| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Martin Smith Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 8
Take any one of these stories that you mentioned, the way it germinates and develops over time. Is the first stage a lot of research about what people are saying happened or didn't happen? What does that first phase look like?
It's a lot of research. It's a lot of reading. Even more than that, it's calling people and going out and meeting people. You have so much time. You don't have a ton of time, so you can't read every book, but you can talk to a lot of authors and you can talk to a lot of players, primary sources, the politicians and what-not. So there's usually an intensive research period.
Some films are different. For the one that we're going to talk about tonight, "In Search of Al Qaeda," I had two weeks before I went out. I filmed the research, so that was very different. But, generally, for a one-hour Frontline, there's an intense, long period of research. There are several research trips, where you go and you pre-interview sources, you sort the good from the bad, the people who are going to be useful in telling the story. You look at locations, you scout places, you figure out what's possible, and you do a lot of those kinds of work. And then you come back with a crew on a second go-round. And then you film it all, and then you come back with the editing. But there's a pretty intense period of research and, sometimes, a pretty large staff digging into stuff.
Is there a particular problem in the fact that you have a set of ideas
you want to convey but you have to do it with images? In other words, the storytelling
is visual and the images have to be gathered, then collected, and then put together
in a way that does 
not
become the tail that wags the dog, so to speak. What's that problem like?
With a little bit of thought, you can always find a way to illustrate a story. I've never wanted to shy away from a story, if it was a good story, because I was afraid that there weren't enough images. For instance, in "Dot Con" there are not a lot of images to illustrate some of the financial mechanisms that we were trying to explain. In the IPO process, for instance, we got deep into the process by which companies were being pushed out into the public before they were ready, this kind of massive, mugging process of unsuspecting investors. We don't have pictures of that, per se, but the story is a good one: scandalous behavior on the part of banks pushing these stocks. We went ahead and did it, and we found a way. I had a very good editor, Ben Gold, who helped me put that together. There are a lot of tools in your kit now, especially here in 2003. It's just so much easier than it used to be.
In terms of the mobility of the equipment, the editing ...?
And now the ability of the editing process that you can go down blind alleys and reverse it and come back, and recut. It's just much easier. You remember what it was like to write a paper on typewriter. You had stop and think before you started, before you put down that first sentence. But now you just sort of start in the middle and work your way out.
You can cut and paste.
Yes. That's one thing that Frontline knows. They did something called "The Great American Bailout," about the savings and loan debacle. You find the images. There's nothing better or any more powerful than a compelling interview. And you certainly can always find that.
So I don't think about the images as much as you might think I would, since I put a heavy emphasis on craft and filmmaking. In the initial stages, they will come. They'll be suggested by the material. We'll figure it out.
You mentioned interviewing. What are the key ingredients to successful interviewing?
I just think it's a matter of making the subject feel safe. You're not there to judge them, but you're there to understand their point of view. Even if you're going to challenge them for inconsistencies or, in some cases -- you know, I've interviewed people who were lying and we both knew it, but there are still ways to come at these interviews by being polite, and trying to understand. Even if you're confronting somebody about a lie, to try to understand, "Well, why did you lie?"
Without saying that, I guess?
Sometimes you do say that. But there are ways to take your time. We take a long time in doing interviews, and a long time of preparing for them, and gaming them out, and figuring out what's the best way to come at something.
Are you looking for something in particular, or are you perfectly happy with the unexpected? Are there answers that you don't know that you want to find?
Well, I always try not ... I don't really write down questions, per se. I might write down some question areas, and sometimes I don't write them down until just before the interview. Mostly, I'm trying to have an intelligent conversation on topic. Given the story, we know what the topic is. But then I just want to have an intelligent conversation that makes the interviewees feel not that I'm interrogating them, but just that I'm trying to draw out and understand their perspective, and so, allowing it to range freely. Clearly, sometimes you have a particular document or a piece of evidence that you want to lay on somebody's lap. That's a different kind of an animal but, by and large, I'm trying to have just a conversation. And I'm happy if there are surprises.
And you get them on camera.
Sometimes those surprises become disappointments.
Okay.
The whole process of putting together a story is having some surprises. If there are no surprises, then what's the story?
Does it make it easier if you say you're from ABC than if you say you're from Frontline?
Oh, there was a time when people would say, "Frontline, Nightline, Dateline, what's that?" Now, it seems that more and more people know. And, overseas, it doesn't quite matter. I mean, ABC, PBS, it's all kind of ...
Just that you're from the U.S. news operation?
I think they figure if you had enough resource to get on a plane and get here, you must be somebody. A president of these countries will see you just because you came all this way, sometimes. It takes a lot more assistance than that, but I don't know that it makes a big difference, PBS or ABC. I think that some people who are trying to promote something would prefer to go on 60 Minutes, where they know they're going to get the biggest audience. And we don't bring as large an audience to Frontline. But we're doing a different kind of reporting.
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