Interview question list template

What this is about

An interview list has two jobs that pull against each other: getting the material the edit needs, and keeping a conversation alive in front of a camera. Handled as a questionnaire it produces short, defensive answers; handled as a chat it produces forty minutes with nothing cuttable. The way through is a written arc — easy questions first while the person settles, the difficult ones in the middle where trust is highest, and a closing question that lets them say the thing you did not ask about. The list is a preparation tool, not a script to be read out.

A template is the starting point, not the goal: once it has been filled in by hand twice, it is worth asking whether the document should come out of the plan instead.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• An arc in three parts: warm-up questions the person can answer without thinking, the core in the middle, and a release at the end
• Open wording throughout — describe, tell me about, what happened when — because any question answerable with yes will be answered with yes
• A note per question on the answer you actually need for the cut, so you recognise in the room whether you already have it
• The instruction to answer in full sentences that contain the question, since the interviewer is normally not in the finished film
• Backup questions and reformulations per topic, for the moment a question is misunderstood or produces an answer that says nothing

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Write down what the finished film needs to hear from this person in three sentences, then build questions that could produce those sentences.
2. Order the list as an arc: biography and easy ground first, the difficult topic once the person has stopped hearing the microphone.
3. Rewrite every closed question as an open one and delete double questions, which always get answered in their second half only.
4. Brief the person before the take on answering in whole sentences that carry the question, and demonstrate it with one example.
5. Prepare two reformulations for each core question, so a misunderstanding does not cost the topic.
6. Leave the list to one side during the interview, listen, and follow the answer when it goes somewhere better than your next question.
7. End with an open invitation to add anything missing, and mark on the list which answers you actually secured before the setup is struck.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Reading the list out in order, which turns a conversation into an interrogation and produces answers that sound recited
• Closed questions, whose answers cannot be used because nothing in them names the subject
• Double questions, where the person answers the easier half and the harder half quietly disappears
• Striking the setup before checking the list, then discovering in the edit that the central statement was never actually said

With TillyGen

TillyGen ties the questions to the scenes and statements the film is planned around, so the list shows during the shoot which planned message still has no answer on tape.

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.