Prepare interview questions

What this is about

Two rules do most of the work. Answers have to stand on their own, because the question track usually disappears in the edit and a crisp 'yes, exactly' becomes unusable material. And order matters more than wording — easy factual questions at the start let a nervous person hear their own voice before the difficult one arrives. Everything else is preparation of the boring kind: knowing the subject well enough to notice when the interesting answer is the third sentence rather than the first, and having the follow-up ready that asks for the example behind the general statement.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Open questions produce material; closed ones produce yes and no, and neither can be cut into a film.
• Interviewees have to restate the question inside the answer, because the question track is normally dropped in the edit.
• The question list is a route, not a script — the best answers come from following what the person just said.
• Sensitive or challenging questions belong late, once trust exists and a usable body of material is already recorded.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Write down what the finished film needs this person to say — three or four statements at most. Every question then earns its place by serving one of them.
2. Research the person and the topic properly, so you can hear when an answer is genuinely new rather than the same line that stands on their website.
3. Draft questions as open prompts: how, what happened, describe the moment. Anything answerable with a single yes deserves rewriting before the shoot day.
4. Order them dramaturgically: warm-up facts first, the substance in the middle, the reflective or uncomfortable question last, when trust is at its highest.
5. Ask for self-contained answers in the briefing and demonstrate one. People deliver far better material once they know to start with the subject.
6. Prepare a follow-up for each core question — the one that asks for the example, the number or the concrete moment behind a general statement.
7. Cut the list down to what fits the booked time with room for repeats. Forty questions produce forty shallow answers and no usable arc.
8. Keep a few safety questions for the summary sentence the edit will need, and ask them even when the conversation already went well.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Sending the exact wording in advance and receiving rehearsed answers recited from memory.
• Cutting in with the next question while the person is still finding the sentence you actually want.
• Filming a great conversation nobody can edit, because every answer opens with 'well, as I said'.

With TillyGen

TillyGen ties the question set to the shot list, so the interview blocks in the schedule match the statements the film needs — and gaps are visible before wrap.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.