Close Talker with Michael Strahan

The trailer for Close Talker with Michael Strahan, directed by Rick Wayne.

The interview format is deceptively hard. Two people and a conversation is the least equipment dependent thing a director can shoot and the most difficult to make watchable, because nothing external is available to rescue a flat exchange. There is no location to cut to and no action to cover. The entire film is whether something real happened between two people, and whether the camera was in a position to see it when it did.

A subject like Strahan raises the difficulty rather than lowering it. Someone who has spent a career in front of cameras, in sport and then in broadcast, arrives with an extremely well developed public version of themselves. That version is professional, warm and completely frictionless, and it will answer every question competently without ever saying anything. Getting underneath it is not an interviewing technique. It is a matter of what the room feels like.

Wayne's positions on this are stated plainly in his own words. He trained at Second City and takes the improv principle literally: build on what is in front of you instead of protecting what is in your head. He treats play as a directing tool rather than a reward for finishing the work, and he describes a set that feels like a playground as the condition under which the magic shows up. He holds that real human emotion is a superpower. Every one of those is a description of how to run an interview room rather than how to light one.

A trailer at forty six seconds also has to withhold. It is selling access to a conversation, so it has to prove the conversation is worth having without spending the moment that proves it.

Published in September 2019, it belongs to the documentary heavy stretch of Wayne's Los Angeles period alongside artAffect Reno and Denver and the BuildOut trailer.