- For a journalist who grew up as a Stones fan, Mick Jagger was the Everest of interview subjects. By the time I met him, the idolatry phase was long gone. We sat in an empty classroom of a Toronto school where the band was rehearsing its 'Voodoo Lounge' tour in the gym. He seemed strangely diminished in the flesh. Pale, impossibly slight, a concave chest peeking through an untucked pink shirt, an indolent youth in old skin.
- [on interviewing Jack Nicholson] At one point, when I tried to redirect a line of questioning, his eyes narrowed into crocodile mode. 'I don't necessarily want to give you the interview you want', he said in that familiar desert-dry drawl. 'I want to give you the interview I want'.
- Harrison Ford's eyes are exceptionally busy - the stare of a paranoid stoner locked in a perpetual conspiracy theory, trying to make up his mind if he's a predator or prey.
- To sit down with an aged, elegant Gregory Peck, and hear the cadence of that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' baritone, was like having coffee with God.
- When I interviewed Robert Downey Jr. For his breakout hit 'Chaplin' I couldn't understand why he was so nervous. The guy was sweating bullets. That was before the world knew that this young genius was a drug addict.
- The celebrity interview is a sticky transaction, a blind date that demands forced intimacy on an uneven playing field. The star is rich and famous, the journalist is not, yet we pretend to ignore our differences. The journalist is automatically suspect, a sycophant concealing a switch-blade. But an actor, sentenced to a weekend of robo-interviews may feel his skin crawl with a deeper sense of duplicity. Amid the shared alienation, we look for glimmers of common ground.
- When you are a fan, an interview comes as a mixed blessing, an end of innocence. In a rare case, you may strike up some kind of relationship which I've done over the years with Leonard Cohen. But then Leonard handles interviews with the same loving sanctity he brings to everything else. If the journalist is female, he may offer to draw her a bath.
- Madonna crisply answered every question like a schoolgirl trying to score an A. She chose her words carefully, as if crafting an essay, saying more than once that she didn't wants to sound stupid. Despite being a pop idol with millions of fans, she felt only a handful of people understood her art. As she dished about Sean Penn's new baby, Warren Beatty's penis size and God's bisexuality, it's was all wonderfully clinical.
- [on Keith Richards] Watching him talk, I kept getting lost in his face, a quicksand of compulsive gestures that seemed to have a mind of its own. Later, when I listened to the tape, all the meaning lay buried in the inflection, lazy arabesques of innuendo from a man tired of his own cliche.
- [interviewing Meryl Streep for 'The River Wild'] It was a pristine setting, on a lake ringed by mountains. But it was late, Meryl was spent, and as she talked for the umpteenth time about how women read rapids better than men, and how she got thrown from a raft and sucked into a hole, she looked right through me.
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