The Talks

It’s strange to interview famous people; stranger still to interview people who interview famous people. That’s Johannes Bonke and Sven Schumann, childhood friends from Germany, and the masterminds behind The Talks, an online interview magazine, dedicated to long form journalism and in-depth Q&A’s with ‘interesting, remarkable’ people. “It’s a range of people” Johannes says, “designers, artists, actors, musicians. Anyone who interests us.” Sven adding “people who have left a footprint in our society.” All shown in a sans bullshit, very candid way, which means swearing is OK, but never encouraged. “You’ve got to have swearing” Johannes says, “but only as a means to show the true character of the person.” Swearing, among other quirks, are the things that many editors are quick to edit out, but it’s just what makes The Talks so interesting. It’s part of the reason The Talks even started in the first place. Coming from covetable writing posts, Sven and Johannes decided to take their cut teeth and contacts, and start their  own ‘magazine’ on their own terms.

Since launching The Talks , Sven and Johannes who look a bit like movie stars themselves, (Johannes a little like Ralph Fiennes and something Benicio Del Toro-ish about Sven) they have had the pleasure of interviewing some of the most influential people in recent memory, their roster looking more like a guest list to an Oscar after party than an editorial calendar: Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Viktor and Rolf, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, Charlie Kaufman, to name a few.

Needless to say, these guys have my dream job. Jet-set journalists, who talk to interesting people, keeping the pock marks and dimples of conversations, right there in plain sight for their weekly-visiting audience.

Read our Q&A as we discuss attention spans, Lou Reed, and the problem with magazines today.

Where did the idea for The Talks come from?
Johannes: The Talks developed over the ten years we have worked together because, I think we gained some very good knowledge about what worked in the International media circuit and what you have to do to conduct a good interview. Writing for Vogue, GQ, ELLE, Marie Claire, we travelled everywhere and conducted many interviews and, even though we did the interviews ourselves, at the end we were only doing what the magazines needed.  But we had an urge to interview people for our own reasons and in our own way, and not for anyone else. Sven said we should just do this and it took a year to develop. We considered the style, the layout, how we will write the interviews, how long they should be and audio flies, how to make the site unique..

Sven: I think it took a year because we wanted to make sure by the time we went online, everything was planned properly. Really, if we wanted, we could have launched the site in two months, but it took a while with the content and coming up with the details and considering how long the attention span of the Internet reader is.

Johannes: You know in some magazines, people aren’t allowed to say fuck and these kind of things. But a lot of people actually do swear a lot. And I think it actually gives away the character of a person quite a lot in the way they articulate themselves. It gives the reader a bit of a chance to get to know the person on another level.  And the audio clips give that other little level that the written interview alone wasn’t able to achieve and that way, you can know a little but more about the person than if you were to just read about it.

So if someone’s not swearing, do you provoke them to?
Johannes: No, never.

How do you choose who to interview?
Johannes: It’s mainly people who interest us in a way. It’s important that they are from different fields; designers, artists, actors, musicians. It is a range of people. Then we have to have the right sort of angle, which is very important.

More specifically, how did you get to interviewing these kinds of celebs?
Sven: With our experience for writing for magazines, we’ve established quite a good list of contacts in the media industry. Through these contacts, we set up our interviews. And due to the great reception of The Talks, we actually have had some great people contacting us who wanted to be on The Talks, so hopefully, that will continue to happen, going forward.

Can you tell us about your worst interview?
Johannes: My worst interview happened in Toronto actually. This was a couple years ago. And I’ve always liked him, it was Lou Reed and, I heard before I interviewed him from a few people, that he’s a very difficult person to talk to. But being a young journalist at the time, I mean, sometimes if you are younger than the rest of the journalists, you have a benefit. People are usually a little bit nicer to you, just because you are younger. So, anyway, Lou Reed is there in Toronto to talk about his controversial album Berlin, and I thought it’s perfect because I’m from Berlin so I’m thinking, at least we have this cultural connection. He was in Berlin before and after the wall came down, and so I asked him something like “how do you feel the difference of Berlin before and after the wall?” And he looked at me and said “how old are you?” And I think I was twenty four at the time, so I told him twenty four, he said “well I don’t talk to people who are young, who have not seen Berlin when the wall was still up” and like “what do you want?” And the rest of the interview he gave it was like he was so bored. But it’s like that sometimes. You will get difficult people, even if you have very good questions. There is just nothing you can do in that circumstance, and that was quite frustrating.

As for the best, there have been a few ones which stick in my mind; Woody Allen is probably one of my favourite people to interview. I’ve interviewed him five times. Mick Jagger, Valentino, it’s great. Someone like Anthony Hopkins…You know actually it’s the older people that are the better people to interview because they don’t have a filter. They can be more themselves, more candid.  The don’t really watch what they say as would a newer, younger person.

Sven: It’s great to get the chance to talk to people like Jack Nicholson and Patti Smith. If I had to choose, yes it’s the older people because they have lived a full life and also, they aren’t afraid to talk about it. Where as young people have difficulty, because they are afraid to talk about something that might put them in a negative light, in such a fragile stage in their career.

And, just going back to the bad experiences, even these, you can still get a certain angle and it can still make for a good story…
Johannes: Oh absolutely! I’m pretty sure we will publish the Lou Reed interview. It’s hilarious! And yeah I think that even though it was a ‘bad’ interview, it really ended up portraying him more or less in the light that his personality is. I think even if it’s a bad interview it can still fulfill the ultimate quest of portraying someone right, and this is what we are always trying to achieve, with The Talks. Sometimes too the protection an editor has at some magazines, they will go as far as even rephrasing peoples answers in the way the magazine wants the subject to talk or present themselves. But we try to bring out the true personality, every time.

Talking magazines, what kind are you reading?
Johannes: A lot, um I mean, I really like American Vanity Fair, we do read a lot on the internet these days I guess. All of my news comes on the internet… The New York Times.  But I really like American Vanity Fair because they manage to combine celebrities with an in-depth research approach to their profiles on people. I don’t know if you knew this but how many stories you think the writers at Vanity Fair have to write per year? Four! Four stories. So it gives them three months to research and to write.

Sven: Some part of the problem with commercial magazines nowadays is that they are not so in-depth anymore. It’s too many pictures, not enough text, because no one has the guts to publish interviews that are more than like two pages sort of thing. That’s why. I mean there are still very interesting magazines like 0 32 C,  a German mag. Some of the interviews they do, they portray the people on an in-depth level on many pages. I think that’s something that’s lost in the commercial magazines. Ten page articles are now two pages.

Especially for online…
Johannes: But yah it’s true. And you know, even for myself I find that I’m not willing to read something too long online. There’s something weird about it. I could read a fifteen page story in an actual magazine, in print, but if it was on a website, I wouldn’t read fifteen pages online. Unless it’s something you really care about, like if it’s something you want to read you know, you don’t care how long it is or where you are reading from. But it’s a lot harder, especially on the internet, also because there are so many things that are distracting you.  If you read for an hour, you get fifteen ‘bings’ in your email and that takes away your attention. If you have a magazine in your hand, you can concentrate on the magazine fully. There is less immediate surrounding distractions.

How are you conducting interviews?
Sven: 98% in person. I don’t really like phone interviews. Skype is cool too because you can see the person. By email it’s so difficult. You can’t have any follow up questions. It’s very hard.

Anyone you want to interview you haven’t yet?
Johannes: Keith Richards.
Sven:  Jack White. We’ll have to work on these. If you really want to talk somebody, you want to have a little time to plan and get what you want out of it.

Any tips on good interviewing?
Johannes: Always listen to what the other person says. You can ask as many questions as you want, but if your always sort of on your paper looking to see what your next question is, you are going to miss out on a lot of opportunities to ask even better questions. The questions you may have might be good, but the things that come out of the conversation are the questions no one else will think to ask, because you are asking the questions in that moment, based on what that person is saying.

How did you learn that style?
Basically through experience. We both are educated. But actually interviewing someone is not about learning from university.  The interview is the meeting of two people and the way you talk to someone, and that’s something you learn by doing rather than in theory, like reading about it in a book. I mean reading and studying about how to interview someone in theory is helpful as a background, but I think to dive into it and experience it for yourself and make mistakes and learn from them is the best way. I’ve made many mistakes, hopefully not so many anymore, I think that’s the most important aspect. That’s how we learn it.

Sven: Definitely the more you do, the more you know, and you get more comfortable you get as you go and you learn what to ask and what not to ask. Learning by doing in the best training.  People are always sort of nice to you so, it’s not if you ask them something they don’t want to be asked. It’s like, it’s not the person who doesn’t want to talk…There’s not so much that can go wrong, I mean, any conversation can end up terrible …

Johannes:  A LOT can go wrong!

Sven: Well, yes! A lot can go wrong. I mean if you ask people on the first question and that is completely not what they are looking for, then it’s hard to come back after that sometimes. But that’s how you learn.

Have you thought about expanding to video interviews?
Let’s see what happens. For now, we will concentrate on more of what we are doing. But, we have plans.

More here:
http://the-talks.com/
http://www.facebook.com/TheTalksInterviews