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You are going to interview a famous or not-so-famous person and you want to make it unique. But a conversation even with the most interesting interlocutor can come out sluggish and boring if you don’t take care of the interview questions beforehand. Of course, not everyone can become the second Larry King. Nevertheless, there are techniques that once mastered, you can always “bail out”, even if the conversation suddenly failed. Today we will talk about these techniques.

Questions or topics?

Is it necessary to prepare a detailed list of questions for an interview in advance? Reputable journalists, who have learned a lot about interviews, say no. It is better to think out only the themes for discussion, and the questions are born in the course of the dialogue.

However, if you still lack experience in conducting interviews, or if you think that with prepared questions will be more comfortable to build a conversation, still make a list. It may also be easier for the speaker to prepare for the interview if he or she has the list in advance. Don’t make a drama out of it – if the interviewer is familiar with the questions before the interview, it doesn’t mean that the interview will end up flat and formulaic, with pre-prepared phrases. First, you can send not the entire list, but only the questions that the speaker needs in order to “raise” some information – for example, data about the company’s financial performance. Second, it’s impossible to know in advance what direction the conversation will eventually take, so you’re bound to have new questions in the course of the interview.

By the way, even the most thorough preparation of both parties does not mean that everyone will stick to “homemade”. The element of surprise has never been canceled, so things can go off-script. Breaking the pattern is not always a bad thing.

A striking example of this is the interview with the BBC radio host Chris Stark and Mila Kunis. The young journalist was very nervous because he had to communicate with the star, which he told her. “It’s not the same as chatting with friends in the pub that I’m used to,” Stark admitted. The journalist and actress then begin discussing cocktails, food, and soccer, and eventually Stark even asks her out on a date.

When Stark’s colleagues asked the star still talk about the initially planned topic – the movie “Oz: The Great and Powerful”, in which Kunis played a witch, she replied that she likes informal communication more. And at the end of the conversation, the actress admitted that it was one of the best interviews of her life.

YouTube video with the recording of this interview by now has collected 14 million views and more than 11 thousand comments, many Western publications wrote about it. And Chris Stark himself later made such an informal approach his thing.

Avoid platitudes

Before you start preparing questions for the interview, monitor the topics that were most often discussed with the hero by other journalists, and exclude them. No one wants to talk about the same thing a hundred times.

Most often stars complain about monotony. For example, Bruce Willis has repeatedly stated that he hates giving interviews, including because journalists ask the same questions. And Quentin Tarantino once got terribly angry when a journalist from the British Channel Four News Krishnan Guru-Murphy asked about the connection between violence in his films and violence in life. Tarantino said that he had been answering such questions since the beginning of his career and was not going to voice his opinion again. As a result, the interview turned into an aggressive verbal altercation.

Of course, such stories become high-profile, they are discussed a lot, videos are watched and commented on. And yet, it is unlikely that anyone would want to voluntarily be in the interviewer’s shoes at that very moment. So look for a fresh perspective on the topic, in general, make the questions interesting for the interlocutor. Try to think of the structure of your interview as a diagram: from soft questions to hard ones.

You also don’t need to ask the interlocutor obvious things. For example, where or what he works on, what his hobbies and family are, etc. Finding such information is part of the preparation for the interview. It is necessary to try to find out everything about the hero’s biography from open sources as much as possible. And only the things that the hero has never talked about you can specify.

Prepare some “just in case” questions

What to do if your interlocutor is verbose, gives short and one-word answers? Formulate in advance a few additional questions for the interview “just in case”. They will save the conversation and possibly help you get the character to talk. For example, ask the interviewee’s opinion about a recently released film or book.

Use useful tools

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when preparing interview questions, but you can use what others have already invented before you. For example, the rules of Canadian journalist and scholar John Sawatsky. Over many years, Sawatsky, together with his students, studied various interviews and analyzed them. As a result, he formulated three rules for good questions and made a list of the interviewer’s “Seven Deadly Sins.”

The three rules of good questions are

1. open-ended
2. Neutral
3. Short and uncomplicated to understand
   “The Seven Deadly Sins” by John Sawatsky.