions". The intersection of the two you call "Questions asked before". How can "questions asked before" be included in "new questions" and "unheard of questions"?
Perhaps you're defining the sliver of blue "new questions" and the sliver of orange "unheard of questions". In that case, what are the two sets independent from each other?
That's as far as the logic in my brain is willing to go this evening, I'm afraid.
JE: It's because I was in a hurry and didn't do it right! Back to the drawing board...
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As somebody who's interviewed a fair amount of celebrities for a local paper, I just wanted to point out that interviewers are not necessarily being lazy or unoriginal. They have to present a story to an audience that may not know anything about the subject. It's not a small group of cinephiles. It's the general public. You have to assume they haven't heard of the project at all. You can't ask a bunch of obscure questions about individual trees and ignore the forest. The best you can do is try to make it as interesting and engaging as possible, and maybe think up some new angles to ask about the same old things.
It's really such an odd dance, to have this conversation with someone where neither person is "themselves" yet at the same time you must do away with almost all formalities and get at the heart of the matter. Chuck Klosterman has a nice essay on this in the first chapter of his new book.
Heheh. I still don't get it, but I think it's more logically sound. I don't know what "one place" and "another place" refer to.
Heheh. I still don't get it, but I think it's more logically sound. I don't know what "one place" and "another place" refer to.
If I interpret Jim's diagram correctly, he's talking about two different hypothetical interviews (the "one place" and "another place"). Most of the questions in the two interviews will be in common. Of the questions that remain, some will be genuinely new, and some will be just be indecipherable. The problem with the venn diagram is that it is suggesting that only one of the interviews is responsible for the new questions, and only the other is responsible for the indecipherables, which I'm assuming is not intended.
But I may be wrong.
JE: Or I may be because I'm just bad at Venn diagrams. All I meant was that, out of any two groups of interviews (in different cities) most of the questions would overlap.
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