Formal sit-down interviews often feel like a chess game. The person across from you is making moves, adjusting, protecting certain squares. But the goal is not to overpower them or force your way past their defenses. More often, the real work is helping them forget they are playing chess to begin with.
The moment someone sits in the chair, self-consciousness takes over. They become acutely aware of how they look, how they sound, whether they seem intelligent, composed, or in control. That’s why the hardest part of an interview is not asking the question. It’s pulling someone out of that self-monitoring loop and into a real conversation.
The goal is not just to extract information. It’s to get someone to stop managing themselves long enough for something more honest to appear. That can be difficult in a room full of lights, cameras, and crew, but it is one of the interviewer’s most important jobs. And a lot of it comes down to power.
Interviews Begin in Self-Consciousness
A lot of people think the interviewer has to assert control, pin the subject down, and steer them toward the exact lines the film needs. In the worst cases, people will even feed those lines to the interviewee and call it a day. It may get you a usable quote. It may even get you the beat you need for the cut. But it often does a disservice to the story.
Because the second someone feels controlled, they tend to close up. They become more guarded, more strategic, more aware of what they should or should not reveal. Dominance might get compliance, but it rarely gets truth.
That’s where what I think of as the palms-up interview comes in.
The phrase comes from body-language psychology around handshakes, something I learned when dealing with corporate clients, specifically a few well-known CEOs.
A palm-down handshake is often read as dominant, a way of establishing control immediately. A palm-up handshake reads as more open, more deferential, more willing to give the other person space. Whatever you think of corporate body-language games, the larger idea holds: people tend to reveal more when they do not feel overpowered.
Come In Palms Up
For me, a good interview often starts by giving away more agency than you might think.
Louie Theroux is a master of this. He rarely walks into a room trying to overpower it. He often comes in vulnerable, awkward, or a little clueless. He asks the obvious question. The question that might make him seem less like an interrogator and more like someone who genuinely needs the subject to explain their world to him. That shift matters. It gives the subject somewhere safer to stand.
By seeming open, curious, even slightly naïve, he creates a dynamic where the subject feels like the one with knowledge and control. And because they feel safer, they often reveal far more than they would if he had come in aggressively trying to crack them open. The answers do not just become informative. They become revealing.
That’s the real key. Interviews are not just about information gathering or plot delivery. They are about character.
A person reveals themselves not only through what they say, but through how they say it. Through hesitation. Through drift. Through the way they evade, correct themselves, relax into a memory, or suddenly lose language altogether. The pauses matter. The body language matters. The silence between questions can tell you as much as the answers themselves.
Too many interviewers rush to fill that silence. But silence is often where the person stops performing and something more human starts to surface.
Character Lives Between the Answers
And sometimes the truest version of that character only appears when the subject is placed back inside the environment where they feel most alive.
One of the clearest examples of this for me came while filming The Selling Stage with LuFisto. You might assume that home would be the place where the most personal interview happens. And those interviews gave us something valuable. But the ring was different.
The ring was where her body knew exactly what to do. It was the place where performance and truth stopped feeling like opposites. It was where memory was no longer just being dug up. It started to become lived-in. It was the place where she felt most in control, and because of that, it became the place where she was most emotionally open. It was the only place where she cried during an interview.
That taught me something important. The strongest interview does not always happen in the most neutral or conventional setting. Sometimes it happens in the place where the subject feels most like themselves and in a state where they feel like they are in control.
An interview is never just a delivery system for information. It is a space where self-consciousness, power, environment, and character are all negotiating with each other in real time. The more willing I am to let go of dominance, the more likely I am to get something deeper than a clean answer. I get the person. And that is usually where the story actually lives
-Adam
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