Monday 31 December 2012

Pass Me On: David Arnold


It took a while to get to David Arnold.  When I started Pass Me On it was a response, in part, to putting in requests to PRs and then them humming and hahing before deciding that because I wasn’t GQ there was no chance.  ‘Fuck you PRs’ I thought.  I’ll do it on my own by getting personal introductions to people, thus eliminating the middle man, ie you.  Without the help of a PR, it’s been so much easier.  It only took me four months to pin down David Arnold for an interview.  Sure there was this little project he had going on, something about closing ceremonies for the Olympics and Paralympics.  He had to get them out of the way first.  Oh sure, I thought, we’ve all got work to do right?  He’ll be able to find 15 minutes to talk to me.  We all say we’re busy don’t we?

I've changed the format of Pass Me On this time around.  The interviews always ended up being longer than 15 minutes and a friend advised that the Q&A format of the writing wasn't a great showcase for my feature writing skills.  Q&A was initially attractive because I liked the raw, uncensored nature of it.  When you read an interview in a magazine, to a certain extent you're being advised on what the interviewee is like because of the impression the interviewer is getting.  With Q&A the reader can make their own mind up.  The flip side of that is, although eavesdropping can be fun sometimes if the conversation is juicy enough, it can get boring if you're not interested in what those two people are talking about.  When you lay it out like a feature, you're trying to find things in the transcript that are interesting to everyone.  Make your own minds up about whether I was successful here.