In this week’s themed Friday High-Five, we look at five memorable interviews … some good, some so bad they’re good – but each of them fascinating in their own way.
We all know the ladies go gaga for Don Draper. But it seems like the men fall even harder for his real-life counterpart Jon Hamm, if his recent profiles are to be believed. ‘What’s it like to be too handsome?’ asked Guardian interviewer Stuart Jeffries, in an article published in yesterday’s Age. (‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say,’ replied Hamm.)
Jon Hamm: ‘He treats good-looking the way you treat your favorite sweater: He leaves it on without thinking about it.’
But Jeffries' comparisons to Pitt and Clooney were positively negative compared to Hamm’s Esquire interviewer last month, who dissolved into a so-bad-it’s-good puddle of cringeworthy prose in his presence:
When Jon Hamm talks about the St. Louis Cardinals, his face happily divides into the components of angular male handsomeness — chin, chin dimples, ruddy jaw, cheekbones, dark black eyes like a falcon’s or, better yet, an obscure snake-hunting eagle’s. Oh, why describe? Why winnow toward the accurate? He’s impossible, because he looks good and he looks like he is good, too. He dangles victory from his fingers, as if he had a key fob for every circumstance, as if his whole world started with an on button that works only when he is proximate. He treats good-looking the way you treat your favorite sweater: He leaves it on without thinking about it. He throws it on the chair next to his bed at night and knows where it’ll be in the morning.
Women can spectacularly collapse at the feet of fame, too. Take the example of this GQ interview with Avengers star Chris Evans, in which the journalist takes a ‘say yes to everything, try to be cool approach’. Which translates into something akin to Bridget Jones interviewing Colin Firth and repeatedly asking what it was like to do the scene where he climbed out of the lake with a wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice.
Chris Evans. ‘Since we’re both single and roughly the same age, it was hard for me not to treat our interview as a sort of date.’
‘Since we’re both single and roughly the same age, it was hard for me not to treat our interview as a sort of date. Surprisingly, Chris did the same … [he] kept up frequent hand holding and lower-back touching, palm kissing and knee squeezing.’ She details forgetting to ask him all kinds of questions, getting so drunk she had to sleep it off in his guest bedroom, unwittingly telling a passing gossip reporter that her interview subject is ‘flirty’ and she has a crush on him, and recounts excruciating exchanges like this:
‘Is it going well?’ he asked.
‘It’s going really well,’ I said.
‘Nailing it?’
‘You’re nailing it.’
‘You’re nailing it also,’ he said. ‘I’m going to write an article about you.’
Robert Coleman’s interview with Bret Easton Ellis on the eve of his Wheeler Centre event has become, like the author himself, a cult classic. The self-aware Coleman confesses to his Three Thousand readers that he’d never finished any of Easton Ellis’s books and that he ‘substitut[ed] lack of research by watching American Psycho for the first time after nine beers only the night before’. In the weeks after the resulting interview was published, the phrase ‘doing a Robert Coleman’ was used as shorthand for ‘plunging in with no research and hoping for the best’.
‘You get the more real me than anyone has gotten so far,’ Bret Easton Ellis told Robert Coleman.
After confessing his situation, the interview got interesting, in a car crash kind of way, but it was also surprisingly revealing. ‘This, this right now, happens very rarely, and this is the only time it has happened in Australia,’ Easton Ellis told him. ‘You get the more real me than anyone has gotten so far.’
B – With a straight face. Ask me the next question.
R – You’re going to piss your pants. Here goes: ‘re-reading recently…’
B – Haha, fuck!
R – Okay, going to cross that one out.
B – How do you feel about yourself now?
R – I’m sweating profusely. I’m slightly embarrassed. You have a piece of paper that I’d sincerely like to take back. I haven’t read your books … Also, I kind of think we’re better in conversation than with these questions.
B – I think we are.
R – Best interviews are not from a piece of paper, right?
B – Ohhhh, very good. Oh my, you have a lot of gall, don’t you? A lot of gall! Continue.
R – Was it difficult re-hashing and progressing the characters from Less Than Zero?
B – (laughing) … As if you give a shit!
It’s not always a bad idea to put yourself in the story. Nor to be slightly guileless: it can result in interview subjects relaxing and being surprisingly revealing. But you have to be very, very good to make it work. And it helps to be pretend-guileless: do your research, observe everything, but wear your intelligence lightly. Jon Ronson, who appeared at the Wheeler Centre last year to talk about his most recent book, The Psychopath Test, is a master at turning unassuming into a deadly effective art form.
Jon Ronson: as an interviewer, he is a master at turning unassuming into a deadly effective art form.
Some of his journalism is archived online at the Guardian, including a version of his year-long series of interviews with Omar Bakri, the Islamic fundamentalist who asked Jon to taxi him to Officeworks to photocopy jihadist leaflets, and used Coca Cola money boxes to collect funds to defeat capitalism. There’s also an intriguing and disturbing interview with right-to-die activist Reverend George Exoo (whose clients were not terminally ill, just depressed) and a recent article about home chemists, including one Asperger’s man who was arrested for trying to split the atom in his kitchen.
Lynn Barber’s profiles, published in the Guardian, are never boring. They’re sharp, observant, brilliantly written – and absolutely fearless. (Incidentally, Lynn herself is far from boring: she wrote An Education, a memoir that was filmed with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, and launched the career of Carey Mulligan.)
Lynn Barber as a teenager, around the time she later chronicled in An Education.
For instance, interviewing Alain De Botton in 2009, she observed, ‘On the one hand he is friendly, charming and polite; on the other, there is something almost repellent about his politeness.’
Here’s a fascinating titbit, on his relationship with his ‘cruel tyrant’ father, from the interview:
‘I wrote four books in his lifetime and with each one he would manage to say something absolutely vile – I remember him in earshot saying: “I don’t think he’s succeeded with this one” – and it was tough to hear. But then I learnt that he’d sent copies of my books to his friends, so … it was a strange and schizophrenic, very troubled, relationship.’
When we put up our video of Bret Easton Ellis, we thought people would be interested but we didn’t expect the deluge of comments responding to the author’s talk.
First up was Gary Chau calling BEE “a douche” which inspired several of his fans to come to his defence. Emma wrote glowingly that Easton Ellis was “pretentious, opinionated, mildly subversive…and he was honest about his mood at the time” while Josie thought he “bridged the gap between generation x and y and baby-boomer” and was going to give his book to her 38-year-old son.
There was a lot of interest in the questions and the questioners. A character calling themselves Paul Bogan was against the whole idea: “As much as it’s democratic and breaks down the barrier between the artist and audience, the Q&A at the end was really embarassing, it’s no wonder Ellis was more interested in kvetching with his i-phone than anything else.”
Interviewer Alan Brough copped some flack from Mr Bogan, who compared his charisma to that of “hessian sack of unscrubbed potatoes”. We thought this was a little harsh and so did other commenters including Trev who outlined a golden rule “Don’t go the Brough”. Others agreed including Fran who “thought he [Brough] did an incredible job with someone who wasn’t that easy to interview” and Alex “walked away from the evening a little less a fan [of] Ellis but a new fan of Brough”.
Charles and Meyer before meeting Easton Ellis
Few authors attain rock star status, but Bret Easton Ellis' Australian tour has had it’s fair share of pyrotechnics and brought out some odd fans. Like who? According to Elmo Keep, Easton Ellis was asked to help Delta Goodrem out with Stateside work. He told Keep, “I’m getting phone calls from Brian McFadden’s manager asking if I can get Delta a job in LA. And I’m like, ‘I don’t really know what she wants to do.’”
But now he’s hit Melbourne, the requests are much simpler. Author Kathy Charles and blogger Angela Meyer met him yesterday. Both were excited at the prospect, Charles bringing along a galley proof of Easton Ellis' Lunar Park that she bought on eBay for US$120 for the cult author to sign. And what was she expecting from the man? “I think he’s going to be really nice, because that’s what everyone says he’s like,” Charles said.
Easton Ellis himself was getting psyched for tonight’s appearance with Alan Brough. When asked what he’s expecting tonight, Easton Ellis said “It’s going to be different than most events I did on this tour of the US, the UK and now Australia, because it’s a very big event.” We’re expecting nothing short of Glamorama.
Bret Easton Ellis has made a foray into young adult fiction if you’re to believe this post on Crushable. The author known for American Psycho, has written his own take on the Baby-sitter’s Club franchise with a sample first chapter posted on the site.
It’s a characteristically Easton Ellis take on the genre. One of his cheesy characters reflects “Like, sorry that you have diabetes Stacey, but do we have to spend half the afternoon discussing it? And yeah, it really bums me out to watch Claudia just snort up half those Pixie Stixs when she is so blatantly trying to get attention to her sugar problem.”
The piece closes with “I was totally dizzy from relief and relished the idea of drifting into a semi-conscious state of Ritalin withdrawal so Mary-Anne could bitch about her boyfriend.” Only Bret Easton Ellis could bring drugs and hipster slang to the wholesome YA genre.
Bret Easton Ellis' script The Golden Suicides has Gus Van Sant attached to it according to Oregon Live.
The script features characters that could have been pulled from Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero – based on the life of artist Jeremy Blake and his girlfriend video game creator Theresa Duncan, who both killed themselves in 2007.
The only problem is locking in Van Sant who has a busy filming schedule. Easton Ellis said “I ask him to direct it every day. He says ‘I don’t know, I don’t want to. I’ll produce the movie, but I don’t want to direct it.’ He wanted to do ‘Twilight.’ He wanted a ”Twilight gig. It’s a lot of money. I get it."
If you’re wondering what Bret Easton Ellis' appearance will be like, literary agent Erin Hosier gives a wry wrap of her attendance at his book reading over at the Nervous Breakdown.
The first thing she spots at the reading is the icon-like status the crowd affords Easton Ellis. “Someone has crossed out the word “Ellis” from the poster on the podium so that it now reads ‘Elvis.’” It’s a younger crowd who Hosier decides are “mostly 20-somethings. Only a smattering of suited, plastic surgery failures litter the front.”
Easton Ellis launched into a brief reading from Imperial Bedrooms and he seemed nervous. Hosier describes it: “He puts his hand on the back of his neck as he reads, like a jock giving a book report. His voice is so sexy, I wish he would slow down.”
Then follow some questions – including some starstruck queries about his favourite rapper (Easton Ellis replies “Look, guys, I’m old, okay? I listen to The National.”) and writer’s block. Hosier finds it a tedious obstacle before the autographing. “Bret is exasperated. He is disappointed in the crowd and frankly so am I.”
And when the signing comes it’s all too fleeting. Hosier has pre-publication copy of the book about which Easton Ellis joked “‘I’ll just sign it where it will be worth the most money,’ he says, and does, too quickly. And then it’s over.”
Ahead of his release of Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis gave an interview to Vice magazine in his characteristic rock-star style.
When pushed on why he wrote a sequel to Less Than Zero, Easton Ellis shrugged “Because I wanted to.” Quibbling with the arch writer behind American Psycho is never a good idea so who could argue with his response “I never thought of this as a sequel. I thought of it as exploring where this character is 20 years later. That was the one driving point. I didn’t want to write a sequel and I don’t think it is.”
When asked the ever-present question about how much he writes from himself, Easton Ellis replies “The closest I’ve come to my actual voice was probably in Lunar Park, where I was really freely writing how I probably do write in terms of emails and how I talk to friends.”
Easton Ellis appears for the Wheeler Centre in August with tickets on sale 16 July.
Last night the Wheeler Centre confirmed that Bret Easton Ellis will be appearing in Melbourne in August. The author of American Psycho will discuss his hotly anticipated Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his cult novel, Less Than Zero.
One person anxious for ticketing information was Melbourne author Kathy Charles. She quickly tweeted: “I’m watching you @wheelercentre – until those Bret Easton Ellis tix are released I’m ON YOU LIKE A HAWK!”.
With this in mind, we’ll let you know when tickets are on sale for the mid-August event.
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