Introduction: Interviews in Film and Television Studies

In receiving his Honorary Lifetime Membership Award at this year's SCMS conference in Chicago, Richard Dyer commented that cinema and media studies might be entering a period of "consolidation." These disciplines have certainly grown substantially over the last two decades, in terms of the number of students signing up for courses, the number of academics currently within the field, and the number of publications exploring cinema, television, and related fields. This has encouraged the development of a broad set of research questions as well as a variety of approaches and methodologies that not only respond to a changing media environment, but also enrich our understanding of film and television.

In recent years, film and television studies have been influenced by a variety of techniques common to other disciplines. For example, the adoption of historical approaches in film and television studies, alongside the growth of interest in oral history, and the influence of cultural studies have meant that methods employed in these disciplines are being adapted to suit our purposes. In particular, the use of interview material seems to be on the rise in studies of film and television. This trend prompted my decision to organize and chair a workshop panel on the topic of the practitioner interview at the annual SCMS conference in Chicago.¹ I hoped that this would not only provide an opportunity to reflect upon interviewing practices, but that I could learn more about what other academics are doing in this area.

The In Focus to follow was inspired by this workshop panel and here collects the thoughts of several academics who have recently, or are currently, carrying out interviews with practitioners as part of their research in film and/or television studies. Alongside these papers is a piece from the British journalist Mark Kermode. Given his extensive interviewing experience and knowledge of film and television, as well as the fact that he has published a number of academic pieces and addressed student audiences, his contribution is both informative and pertinent in this context. Kermode's commentary not only offers us a glimpse at the pressures, constraints, and goals of a working journalist, but also provides useful hints in considering our own interviewing practices.

In film studies qualitative research, the use of the interview has usually been confined to examinations of audiences. Audience studies have routinely included interviews of film viewers, although they often rely upon a quantitative component to build up a picture of actual audience reception to a particular film. In other words, a study like Martin Barker, Jane Arthurs, and Ramaswari Harindranath's The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception² relies on relatively large numbers of interviewees drawn from "the general public" in order to prove a point about the actual reception of a film, in combination with and in light of the critical reception apparent in surrounding media discourses. In this "top-down" approach, the audience is separated from the producer or maker of a film. While there is often an emphasis upon audiences as active or resistant, a distinct borderline is kept in place, and interviewees are not generally regarded as participating in the production process in any sense. In other areas of film studies, scholars have certainly made use of preexisting interview material with practitioners. For instance, star studies often refer to interviews (as gleaned from various fan magazines, the popular press, and so on) in connection with established star personae, but usually avoid direct contact with the performers themselves.

Of late, academics in various areas of film studies have also made use of what might be called semi-populist publications, which include extended and detailed interviews and commentary obviously intended for the serious reader or fan. Examples might include Chris Rodley's Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996); On Acting: Interviews with Actors, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Chloe Veltman (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2002) or Pascal Pinteau's Special Effects: An Oral History (New York: Harry Abrams Inc., 2004).³ Books like these are frequently consulted or referred to in academic studies and are used as...