Are celebrity interviews a farce?
June 3, 2013 6:10 PM   Subscribe

Certain corners of Twitter are abuzz today over a video of actor Jesse Eisenberg's vicious dismantling of an unprepared and annoying young junket interviewer. (Her attempts to defend herself did not go over well with the internet, either.)

Meanwhile, The Times' Janice Turner endured "the interview from hell" with Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, prompting The Guardian's Roy Greenslade to call for a pox on the entire enterprise.

Which reminds me of this memorable piece by Xan Brooks about his attempt to interview a surly John Goodman about Argo.
posted by eugenen (298 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
This just super duper cements his status as my ongoing celebrity crush.
posted by Sara C. at 6:20 PM on June 3, 2013 [7 favorites]


The girl in the first interview is super annoying. I was cheering for Jesse by the end of that video.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:21 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


Noo, not available here.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:22 PM on June 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


Related: Mila Kunis is interviewed by Chris Stark, which is both hilarious and endearing.

(via this AskMe about unexpectedly compelling interviews)
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:22 PM on June 3, 2013 [29 favorites]


That Romina girl is what Zach Galiafinakis is parodying with Between Two Ferns, right?
posted by Sara C. at 6:22 PM on June 3, 2013 [22 favorites]


I don't think Between Two Ferns is a parody, it's more surrealist than anything. The episode with Conan and Andy Richter makes it seem like the joke is more just how Zach Galifianakis wants to be an interviewer when he is instead awful at all things.
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:25 PM on June 3, 2013


Of course all of this, parody and otherwise, owes a debt to Chris Farley's character on SNL.
posted by 2bucksplus at 6:26 PM on June 3, 2013 [8 favorites]


Um, entertainment journalism is the future.

Just tow the line, stick to the prepared lines, and you need never beat the pavement searching for stories about nobodies or getting maimed in a warzone.

Jeezus, just do a little homework on the piece of shit movie that is being marketed, maintain a BMI of no more than 23, and pretend to be interested.

Is that so goddamned hard?
posted by Renoroc at 6:27 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


Man, I'm still at work, so I'm not going to watch the video, but those "attempts to defend herself" give me the discomfort-comedy skin crawls. Sometimes I think there's nothing as agonizing as watching someone who thinks they're making a certain impression, which is diametrically opposed to how they're actually coming off.
posted by kagredon at 6:28 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


I associate writing notes on your hand with Sarah Palin. So she got off easy.
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:29 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yeah, no, I know that B2F isn't literally a parody, in the sense of, like, Scary Movie or something.

But there is something soulless and insipid about most of these junket interviews that I think that series gets at the heart of. It's what makes it actually funny instead of just Zach Galifianakis being a jerk in a sort of Officially Cringe Humor kind of way.
posted by Sara C. at 6:29 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


i know eisenberg is being an asshole here, but i wonder b/w this and kunis is a way of re-working the staid celeb junket into something mroe intimate--gone viral for a movie that will surely bomb.
posted by PinkMoose at 6:30 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Celebrities should only be interviewed in the style of American Gladiator.







I'm going to let that statement hang ambiguously and let your imagination decide if it was a profound social commentary or vacuously silly.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 6:33 PM on June 3, 2013 [9 favorites]


I'm going to let that statement hang ambiguously and let your imagination decide if it was a profound social commentary or vacuously silly.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 6:33 PM on June 3 [1 favorite +] [!]


Ohh, just like American Gladiator!
posted by gc at 6:36 PM on June 3, 2013 [32 favorites]


Anyone have another link to the video, which is not available here?
posted by jeather at 6:37 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I don't think either one of them comes off all that well in that first clip.
posted by xingcat at 6:38 PM on June 3, 2013 [14 favorites]


jeather, enter the youtube link over at http://www.proxfree.com/ (any US setting should do)
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:39 PM on June 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


That John Goodman article is heartbreaking.
posted by whuppy at 6:39 PM on June 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


I forget. Is he the poor man's Michael Cera, or is it vice versa?
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 6:39 PM on June 3, 2013 [13 favorites]


It's what makes it actually funny instead of just Zach Galifianakis being a jerk in a sort of Officially Cringe Humor kind of way.

Totally. His approach of being both woefully unprepared for the interviews and at times openly hostile to his guests perfectly frames the undercurrent of "You should be interviewing me" entitlement that runs through this kind of enterprise. It's really just every other interview ever, except that he's behaving in an honest way instead of a manufactured way. I adore it.
posted by davejay at 6:40 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Anyone have another link to the video, which is not available here?

The video on this page seems to work (in Canada).
posted by thisclickableme at 6:40 PM on June 3, 2013


Ugh. I watched ten seconds, in which he was instantly extremely hostile about something petty, and clicked it off.

No desire whatsoever to watch that. The "defend herself" links mostly seem to be her saying "welp, sure was humiliated by this dude" which seems... accurate?

=/
posted by kavasa at 6:40 PM on June 3, 2013 [42 favorites]


Even the name reflects the approach, actually.
posted by davejay at 6:40 PM on June 3, 2013


Oh, man...

I used to be one of those junket interviewers. Print, thank god, rather than video, so at least when something just lay there flopping like a dying trout, it didn't end up all over the Internet. Worst case for me, I wrote something shorter than expected and nobody paid much attention to it. It still filled space, I still got paid, and it was quickly forgotten.

Also, it has to be said that I didn't have to have some stupid gimmick like "say my name" to piss off the talent. And I never had anything like that happen so either I was better at it than she is, or I just got people when they were in a more gracious mood. I'd like to think the former. I sometimes had interviews that didn't go well, but they were mostly just sort of flat and uninteresting, not total clusterfucks like what that turned into.

My worst interview ever - phoner with Neal Stephenson. Someone whose work I really admire and I was pretty excited to talk to. He went out of his way to give us some time that would work with our weird production schedule - he was actually on vacation at a friend's house in Vermont or someplace and let me call him there. And I can't even say what went wrong, but I just totally blew it. I wasn't well prepared and I was asking dumb questions and it just didn't go well at all. He sat there and answered me as best he could, and if he was irked he at least waited until after I'd hung up to comment on how stupid I was. I'm grateful for that at least.

(Weirdest interview: hands down, former supermodel and SI swimsuit issue cover girl Carol Alt. Though to be honest, if I'd just made a movie about huge, man-eating fish that can move on land and go around slaughtering people right and left, I'd probably want to talk about it as little as possible, and would likely take every possible opportunity to shift gears toward my raw food cookbook too.)
posted by Naberius at 6:41 PM on June 3, 2013 [22 favorites]


Guys, guys it really doesn't get better than Samuel L. Jackson over the use of the "n-word".
posted by pmv at 6:43 PM on June 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


i wonder b/w this and kunis is a way of re-working the staid celeb junket into something mroe intimate--gone viral for a movie that will surely bomb.

Now You See Me did just fine last weekend. Better than After Earth.

I feel for both of them in this clip. Interviewing people, especially celebrities, can be nerve-wracking, and hard and it's even harder to stand out in a press junket setting where basically every question is "so what was it like working with Morgan Freeman!?" At the same time, he has to do an 8 hour day of answering the same questions over and over again, which I can imagine is boring and tedious and agonizing.

But they were also both pissing me off. She was going for cutesy attitude, but lost the "cutesy" somewhere along the way. Those articles about what a mean jerkwad Jesse Eisenberg is aren't doing her any favors. But he was kind of being a mean jerkwad.

All in all, I call this one a draw.
posted by to sir with millipedes at 6:44 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


Eisenberg was the jerk. What is with his stutter.
posted by bhnyc at 6:45 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


Gee I hope this controversial interview doesn't bring her unwanted attention to her video program.

Say My Name with Romina does seem to be a sincere thing though, there's 4 videos on Vimeo. Romi Puga says she's "a recent graduate of NYU and currently working at Fusion -- the ABC News & Univision joint venture". Her interview with Snoop Lion (née Dogg) is awful; I guess she doesn't have an intentional Between Two Ferns shtick going on.
posted by Nelson at 6:45 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


For anyone who isn't able to see the video: he doesn't actually dismantle her.
posted by Flashman at 6:45 PM on June 3, 2013 [15 favorites]


For anyone who isn't able to see the video: he doesn't actually dismantle her.

Way to ruin the magic trick!
posted by kagredon at 6:46 PM on June 3, 2013 [27 favorites]


Eisenberg comes off as an asshole, it seems to me... It's not clear to me why the interviewer deserves such harsh treatment...

OTOH, I realize full well that there are things that don't seem that bad the first time you encounter them, but which, once you've had to put up with them ten or fifty or two hundred times, make you crazy. You just get fed up with the thing, and you start appreciating subtleties of awfulness...

I don't know that I've ever even seen an interview of this kind before... But maybe this guy has had to put up with like hundreds of crap interviews, and he just snapped...

Also: Mila Kunis seems so awesome...
posted by Fists O'Fury at 6:47 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


I kinda felt bad for her.

She's a product of our time: cutesy and inoffensively ironic. Her "brand" repurposes a generically recognizable song in a way that promotes herself with just enough winking to try to avoid seeming desperate. This interview, in which she is completely embarrassed and called out for her lack of preparation and professionalism, will probably be amazing for her career.

I hate her success, but not because she has it. I don't actually know anything about her, any more than I know anything about Jesse Eisenberg. I do know what it feels like when your reputation outpaces your talent, and vice versa. She's young, and might end up being a lot better at her job in the future, and few people deserve to be a punchline. If we had a system with healthier priorities then this probably wouldn't have been an issue, but I don't hold her solely accountable for our failures as a society.

Even though it would be really fun to do so.
posted by Riki tiki at 6:50 PM on June 3, 2013 [17 favorites]


The amazing thing about that Mila Kunis interview is that she's probably done a couple of dozen other interviews already that day, and still puts in the effort to be genuinely nice to a scared young reporter. It says a lot about her as a person.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:53 PM on June 3, 2013 [17 favorites]


If she hopes to grow up a little, she should look at this as a learning experience.

Something tells me, though, that maturing isn't high on her list of priorities.
posted by leftcoastbob at 6:53 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


You know, I don't know how to interview people so I just don't interview people. I find that this works really well for me, as someone who has no real interest in interviewing people.
posted by Sara C. at 6:56 PM on June 3, 2013 [29 favorites]


I'd be interested to see a video of the interview that wasn't edited by the interviewer.
posted by lucidium at 6:58 PM on June 3, 2013 [17 favorites]


You know, I don't know how to interview people so I just don't interview people. I find that this works really well for me, as someone who has no real interest in interviewing people.

Granted, she already works for Univision/ABC, so she probably should have her bonafides in order by now, but I will say that the best way to get good at...well, anything, is to fuck it up in a major way a few times.
posted by to sir with millipedes at 6:58 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


Yeah, but you do that interviewing the candidates for student body president for your college paper. Not the star of a huge movie opening this weekend.

That said, I recently read an article in a silly fashion magazine that was written by a woman who could probably be Romina Puga in a couple years. She was a wannabe rock journalist who got hired out of college by Spin and everything happened for her really quickly and suddenly she was a correspondent on VH1 and had no idea what she was doing. And then she realized that, for the network, she was really more of a look than an actual journalist. So she quit.

That article shed a little bit of light on what it must be like to be really inexperienced and shitty at your job but powerless to get off the bus because it's what you DREAMED of doing.
posted by Sara C. at 7:03 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


What am I missing? She doesn't seem like the most interesting or capable interviewer on the planet, no—but it's hard to tell, considering that dude rips into her from the getgo for no readily apparent reason. She just seems naïve and inexperienced, and he seems like a prick.

Then again, I don't watch or understand this genre of celebrity pulp, so maybe I'm missing some nuance here.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:05 PM on June 3, 2013 [22 favorites]


Apparently I live in a hail of verbal abuse that has permanently warped my social skills, because it seemed like flirting to me. In my house, this would count as foreplay.
posted by Ouisch at 7:05 PM on June 3, 2013 [38 favorites]


I thought it was funny but I wouldn't describe it as "dismantling". Eisenberg comes off like a lot of the characters he's played. At least like the one in Adventureland. That's either good acting or bad acting, I don't know which.
"Oh the media monkeys and the junket junkies will invite you to their plastic pantomime. Throw their invitations away!" - David Bowie
posted by bleep at 7:07 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


considering that dude rips into her from the getgo for no readily apparent reason.

Again, it's worth noting that the only version of this interview we have available is the one edited and posted by the interviewer and her employer.

That seems kind of relevant.
posted by mediareport at 7:08 PM on June 3, 2013 [23 favorites]


I realize the pre-banter is where she lost him, but what is she supposed to call Morgan Freeman? Morgan? Mr. Freeman?
posted by graventy at 7:09 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


This is really not worth beanplating. The interview is edited out of order and she's really just too young/inexperienced/starstruck for the fluff interview to begin with.
posted by starman at 7:09 PM on June 3, 2013


escape, notice that he really starts laying into her when she does two things:

1. Refers to Morgan Freeman as "Freeman", which he's right, that is really awkward.

2. Has questions written on her hand.

The whole thing just seems like she desperately does not want to be there. Which has to be insulting when you're an actor who is contractually obligated to do this, and then the damn journalists don't even CARE enough to remember the three totally obvious and insipid questions they want to ask...?
posted by Sara C. at 7:10 PM on June 3, 2013 [19 favorites]


I wasn't crazy about it. Yes, this is a crappy sort of interview format, and I can understand how it can wear on an actor, being subjected to the same few questions and a selection of cutesty gimmicks instead of actual journalism. The flip side is: That world was created by publicists. They will shut down an interview that goes off topic. They set the rules. They set the structure. This sort of celebrity puff piece is exactly what the studios want, and, if Eisenberg feels it is bullshit, he should take it up with them.

Instead, he complained to this young woman that she was on his time. No she wasn't. It's her job too, and so he was on both their time, and both deserve to be respected.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 7:10 PM on June 3, 2013 [7 favorites]


She does mention in one of her posts that the name gimmick was at the beginning of the interview, so it is at least partially out of order.
posted by kagredon at 7:10 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Eisenberg comes off as an asshole, it seems to me... It's not clear to me why the interviewer deserves such harsh treatment...

What am I missing? She doesn't seem like the most interesting or capable interviewer on the planet, no—but it's hard to tell, considering that dude rips into her from the getgo for no readily apparent reason. She just seems naïve and inexperienced, and he seems like a prick.

She started off the interview by asking him to look into the camera and say her name, which is a weird request that made him suspicious and put him on edge. (The interview isn't edited chronologically, which makes this part weird, but she says in one of the linked articles that the interview actually began with the very awkward exchange that appears at the end of the YouTube clip.) So basically they got off on the wrong foot and she wasn't able to recover — mainly because she didn't have anything else in her bag of tricks besides questions about "Freeman" and a cutesy routine involving magic.

I've had interviews go much worse than this, but I took those as opportunities to look at what went wrong and figure out how I could have recovered and to improve my own interviewing techniques — not to feel sorry for myself over how mean my subject was to me.
posted by Mothlight at 7:11 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


To those saying that Eisenberg comes off like an asshole: you're not wrong, but I'd say that her lack of respect comes through pretty clearly even in this heavily edited excerpt. The obvious not-giving-a-shit about even attempting to ask anything interesting about the movie, demanding that he play her stupid "say my name" game for her self-promotion campaign, handing him props and telling him to do a magic trick and then deliberately attempting to sabotage the trick when he plays along.

These sorts of schticky interviewers whose main aim is to get the celebrity to do something they find amusing are kind of the trolls of the entertainment journalism world. She's clearly outmatched here, and while Eisenberg is indeed a dick, it's not totally undeserved, IMO.
posted by eugenen at 7:14 PM on June 3, 2013 [19 favorites]


This sort of celebrity puff piece is exactly what the studios want, and, if Eisenberg feels it is bullshit, he should take it up with them.

I imagine that Eisenberg is a dick to publicists, too.
posted by gsteff at 7:16 PM on June 3, 2013


That Samuel L. Jackson interview doesn't really put him in a flattering light. It's not wrong of the interviewer not to want to say the n-word, but it still is a potential issue of conversation. I mean again, perhaps he has given 100+ interviews covering the same topics, but that's not the current interviewers fault.

I guess I feel that actors should still be professional, they make what 100x what the interviewer make and can't be a little bit gracious because they're 'artists'? Fine but at least don't shit on the little guy.
posted by Carillon at 7:17 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


So when does this book that he was promoting hit the stores?
posted by lampshade at 7:17 PM on June 3, 2013


She's trying to use her immature charms on him, and he's not having it. I actually do think he dismantles her, but not viciously. He just can't help putting her in her place. No, he's not nice, but he's kind of refreshingly irritated.
posted by thinkpiece at 7:18 PM on June 3, 2013 [21 favorites]


I was trying to place what celebrity's mannerisms the interviewer was affecting, then I got it - she's trying to be Natalie Portman in Garden State.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 7:19 PM on June 3, 2013 [12 favorites]


I realize the pre-banter is where she lost him, but what is she supposed to call Morgan Freeman?

"Morgan Freeman"
posted by mr_roboto at 7:20 PM on June 3, 2013 [29 favorites]


The interview... doesn't go well, for sure, but doesn't seem quite that intense?

When I read "Jesse Eisenberg's vicious dismantling", I expect interviewers to exit stage right in little tiny ego pieces, or at least, for a voice to be raised at some point, so I'm not really feeling the drama here.
posted by furiousthought at 7:20 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I saw this as pigtails in the inkwell, not as being hostile.
posted by machaus at 7:20 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I didn't exactly see Eisenberg as acting like a dick here. He was witty, clever, and appropriately critical of his interviewer—maybe more honest about his thoughts than you usually get, but it's not like he was wrong or anything.

But I have been told many times, by many people, that I am an enormous dick, so maybe this is just further proof that I have my head firmly in the dickosphere.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:23 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'd be interested to see a video of the interview that wasn't edited by the interviewer.

This, so much this. If anyone reading this doesn't grasp that editing can make any saint look like a psychopath or vice versa, I believe you lack basic media literacy.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:25 PM on June 3, 2013 [11 favorites]


To me this was funny banter. I didn't really detect any hostility, just some gentle ribbing. If she was so offended and hurt that this actually became a thing, maybe she should just not interview people.
posted by averageamateur at 7:26 PM on June 3, 2013 [16 favorites]


Until we see the entire footage of the encounter, it's completely absurd to make any judgment about which one of these two folks is the bigger jerk. The piece is so heavily chopped - check the edit at 0:44 between Eisenberg's "my thumb's fine, thank you" and "what did you write on your hand?" - and the evidence of out-of-order sequence so obvious that the only sane position in this thread is to repeatedly request the entire unedited encounter from Univision/ABC/Fusion/Romina.
posted by mediareport at 7:28 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


This smells strongly of a carefully organized set up. So does the Mila Kunis bit.
posted by sibboleth at 7:28 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


That's an awful position to take, item. I'd call it useless, too.
posted by mediareport at 7:30 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


That girl has never failed at anything in her life. No one has ever looked at her and said anything remotely resembling, "I am disappointed in your performance. You will not be rewarded."

This needs to happen more in life. We need more shame and judging.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:31 PM on June 3, 2013 [34 favorites]


The weirdest recent celebrity interview is the one where Michael Douglas claims cunnilingus was responsible for his oral cancer, rather than smokes and booze.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:31 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Very interesting litmus test. I think he came off as a complete jerk.

Even if the editing is tricky. Even if she's a horribly annoying interviewer. Even if he's done a hundred mind-numbing interviews that day. He still could have made the conscious choice to be a slightly better person for 5 whole minutes.
posted by billyfleetwood at 7:34 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


Apparently I live in a hail of verbal abuse that has permanently warped my social skills, because it seemed like flirting to me. In my house, this would count as foreplay.

Hell, this sounds like my marriage proposal.

I'm still single
posted by elwoodwiles at 7:35 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


After watching the clip: wow, slow news day?
posted by mullingitover at 7:37 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


Actually thought this was a nice parody. Now just seems like Jesse is being kind of a dick. On the other hand, I guess I'd act like a dick to amuse myself in that situation as well.

Somewhere between Kurt Cobain going to MTV interviews smashed and dressed in drag and Jennifer Lawrence charming and disarming the fuck out of her interviewers and the world at large, I have to think you can do better than demeaning someone.

Unless this is parody. Which, come on....no?
posted by es_de_bah at 7:40 PM on June 3, 2013


"We need more shame and judging."

I don't know anything about this particular woman, but it's hard to imagine anyone who's had too little failure or shame in their life. Sometimes it seems like there's a limitless supply.
posted by Kevin Street at 7:41 PM on June 3, 2013 [20 favorites]



This just super duper cements his status as my ongoing celebrity crush


This guy I was just dating is apparently friends with him. I kind of let that guy go though, maybe I shouldnta.
posted by sweetkid at 7:41 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'll be back in town in September. Can we go on a double date?

(Yes I am a really bad person.)
posted by Sara C. at 7:43 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Would totally go on a date with Jesse Eisenberg and ask him, "Oh, by the way, what was it like to work with my softball buddy Freeman?"

No, really I would ask him if he ever worked with the guy who played older Pete in Pete And Pete, who is a grip now. I bet Jesse Eisenberg and Older Pete would have a lot to talk about.
posted by Sara C. at 7:44 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


I don't know anything about this particular woman

For real, that's a lot to divine about a human being from a junket clip.

Until we see the entire footage of the encounter, it's completely absurd to make any judgment about which one of these two folks is the bigger jerk.

While I agree with this, I think the more important detail for me is how these kinds of interviews work, as covered nicely in the Guardian piece. Actors need to sell their movies, journos need to offer a compelling product, both grudgingly play to their levels of tolerance for each other under the guidance and bidding of PR.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 7:45 PM on June 3, 2013


Haha if this is dismantling than what Mark Lanegan did to me must have been like de-materializing and then crapping on and that was over the PHONE. She got off light. The part of her story where she pops back in after the interview to somehow pester him about where he lives and he goes "Youre still here?" is definitely the best bit.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:45 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


it's hard to imagine anyone who's had too little failure or shame in their life.

So, I take it you've never been to Portland.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:45 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


The main thing I learned from this is that I really want to meet Mila Kunis for a drink. Mostly because I want to buy her a beer that's better than Blue Moon.

Does this mean I'm old? It kinda feels like it does.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 7:46 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]




Hold on guys I'm trying to think of some more people I can namedrop this thread is moving too quickly.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:48 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


you've got to keep that written on your hand, PA
posted by kagredon at 7:48 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


The worst thing about this is that now I have Say My Name stuck in my head.
posted by dirigibleman at 7:49 PM on June 3, 2013 [11 favorites]


As I understand it, as difficult as it may have been for her, it's much worse for the talent. They do these junkets where they give dozens of reporters, some of which are definitely "reporters", five or fifteen minutes each (or maybe they weight the amount of time depending on who they're talking to and how popular their media outlet is), and all that they've got to say are the same things over and over again, but they have to say them as if they're sincere and from the heart and fresh and off the cuff; it's basically the worst director that they've ever had, asking for identical take after identical take and you don't know if the director is trying to wear you down to get to something authentic or prove to you that he's the boss or can't identify what he's trying to get but just knows that he's not getting it or is just killing time because the sets for the next scene aren't ready yet, or what. Over and over and over and over and [copy and past a few dozen more times]... you get the idea.

And there's way more people than there used to be, because there are these fucking internet people, in addition to the TV and radio and newspaper people, and half of them have this stupid schtick. Like asking you to recite the alphabet backwards really fast, or they talk in an obviously fake accent that you can't really understand, or they just ask you to look into the camera and say their name like it's your magic word that turns you into Captain Marvel or something. They're blatantly using your name recognition to increase theirs. And maybe you can put up with all of that, and even come off as witty and thoughtful and fresh after the hundred and first interview (with someone who can't even pronounce your name and wants you to do the interview through this hand puppet that they brought in), but that's not your job, is it? I do not give one-thirty-seventh of a flying fuck whether or not Xan from the Guardian had a good time interviewing John Goodman. Goodman is a master of his craft and should either be making more art or chilling out and having fun, and the best that some dipshit deserves for trying to turn Goodman's long struggle with alcoholism into a little grist for his column is for Goodman to turn his hide into a jacket.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:51 PM on June 3, 2013 [46 favorites]


I stayed waaaaay too long for comfort at Peter S. Beagle's con table once, does that count as an interview? If so BRB padding resume
posted by nicebookrack at 7:51 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]




That girl has never failed at anything in her life. No one has ever looked at her and said anything remotely resembling, "I am disappointed in your performance. You will not be rewarded."


you don't know this.

I thought the clip was parody, too. If it's not, he didn't seem like a jerk to me (but hilarious) and she didn't seem that upset.

I've heard of her show now, anyway.
posted by sweetkid at 7:55 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


If it's not parody, it should be.
posted by uosuaq at 7:56 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


There are at least one awesome entertainment journos in this thread not at all counting me who is just a hack despite getting satorial advice from Tom Arnold in a gifting suite on more than one occasion.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:57 PM on June 3, 2013


Mod note: A couple comments deleted; let's skip the debate over whether certain prior comments are useless.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:57 PM on June 3, 2013


Vicious dismantling? I guess for someone with Eisenberg's nice guy persona, it might count? I'm pretty sure most five year olds are more 'vicious' to people though.

Of course, I have no sympathy for either actors or interviewers so I was really hoping to see actual tears at the very least.
posted by jacalata at 7:58 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


She might have been able to get away with the last name thing she used for Morgan Freeman if she'd been talking about some random famous actor: "So Duchovny plays a character who..." But Morgan Freeman is a goddamned national treasure and he deserves better. We're talking about a man so warmly thought of and universally respected that when he played the role of God in Bruce Almighty, it was practically typecasting.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:00 PM on June 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


"I stayed waaaaay too long for comfort at Peter S. Beagle's con table once, does that count as an interview?"

Oh wow, if bothering authors at conventions counts as reporting, I should submit a resume to the NYT!
posted by Kevin Street at 8:01 PM on June 3, 2013


Ouch, that Goodman interview. I'm not sure I want to have read that.
posted by painquale at 8:02 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I forget. Is he the poor man's Michael Cera, or is it vice versa?
Definitely Michael Cera's poor man.
posted by Flunkie at 8:03 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


So Duchovny plays a character who..." But Morgan Freeman is a goddamned national treasure and he deserves better

I dunno about that, we're all familiar with Pacino, DeNiro, Olivier, Brando...

It's just that everyone usually says Morgan Freeman's full name, like they always said Brian Krakow and Jordan Catalano on My So Called Life even though there was only ever one Brian or Jordan anyone was talking about.
posted by sweetkid at 8:04 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


In that first clip the girl is bad at her job, but she’s young.
The guy, Eisenberg, is an asshole. I didn’t have any idea who he was until just now, but now I know; some asshole.

He’s a fucking actor, an actor, out begging people to see his latest work so he can continue to get paid. His job description is putting up with stupidity and bullshit and being nice and personable about it. Otherwise what the fuck does he do for a living?
posted by bongo_x at 8:07 PM on June 3, 2013 [10 favorites]


His job description is putting up with stupidity and bullshit and being nice and personable about it.

No, as I understand it this is the job of like everyone who works in movies except actors.
posted by sweetkid at 8:09 PM on June 3, 2013 [12 favorites]


Was he really an asshole? If someone did that finger trick in front of me like I was a 5 year old, I'd probably be rude to them also.
posted by cazoo at 8:12 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


Jesus, this girl really hit a nerve on the Internet. I felt bad for her because (while for me this felt like nerd-flirting) she wasn't picking up what he was putting down and he doubled down instead of backing off, which would have been nice. Then he came off as a true dick, in part because he has more power than her in that situation.

But really, she's touched some weird ancestral high school memory or something. I don't like it.
posted by c'mon sea legs at 8:14 PM on June 3, 2013 [11 favorites]


Was he really an asshole? If someone did that finger trick in front of me like I was a 5 year old, I'd probably be rude to them also.

I would be too. One of the reasons I’m not an actor out promoting myself.
posted by bongo_x at 8:15 PM on June 3, 2013


Dylan did it better

Every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal
posted by KokuRyu at 8:18 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


Definitely Michael Cera's poor man.

Eisenberg was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, been in films nominated for Best Picture, and won a Golden Globe for Best Actor. I like Cera but Eisenberg is on a different plane.
posted by Justinian at 8:20 PM on June 3, 2013 [17 favorites]


Otherwise what the fuck does he do for a living?

Well, he spent years studying theatre most likely, Strasberg and Meisner and all the big names that nobody who watches movies or plays gives a fuck about, probably thinks a lot about how to maintain the difficult balance between reciting lines from memory and telling himself what the director wants to see out of him and somehow tricking himself into emulating whoever he's figured out his character to be so the lines come out, not calculated, but somehow spontaneous, as if whatever bullshit this writer wrote on the page in his underwear at 3 in the morning were somehow words that a person would actually say in whichever given situation, and because it's film he also has spent time training himself not to act any differently when a film crew and camerapeople are swarming about him doing all sorts of shit which HE sees but his CHARACTER doesn't, and then he probably has to recite lines seventy bajillion times while pretending to be in the exact same mood, reacting to the exact same stimuli, as he did the first time when it was all made-up simulated bullshit already, and of course this is only IF he weathers all the auditions with two hundred people all trying to pretend to be the same person and somehow stand out, over and over again, in between barista jobs if the cliche holds true, and then if he DOES succeed it's not enough to do his job, because he also has to deal with interviewers who don't know the first fucking thing about what acting actually entails, what this theatrical artform that developed in ancient Greece with goddamn Aeschylus and has this rich and wonderful history that unsurprisingly parallels many of the developments of the entire history of the human race entails beyond "What's it like to work with Freeman?", oh and also if he's REALLY successful he gets to real with his face being blown up everywhere on the planet but it's not his face, it's the face of the guy he's pretending to be, so now a bunch of people think he's wannabe Michael Cera from Zombieland or even worse motherfucking Mark Zuckerberg, America's Chief Narcissist Asshole, and all these people have formed opinions on him and who he must be like and how he sucks as an actor and how self-obsessed he must be to want people looking at him all the time, like this recursive bullshit spiral, like shit literally shitting on itself, all because at some point he decided he loved theatre or movies or whatever passion it was that made him into such a goddamn talented person at such a young age, and then people forget about him and it's back to auditions, back to thinking about acting, back to a hundred takes of the same goddamn scene where if he does it well he'll be able to convince people that he's not really himself, not that those people possess the sufficient irony to understand this as they use this new portrayal to condemn him as a person and treat him like a character in the shitty underwear screenplay he just worked his ass off to try and spring from
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:22 PM on June 3, 2013 [110 favorites]


There are people who ask questions in the style of what they imagine to be an interviewer, then there are people who chat with celebrities and end up having an interview.

For example, Alec Baldwin chatting with Thom Yorke, or Alec talking with one of his role models, Gene Wilder (part 2, part 3, part 4), is the latter. The Eisenberg interview was the former.

Good interviews come from some mutual respect, and at least some understanding of the history of the person. I think the internet era has made interviewing celebrities strange, as you can look up a ton of obscure half-truths, digging up the past and trying to find out something interesting. But instead, you come off like someone who just read a bunch of weird factoids.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:25 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


Celebrities interviewing each other is an entirely different thing though then entertainment journalists of any kind interviewing a celebrity. In the double celebrity interview the idea is that the audience is interested in both interviewer and interviewee and so the dynamic is really different.
posted by sweetkid at 8:28 PM on June 3, 2013


Honestly Halloween Jack? So fucking what? Man boo hoo the actors have to answer questions about their latest movie. I mean really? If you don't like the 'game' or whatever don't agree to do the interviews. Instead Dylan or Eisenberg or whomever wants to play who's got the biggest dick with someone who's trying to make a fucking living or do something to further her career. I get that it's tiresome for these people but that's apparently how the game is played damn it. You don't like it? Don't take that role or don't take the fucking interview. Sorry that you did, but that's life sometime your career demands shit of you that isn't convenient.

I don't understand the justification. Oh they don't wanna. Well then return the publicity money and do something else. Or say no and let your career grow naturally. I hate it when people who clearly have the power in a situation revel and rub the other person's nose in their flaw. Ok so she's not a brilliant interviewer. You need to make yourself feel superior? Do it on your own dime and don't fuck with someone else who's not harming you.
posted by Carillon at 8:29 PM on June 3, 2013 [7 favorites]


I don't think that's really fair to Eisenberg. He's done hundreds of interviews. Why is this one different? Not just because he's tired of interviews and she's not good at interviewing, but because it seemed like she wasn't all that interested in interviewing Jesse Eisenberg, but rather interested in being Romina Puga interviewing Jesse Eisenberg. If that makes sense? She wasn't promoting the film, or an interview with Eisenberg, she was promoting herself.
posted by Justinian at 8:34 PM on June 3, 2013 [28 favorites]


Also, I especially respect Jesse for the same reason I respect Anna Kendrick: he has a knack for portraying intelligent people in ways that not only convey both their intelligence and their flaws, but which entwine the two together so you get this sense that intelligence isn't just some Plus Stat that his character got in exchange for their Minus Stat, it's essential to his worldview and personal topography. The Social Network was a combination of two brilliant artists who each have major fucking flaws in their approach, and Eisenberg's Zuckerberg (heehee) was a lot of what helped keep that movie feeling as flawless as it did.

For my money, his best performance that I've seen was in The Squid and the Whale, in which he's the older son of an asshole English professor or some such, and he's emulating his father in all the wrong ways so he comes out arrogant but ignorant, naive but constantly trying to assert the wisdom he simply doesn't have. The entire movie's great if you can stand movies about affluent, well-educated white people, but Jesse's character stood out as especially identifiable and heartbreaking to me.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:34 PM on June 3, 2013 [17 favorites]


Celebrity interviews are tools of exploitation used against artists and journalists alike by industries which mutually benefit from the exploitation. It's the price of participation. And it boggles me when two people in an interview turn on each other like this over what is the fault of the design.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 8:35 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


It's only a matter of time before this all goes meta and a movie about a press junket is made. Romantic comedy? Psychological thriller?

This October...
Brad Pitt... ("I don't think I should be answering these questions.")
Anne Hathaway... ("Answer me! The world needs to know!")
In an Oliver Stone Film...
JUNKET
Sometimes answers...just create more questions...

FALL 2013
posted by zardoz at 8:37 PM on June 3, 2013 [14 favorites]


Well, he spent years studying theatre most likely...................................

Not according to his wikipedia entry. Was that just a generic 'acting is better than you' rant? Because Eisenberg says he got into acting because life is more comfortable when you are following directions for how to behave.
posted by jacalata at 8:38 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


That girl has never failed at anything in her life. No one has ever looked at her and said anything remotely resembling, "I am disappointed in your performance. You will not be rewarded."

She's a young woman, not a girl. And I would never dare to presume what sorts of disappointments or failures anybody I do not personally know has had. I would not be surprised, however, seeing as she is both a young woman and a Latina, to discover that there has been more complexity to her experience than you give her credit for.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 8:40 PM on June 3, 2013 [16 favorites]


Also, I especially respect Jesse for the same reason I respect Anna Kendrick: he has a knack for portraying intelligent people in ways that not only convey both their intelligence and their flaws, but which entwine the two together so you get this sense that intelligence isn't just some Plus Stat that his character got in exchange for their Minus Stat, it's essential to his worldview and personal topography.

I think Eisenberg and Kendrick's ability to plausibly portray intelligent people has to do with the fact that they are themselves really damn smart. (As this video certainly demonstrates, if not in the most flattering way.) It's hard to convincingly play someone highly intelligent if you're, you know, not.
posted by eugenen at 8:41 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


Eisenberg says he got into acting because life is more comfortable when you are following directions for how to behave.

Um, that exact sentence you clipped off says that that's how he felt when he started acting, at the age of 10. I highly suspect that's not his current mentality towards acting, and I think that turning to theatre as a way to escape the anxiety of being 10 is probably not atypical.

It should also be pointed out that Jesse Eisenberg is a frequent contributor to McSweeney's, and that all of his articles get ten times more hilarious if you imagine his Mark Zuckerberg reciting all of them.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:45 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


All of Mila Kunis's interviews desperately make me want to be her BFF. She always comes across as delightful. Anyone who wants more Mila Kunis hilarity should watch her interviews with Craig Ferguson.

These press junket interviews are usually painful for me to watch now that I know the poor actors are on some endless slog through countless reporters, repeating the same answers to the same questions. At least with late night shows or daytime shows like Ellen, you have the illusion of a more intimate, in depth conversation, no matter how micromanaged the interview actually is behind the scenes. Eisenberg, for example, comes across as a shy, neurotic kind of guy in talk show interviews.

Though after years of watching late night talk shows, Craig Ferguson's especially, I've become really intrigued by spotting the differences between guests who are just there to do their contractually obligated publicity, and those who seem to end up genuinely invested in or enjoying the interview, and how the host reacts to them. Letterman frequently seems bored by having to follow the publicity script, except for those occasions when he himself is genuinely excited by or interested in the work, and seems to love making interviews uncomfortable. Leno always comes across as smarmy and barely better than a press junket interview. Ferguson seems to aim for a more intimate, fun interview, and when his interviewee doesn't cooperate, things get awkward.

Press junket or talk show appearance, it's all a deliberately manipulated show, but it's interesting to see where the artifice in these kinds of promotional interviews breaks down and where the line is for different actors.
posted by yasaman at 8:46 PM on June 3, 2013 [12 favorites]


It's only a matter of time before this all goes meta and a movie about a press junket is made. Romantic comedy?

Confession: I totally just had that idea like half an hour before this comment was posted.
posted by Sara C. at 8:48 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's only a matter of time before this all goes meta and a movie about a press junket is made. Romantic comedy?

Well there was that bit in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant pretends to be from Horse and Hound in order to interview Julia Roberts about a movie on space aliens, which has obviously nothing to do with Horse and Hound and wouldn't resonate with their demographic.
posted by sweetkid at 8:50 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


In general, I feel like people should help each other out in potentially stressful situations. And this kind of interview is a game - she wants a cute clip with a celebrity, he wants free airtime to promote his movie. But I'm more sympathetic towards him because he had to do the same thing all day. If she had prepared appropriately and tried to do less giggling and more attempting to ask questions that would have yielded interesting answers, it would have been less uncomfortable for everyone.
posted by kat518 at 8:51 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Seth Rogen was just on the Nerdist podcast, where he related a story about running into Will Smith unexpectedly when he was on the Sony lot on business. Rogen started chatting with him, and then a tour group came around the corner. Rogen instinctively turned around and prepared to bolt the other way to avoid a situation which was probably either going to be either awkward or draining or both. When he turned back around, he saw that Will Smith had actually walked up to the tour group and was taking photos with every single person. Rogen's conclusion: there's a reason why that guy earns the big bucks - he earns it.

It's something you hear over and over about A-List celebrities; the people that get there and stay there tend to be capable of being incredibly nice to people they've never met and don't owe anything to. George Clooney is apparently capable of becoming anyone's best friend in a matter of minutes; even people who don't want to like Tom Cruise say that you have to actually work to dislike him when you meet him in person.

However, it's not something you necessarily hear about A-list actors. De Niro is supposed to be very awkward unless he knows you well; Pacino can apparently be quite volatile and is fond of turning the question back on the interviewer. Neither one of them does a ton of press, and for good reason. They don't enjoy it, the journalists don't get much of a story, and at this point, they've earned the clout to not have to jump through hoops if they don't want to.

The problem here, as far as I can see it, is that Eisenberg is an actor who is being asked to be a celebrity, which is not necessarily what he wants to be doing. I don't know that he's a dick; I think he's being forced to do something that doesn't suit him personally, which as a result served the movie he was supposed to promote poorly. If he was a dick, he was a dick because he was put in a nightmare situation for an introvert and he reacted as you'd expect someone with his temperament to act in that situation, and all the factors in that situation - not just him - are to blame for the outcome.

That style of media interview is not a one sized fits all thing, and yet all different types of people end up getting shoved into the same meat grinder. Some people are more introverted and aren't going to be able to muster up the energy to keep talking about themselves for hours on end. Other people will shine. Eventually, everyone gets properly sorted: the sort of people who are good at being celebrities - the people who want to be celebrities like Will Smith - keep taking photos with tourists. The people who don't have the stomach for it stop doing that sort of promotional tour, either because they keep working long enough that they get enough clout to get out of it, or else because they've stopped working because they are too much of a pain in the ass to hire. Either way, I don't think this moment is particularly revelatory of Eisenberg's character or indicative of where his future lies.
posted by Kiablokirk at 8:56 PM on June 3, 2013 [51 favorites]


I think he was being a jerk, and I was quite glad to see it. Those junket interviews are already disgusting and inane without cutesy gimmicks. And as someone who's fairly private and hasn't really followed popular celebrity culture for the past decade, I'm sort of taken aback at how chummy and familiar the interviewers are with their subjects these days. Not saying that the hacks must fall to their knees and genuflect before the august presence of Bradley Cooper or whomever, but if I'm there to sell some shit AND then be expected to pally it up with some dork, I'd be quite pointy, too.

Here's a fun video of Mila Kunis that's sort of the anti-Stark interview. And she's still a delight.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:58 PM on June 3, 2013 [10 favorites]


Um, that exact sentence you clipped off says that that's how he felt when he started acting, at the age of 10.

If you follow the Wikipedia footnote to the Guardian celebrity junket interview with Eisenberg it's actually age 9, and the quote was directly linked to Eisenberg's promotion of the Facebook movie:

He turned to plays aged nine after struggling to fit in at school, and suffering what he's described as "terrible separation anxiety" (Eisenberg's Woody Allenish neurosis is no mere patter – it is absolutely for real). "When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction."

Yeeha. We are down the celebrity junket interview rabbithole now.
posted by mediareport at 8:58 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm still a pretty big fan of that MTV interview with Ol' Dirty Bastard, or as he requests to be referred to in the interview, "Rain Man."
posted by koeselitz at 9:04 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


That Guardian interview is really damn interesting. I like that Jesse's self-proclaimed "trite and generic" answers are more thoughtful and revealing than the stuff you get out of some actors when they're having a good day.

Sara C., you're gonna have to butt out. He's all mine.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:08 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


Woody Allenish neurosis

On a sort of unrelated note I hate that only Woody Allen can have neurosis now or if anyone does it's described as Woody Allenish.
posted by sweetkid at 9:11 PM on June 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


on an even more unrelated note I don't think anyone uses the term neurosis much any more anyway.
posted by sweetkid at 9:12 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I didn't have an opinion about Mila Kunis until now. She's great.
posted by Mojojojo at 9:14 PM on June 3, 2013 [7 favorites]


I'm straight and all but I really love watching her speak Russian
posted by sweetkid at 9:15 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


Jesse Eisenberg's vicious dismantling of an unprepared and annoying young junket interviewer.

This is absurd framing. He didn't dismantle her in any sense. It's called banter.

People's need to find conflict or controversy where it doesn't exist really amazes me sometimes.
posted by Unified Theory at 9:15 PM on June 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


Not sure if I want Rory Marinich to drink more coffee or less.
posted by deathpanels at 9:18 PM on June 3, 2013 [8 favorites]


The problem here, as far as I can see it, is that Eisenberg is an actor who is being asked to be a celebrity, which is not necessarily what he wants to be doing. I don't know that he's a dick; I think he's being forced to do something that doesn't suit him personally, which as a result served the movie he was supposed to promote poorly.

Exactly. So he says "I will do this movie for 20% less if I don’t have to do press" or something like that.
posted by bongo_x at 9:18 PM on June 3, 2013


*emerges from rabbit hole*And here are more comments than you could possibly want that Jesse Eisenberg has made about being an actor:
INTERVIEWER: You had what you describe as “a secret” while attending Churchill Junior High School and East Brunswick High School.

JESSE EISENBERG: From the time I was around 8 I did children’s theater—Kids on Stage in South Brunswick, the Franklin Villagers Barn Theatre in Somerset—appearing in musicals like Secret Garden and Peter Pan. I didn’t tell anybody I was an actor, nor that I was on Broadway in the 1996 staging of Summer and Smoke. It felt kind of obnoxious and arrogant. It was like putting myself out there to be seen and, besides, they might have thought it was effeminate. Growing up in East Brunswick, I got a great education, alongside a lot of very smart kids. It was also so close to New York that it fueled my dreams of working in the Land of Oz.
And another:
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t want to study acting [in college]?

JE: Yeah, I wanted to study something different. I’ve been to acting school before and I helped teach a class two years ago in the NYU acting program. I like being in acting classes, but I don’t like being in them enough to do it every day. I find it so exhausting. I have other ambitions like writing plays and books. There’s an unlimited amount of knowledge out there to absorb. It’s not just about acting.
So far, he's had a couple of plays produced, one of them starring Vanessa Redgrave. And here's one more quote:
WOODY HARRELSON: When we were doing Zombieland, I remember having a conversation or two with you where you said that you’re not going to do any more movies. You seemed pretty passionate about that.

EISENBERG: I meant that exactly as I said. I mean, I’m seeing two therapists now. I break pills in half in the morning and take different ones. At the time, I was in a movie that had just come out, Adventureland, and I just found that the public attention—even though it was limited—really, really screwed me up and made me feel terrible. You know, I give credence to the worst things somebody writes about me, and if somebody writes something nice, I think they’re wrong or false or lying or joking. Acting is a weird profession. It’s very disquieting, and at the time it just made me so confused. It’s only when you step away from a movie for several weeks or months that you start to put things in perspective.
posted by Wonton Cruelty at 9:20 PM on June 3, 2013 [24 favorites]


I'm nearly incapable of drinking coffee. This level of "enthusiasm" is my default state.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:22 PM on June 3, 2013 [8 favorites]


Ugh. What kind of post is this? "It's ok for the internet to hate on this interviewer, more than it already has, because she wrote some of her questions on her hand. There- I framed it for you so it's justified; gawk and snark away." Fun.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 9:25 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


I mean, I’m seeing two therapists now.

Jesse Eisenberg and I have so much in common it might need to be me who dates him you guys except for the dating his friend part of course.
posted by sweetkid at 9:26 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


sweetkid that is called a bro triangle

it is the holiest and most sacred of all geometric dating formulae
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:28 PM on June 3, 2013 [15 favorites]


Whoa, that Jon Goodman interview made me desperately unhappy for him and angry at the interviewer. Your interview with a famous actor starts going south so you figure you will get him to talk about his alcoholism and the dynamics of the Roseanne show? Have some respect, reporter dude. He is an actor, not a dancing monkey. I was glad when Goodman stopped the invasive questions saying he didn't want to think about all of that stuff just to sell a movie. I guess it is hard for reporters to see where the line is when some actors are open about everything and others aren't, so maybe they figure they might as well ask and get shot down rather than miss an opportunity. But that Goodman interview made me angry and sad.
posted by onlyconnect at 9:30 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


Wonton Cruelty, I'm noticing a pattern in these interviews you posted. In each one, the age at which he started acting is lowered by a year.

We'd started with 10 years old according to Wikipedia, and then he said 9 years old for the Guardian, and in NJ Monthly he said 8, and now I'm on the Interview Magazine one and he's saying "I started doing children’s theater when I was seven to get out of school because I didn’t fit in."

Also, his father is a professor at my old college! This kind of feels like destiny, I call dibs.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:31 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


LET'S ALL GO!
posted by sweetkid at 9:33 PM on June 3, 2013


He also gives his address in Chelsea at the end of that Interview Magazine article. Meetup?
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:34 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


In each one, the age at which he started acting is lowered by a year.

This is a lot like my best friend from childhood - we met when we were five, but when we are at big events like weddings or baby showers she tells people we met younger and younger the drunker she gets - five, four, eventually we're like crawling around together with pacifiers when we met. Might as well have been.
posted by sweetkid at 9:35 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


ok to be fair I have never seen her drunk at a baby shower
posted by sweetkid at 9:38 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm wondering to what extent the Goodman interview represents a specifically UK attitude to this type of thing--when I first started reading the Times, the Guardian, etc., back in the 90s, I immediately noticed that the interviewers were far more direct (all the way up to brutal) than their American equivalents, and were also far more willing to say, "This interview was torture," or "the interviewee had about as much to say as a flapjack," or whatever.

I can still remember my shock--SHOCK!--as a teenager when I read an interview with Diana Muldaur after she left ST:TNG. When she was on the show, she did the usual "oh, yeah, everyone's awesome!" routine; after leaving, she described the job as a soul-draining experience. Suddenly, I realized that, OMG, these celebrities probably didn't mean 3/4 of the things they were saying, and my innocence (sniff) was forever gone.
posted by thomas j wise at 9:40 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


I think the interview clearly turned out better than she ever hoped. Everyone is critiquing and critisizing her, like she pooped out an epic fail. Out of the "hundreds" of so-called interviews apparently happening here, hers is getting traction, and so will she, I imagine.
posted by Brocktoon at 9:44 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I think the writing on her hand and saying "Freeman" things weren't that bad - the really annoying thing she did was pretending he picked her card when they were doing the trick - like, at least go along with doing the trick.
posted by sweetkid at 9:46 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


This was by no means a dismantling. It was merely occasionally uncomfortable.

Goodman, in his interview, comes off as really... human. I just want to give him a hug.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:48 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


Her interview didn't make her come off poorly, I didn't think—I mean, Jesse came off way better, but that's because he was cracking jokes and also is famous. The only irksome part was when she wrote about how much of a jerk he was and how bad she felt on her Tumblr and then ABC, totally hamming up how unpleasant everything was like Jesse's mock-critiquing her was actually a big deal.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:48 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ha, I didn't notice! Maybe the next time Jesse does an interview he'll claim to have started studying acting while still in his mother's womb. And some poor interviewer will swallow it and end up the subject of a MeFi post.
posted by Wonton Cruelty at 9:48 PM on June 3, 2013


Out of the "hundreds" of so-called interviews apparently happening here, hers is getting traction, and so will she, I imagine.

Even if we're only watching NASCAR for the crashes, that is not the metric by which someone is a good driver.
posted by 0xFCAF at 9:49 PM on June 3, 2013


That was so awkward, I think it inadvertently made me feel self-conscious, but I'm not sure on who's behalf.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 9:51 PM on June 3, 2013


I wonder if this interview is an Andy Kaufman/Jerry Lawler style prank. Next thing you know they'll be on Letterman throwing coffee at each other and many years down the road it'll be revealed as keyfabe.
posted by tservo at 9:51 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


how unpleasant everything was like Jesse's mock-critiquing her was actually a big deal

yeah I think she was playing it up, too. I think she thought he was flirting with her at first but then noticed there was a hard edge to it - honestly, that would have been my reaction in the moment, too. But when she was talking about it later as this horrible thing it seemed mostly to be playing on the attention.
posted by sweetkid at 10:00 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


The interviewer was openly hostile and clearly not interested at all in doing any interviewing, and Eisenberg did his best to play it off and still make something that was entertaining and worth watching--not entirely successfully, but he gave it a good shot. Someone here was definitely being a dick, but I can't see how anybody could possibly think it was Jesse Eisenberg.
posted by IAmUnaware at 10:02 PM on June 3, 2013


I don't think either person was being a dick and think that's a valid opinion too
posted by sweetkid at 10:03 PM on June 3, 2013 [2 favorites]


I think the Internet's standards for "vicious" and "dismantling" have dropped to the point of meaninglessness. How about "Jesse Eisenberg was mildly dickish to oh who cares, even finishing this sentence feels like too much work."
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 10:04 PM on June 3, 2013 [15 favorites]


Even if we're only watching NASCAR for the crashes, that is not the metric by which someone is a good driver.

Yeah but in the long run, or even in the short-ish run, having a lot of eyeballs on you is more valuable than being less-than-incompetent at what you do. Especially if you're the combination of young, cute, and ambitious that this interviewer is.

True story: there's a part in Ender's Game where Peter and Valentine Wiggin join forums using fake IDs and deliberately post provocatively and foolishly, in order to piss people off and get feedback about what parts of their writing style felt like they were being written by the thirteen-year-olds that they were. That's why when I was thirteen, I joined an online forum and posted deliberately provocative things, in order to piss off everybody else and get feedback about my style. And then I jumped up a rung and moved to a slightly classier forum, and did the exact same thing, over and over and over again, each time pissing off a slightly higher class of person. It all culminated in a somewhat famous programmer writing an essay about how I was the scum of the earth, and then I started using my real name online because I knew I had nothing left to learn.

There're a lot of young jagoffs like myself for whom fucking up in public is a calculated part of the career ladder. I can think of a number of musicians and celebrities who were much-hated when they were younger, shrugged it off because people hating you is publicity, and then they grew up and did interesting things and everybody forgot what they did when they were teenagers. That thing they tell you about if you hate something, you should try to ignore it instead of giving a shit about it? That's not just useful because it makes you a politer person, it's useful because often the people who hate are okay with your hating them, or have even manipulated you into hating for their own sakes.

Whether this girl intended to come off as annoyingly as she did in her post-interview Tumbling, this experience will certainly teach her that it's better to piss off a bunch of Internet People than it is to not have any Internet People to piss off. It's like watching a million people break a baby bird out of its shell simultaneously.
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:05 PM on June 3, 2013 [9 favorites]


I want Vanity Fair caliber journalism running these interviews! Until I get that, I will continue to use that as my metric.
posted by Brocktoon at 10:09 PM on June 3, 2013


One could look at press junkets as auditions for wannabe journalists. You're thrown into a stressful, unnatural, tightly-controlled environment, but your job is to make it look just the opposite. Maybe you stumble or maybe the actor doesn't give you a fair chance, but your measure of greatness is how well you can transcend, and make the most of a difficult situation. If you can't cut it, the person behind you will. If you do well, you may get to start conducting interviews more on your own terms.

I think he gave her a lucky break, what with the youtube-ready material.
posted by mantecol at 10:09 PM on June 3, 2013


I think the Internet's standards for "vicious" and "dismantling" have dropped to the point of meaninglessness. How about "Jesse Eisenberg was mildly dickish to oh who cares, even finishing this sentence feels like too much work."

Yes. And now I realize that my poor word choices made it seem as if I feel more strongly about this than I do, which is not very strongly at all. And now I see that I wrote something that looks like "I hate this guy" when I meant "he really made himself look bad". And since I don’t really know who these people are and don’t really care I don’t know why I said anything.

I think it was the "Badass Hall of Fame" that threw me off.
posted by bongo_x at 10:18 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


Mod note: Comment deleted; as usual, let's focus on the post topic, not what we think of other people in the thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:22 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'd love to see a celebrity literally enter the "Badass Hall of Fame" during one of these interviews. What a way to break the, um, ice. "Say my name" indeed.
posted by tservo at 10:33 PM on June 3, 2013


yasaman: "All of Mila Kunis's interviews desperately make me want to be her BFF. She always comes across as delightful. Anyone who wants more Mila Kunis hilarity should watch her interviews with Craig Ferguson."

Why wouldn't you? She is gorgeous and smart and funny (and in my world the last two just add on to the gorgeous by orders of magnitude) and she doesn't seem to take herself especially seriously, which is even more awesome.
posted by Samizdata at 10:37 PM on June 3, 2013


Rory Marinich: "That Guardian interview is really damn interesting. I like that Jesse's self-proclaimed "trite and generic" answers are more thoughtful and revealing than the stuff you get out of some actors when they're having a good day.

Sara C., you're gonna have to butt out. He's all mine.
"

Fine then. I will call sloppy seconds, and Sara C. can sit outside and look in the window.
posted by Samizdata at 10:40 PM on June 3, 2013


sweetkid: "ok to be fair I have never seen her drunk at a baby shower"

Well, I have been showered by a baby drunk before, so there's that.
posted by Samizdata at 10:48 PM on June 3, 2013


How much alcohol can you get in a baby before it starts puking anyway?

No reason I'm asking. But hurry up and tell me. It's important.
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:57 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


mantecol: "One could look at press junkets as auditions for wannabe journalists. You're thrown into a stressful, unnatural, tightly-controlled environment, but your job is to make it look just the opposite. Maybe you stumble or maybe the actor doesn't give you a fair chance, but your measure of greatness is how well you can transcend, and make the most of a difficult situation. If you can't cut it, the person behind you will. If you do well, you may get to start conducting interviews more on your own terms.

I think he gave her a lucky break, what with the youtube-ready material.
"

I mean, I suppose he could have told her to fsck herself then walk off the set...

And he left her some face. Instead of "What an idiot!" he turned it to "Difficult interview subject."

Then she totally mishandled the whole thing by going "Pity me everyone! He is a bad man!"
posted by Samizdata at 11:01 PM on June 3, 2013


Since everyone else is analyzing the rest of it, let me go to my area of expertise and analyze the trick.

Technically, it isn't even a trick - because there's no real plot. It's a series of moves - cut to the top, double lift, snap change.

The cut to the top is truly terrible - he makes no real attempt to hide it. Then, once he's obviously cut the card to the top, he then asks her where the card is - and she says, "The top" - where it in fact is.

The double lift is technically fine - except that he spends so long preparing to do it that he gives away that "something is happening".

But then the snap change. Why did he pick the snap change? Of all the sleights to do when angles are an issue, that is the one not to do.

He actually did it right - except the other camera shows exactly what happened (which is why I'm exposing it). This is why you do the snap change with the deck in the other hand - so you have a place to ditch the card!

We live in a golden age of magic tricks. Look at this one, Digital Dissolve - $50 and about 20 hours of practice will get you this little marvel, where I put one coin in your fist, balance another on the top of your hand, then wipe my fingers across it - and they've transposed - and you can examine everything before and after. (Excuse the stupid flashy video effects, they're not concealing anything.)

I could post a dozen or two tricks, some better than this, some easier to do, all less than $100 and a couple of days' focused practice.

There's just no excuse for such a lame demonstration - particularly when he went to the effort to learn the snap change, which is pretty hard... let me try it... well, not that hard but I've certainly practiced that move a thousand times. There are MUCH better tricks that are practically self-working!

Overall, he has a weak and feckless way of handling the cards that makes them seem dull and listless in his hands.

But worst of all - his trick was plotless. There was no suspense, no up-and-down - no interaction with the audience except "WRONG!" and "LOOK!" There was no sense of process - and no style.

Each trick you do should convey your style to the audience. It's the combination of style, a story (even if completely abstract) that pulls the audience along, and allows the bending of reality that make the trick into a miracle.

As for the interview, well, he has all the power in the interview as "some famous actor" and she has none. He's a jerk for putting her on the spot. But it's irrelevant to the fact that he has no talent whatsoever for magic.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:02 PM on June 3, 2013 [12 favorites]


Rory Marinich: "How much alcohol can you get in a baby before it starts puking anyway?

No reason I'm asking. But hurry up and tell me. It's important.
"

Depends on the baby and the type of liquor. I have had my best luck with clear liquors. The colored stuff has them ralphing very quickly. And I have met some seriously tough babies. You know the type - they play "grab the finger" and next thing you know, you have a finger-shaped bag of bones plinters. And I have seen one baby shank another over the right bottle...
posted by Samizdata at 11:03 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm an interviewer myself, and as much as I want to have sympathy for my compatriots, I really, really don't. Here's my favorite (read: most cringe-inducing) local celebrity interview. This wee little hipster 27-year-old opens by asking her readers, "Is Wynonna Judd the hot actress or the fat one?" and it goes downhill from there, as Wynonna rightfully schools her.

Well, where would you like to see the country music scene headed?

Where it is. Are you into country?

I don't really listen to it very much.

Yeah, you don't seem very enthusiastic about this interview. Are you doing it because you have to?


The writer of this piece once sat next to me at a Dinosaur Jr. concert for 15 minutes and wrote a lukewarm review filled with caveats about not being their target audience and describing J. Mascis as having "the stage presence and vocal delivery of a wet sock." Dude: he's J. MASCIS. That IS his stage presence. (I think she left before he popped a string and played his broken guitar with a nonbroken one, all without cracking a smile.)
posted by Madamina at 11:15 PM on June 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


Eisenberg was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, been in films nominated for Best Picture, and won a Golden Globe for Best Actor

but he wasn't in Arrested Development so he loses.
posted by The Hamms Bear at 11:31 PM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]



On a sort of unrelated note I hate that only Woody Allen can have neurosis now or if anyone does it's described as Woody Allenish.


I don't mind it since my neurosies are specifically related to my constant fear of and awareness of death, so if anyone did say that about me its accurate.

The bar of what a 'jerk' is has been set SO LOW. There's this epidemic of niceness where even popular bands are clean cut and shiny, and light, flirty banter (I've actually watched the video now) between a slightly nervous but not too nervous actor and a cute interviewer is treated as some big scandal. This manufactored controversy is a waste of everyone's time, and wasn't any smarter or more clever than your average late night talk show puff piece.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:42 PM on June 3, 2013 [3 favorites]


My worst interview EVER was when I got Lyrics Born for a half-hour scheduled interview and his publicist still hadn't gotten me his album, but wouldn't reschedule. He called me from his car, and was giving me one-word answers to everything while all I could think to ask him about was some six-year-old work with Latyrx, which I liked but knew fuck all about outside of, like, song titles. In it, I found out that he was dating his backup singer Joyo, but I couldn't hear him well enough to get her name and he refused to spell it. Have I mentioned that I already got my editor to push back the deadline so I could file the story that night?

Since I mostly did music, I only ended up on one legit junket (for MetroParent, god save it), which had three parts: 1) Tour the Aardman studios, ask one question by video conference with a bunch of other hacks for a full "interview" feature; 2) Get a half hour group interview with the horse trainer for Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, which was mostly interesting because he also worked on Heaven's Gate, which we watched in high school but I didn't know anything about it being a giant flop, 3) Get 15 minutes with Dakota Fanning in a 12-person group interview, where I think I asked her what she most envied about regular children, ("Free time"). That was a shitshow and I ended up never turning in the "interview" since I would have had to have cobbled it from other people's questions in a way I wasn't comfortable with, especially since there was absolutely no story there at all.

Oh, wait, part 4 was that they did these interviews in such a revolving cattle call that we had to wait two hours for the shuttle bus to take us back to the hotel so I stuffed my pockets with danishes. At least at the hotel, I found out that they'd given us a per diem of $300 for two days and I hadn't used any of it, so I got to play the "Barkeep, what is your most expensive liquor?" game and Dreamworks was happy to pay for it.

(Best interview ever? Jordan Knight, which happened like two days after Lyrics Born and the dude was just incredibly self-aware, self-deprecating and funny. I went in being all pissed off since he had the same publicity team as Lyrics Born and I was going to do the unprofessional "Can you believe this guy used to be in NKOTB? Let's ask him about the gallon of cum because I'm a ROCK AND ROLL WRITER," bullshit, but he was great and I really enjoyed talking to him.)
posted by klangklangston at 12:07 AM on June 4, 2013 [4 favorites]


I didn't think the interviewer deserved turning on her the way he did. And I don't think it was remarkable for her to refer to "Freeman." (But serial junket interviews sound like hell, and I probably wouldn't make it through three of them before snapping...)
posted by Zed at 12:15 AM on June 4, 2013


Yeah, no, she's a hack and hacks like her made it harder to do my job back when I was working as a journalist. "Say my name" is bullshit, the video's edited in a way that's supposed to play up his dickery, but she was unprofessional and glib through the whole thing so she got glib, snarky replies.
posted by klangklangston at 12:24 AM on June 4, 2013 [6 favorites]


It's only a matter of time before this all goes meta and a movie about a press junket is made. Romantic comedy?

It's not specifically about press junkets, but America's Sweethearts takes place almost entirely over a weekend junket.
posted by dogwalker at 1:00 AM on June 4, 2013


That girl has never failed at anything in her life. No one has ever looked at her and said anything remotely resembling, "I am disappointed in your performance. You will not be rewarded."

Yes. It's no wonder she got a bit of internet hate-on. Young, cute and incompetent is an easy combination to hate, even excluding the usual misogyny. She also seems the type of parasitic self promoter nobody like, so no wonder she's gotten a bit of flaming.

(It's also no surprise that MeFi being MeFi, naturally contrarian, is more on her side than his.)
posted by MartinWisse at 1:45 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


...she was unprofessional and glib through the whole thing so she got glib, snarky replies

Wait... So you're saying she's being unprofessional (banter, fluff) in the field of showbiz?

Hah! That's the field she's in, and the field Jesse's in, especially seeing as he's doing press for this in the first place. So maybe you don't have as good grounds for piling on the, um, pandering, ditzy, lowbrow hack as you think.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 1:59 AM on June 4, 2013


I have done interviews, though no celebrity interviews.
I have had excellent days and bad, unprepared days. It happens. I'm grateful that my interviewees were generally gracious and if not gracious at least not outwardly hostile.
This just makes me sad.
posted by Omnomnom at 1:59 AM on June 4, 2013


The Dick Cavett - Muhammed Ali interview. Everything went wrong. It was aboard a riverboat and the lighting never worked out. Several minutes in Cavett and Ali have an exchange that went approximately like this:

Cavett: They paid you a niggardly sum.
Ali: WHAT?
Cavett attempts several times to distinguish between the two words making things worse.
Cavett: I feel a wall has come between us.
Ali: You wish there was a wall between us.

It went downstream from there.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:59 AM on June 4, 2013 [11 favorites]


Janice Turner used to post on a now-defunct forum I was also on, and she was an absolute bitch to me at a time when I was mainly posting on there because I was going through a very vulnerable time. She was so rude that the other forumites - who were not by any means sycophantic toward me - more or less ran her off the site.

So no, not feeling that much ill will toward Rhys Ifans.
posted by mippy at 3:08 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


All I can say is, it is unlikely that he is Horse and Hound's favourite actor.

</nineties-movie-reference>
posted by the cydonian at 3:18 AM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


I have never seen a Richard Curtis film and probably will not be moved to do so - even if the next one contains James McAvoy, Vincent Cassell, John Goodman and Norm off of Cheers.
posted by mippy at 3:20 AM on June 4, 2013


Came in to also say America's Sweethearts pretty much is a romantic comedy about a junket. Mostly forgettable, but almost worth it just to hear Hank Azaria say "junket" repeatedly.
posted by Mchelly at 4:43 AM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


Carillon: I get that it's tiresome for these people but that's apparently how the game is played damn it.

Except that a game is by definition something that is done by mutually agreed-upon rules. It's beneficial for her that she gets to run whatever silly little shtick that she thinks will build her brand, but not necessarily for him. Her onerous task is to get through a five-minute interview--or "sit through five minutes of tortuous conversation", if you will--and she can't even manage that.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:02 AM on June 4, 2013


I'm a little baffled by this. First of all, I share the sense that he's not nearly as hostile to her as he's being made out to be; it's just a guy entertaining himself because the rest of these interviews bore him stiff, and her not actually minding, because she's there to do a job. (When she cracks up while calling him a jerk and says he's making her cry, that's an excellent sign that she's not actually rattled.) Even her attempts to defend herself play mostly like teasing to me, because she knows she got some tape people think is weird and interesting.

And the reason she got tape people think is weird and interesting is that she went in there and didn't say, "What was it like working with Morgan Freeman?" like everybody else he talked to all day. The idea that she's unprepared -- that she asked these questions because she couldn't think of "What was it like working with Morgan Freeman?" -- is suspect to me. She's asking these questions because she does a goofy little online video series that's meant to give you a different glimpse into somebody's personality, and because he was at the end of a long day, he sort of grumped at her and she realized that people enjoyed the "viciously dismantling" idea even though it's kind of not what happened, so she went with it.

Generally, when somebody refers to what they're doing as "shtick," that suggests to me that it's pretty self-aware. She's actually trying to give people something *different* from the forty billion other junket interviews he did all day, and considering her to be a hack but the gazillion lazy boneheads who obediently asked him what it's like to work with Morgan Freeman, all of whom probably got (1) the same quote and (2) the same quote they would have expected to get, to be dignified journalists is weird to me.

I don't dislike entertainment journalism when it's silly on purpose like this is; I dislike it when it's earnest and fawning and breathlessly reports that Jesse Eisenberg learned magic for this movie. She tried to get him to do a card trick. She did the finger-and-thumb thing. It's meant to be playful, and I sort of took his Carrot Top comment, for instance, as giving her back what he thought she was doing, which was screwing around.

And then everybody bit, and she went with it. That's what I see.
posted by Linda_Holmes at 5:13 AM on June 4, 2013 [11 favorites]


The press junket has to be the low-point for an actor's career, being that they are all but mandatory and, for every one journalist who knows what they're doing, you have to deal with a couple of dozen talking heads from some mid-market Action News team asking questions that were already addressed in the press packet. I'm not sure I could do it even once.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:21 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


Are celebrity interviews a farce?

Celebrities are a farce.

Or maybe that's celebrity is a farce.
posted by Foosnark at 5:24 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


Actually, not all celebrity interview junkets involve bottom feeder hacks groping in the murk towards huffy & defensive talent bait.

Most do, of course - but I did dozens as a young hack & there are exceptions

One of the best was for Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994).
I'd done the film viewing in LA - then the interview day was back in a Manhattan hotel.

The star, Leslie Nielsen, had already fielded dozens of identical doofus mini-interviews about playing the idiotic Lt. Frank Drebin by the time it was my turn right at the end of the day. He decided to play the interview AS Frank Drebin being interviewed, talked brilliantly about his early career as a straight man - and let the interview run way over time...(and, no, I hadn't "prepared" very well - Nielsen was just a gorgeous professional guy & made sure everyone got great copy).

We hacks had been warned in advance that Priscilla Presley (who played Nielsen's gf in Naked Gun) would NOT tolerate any questions about Elvis. We had to stick to asking her about film acting - or her perfume range. Christ. She answered the first interview question with "...that reminds me of when Elvis and I were courting. He would always ..". And we were off!

George Kennedy (Nielsen's sidekick) had won an Oscar back in 1967 for his supporting role in the classic, Cool Hand Luke. He was as happy to talk about playing a Judas to Paul Newman's anti hero Luke as he was about taking pratfalls in Naked Gun movies..

Anna Nicole Smith played a technician who worked in a sex clinic - her interview answers were blindingly strange and sweet (I actually sold them as a separate interview altogether!). I got all I needed in about five minutes - and I still remember her staggering beauty.

But yes - there was also an element of farce - as with the interview of this post.

I was offered a quickie junket interview with one supporting actor in the Naked Gun movie I hadn't actually heard of (I was a newly arrived Brit in New York). So I turned him down because I wanted to get on home..

That supporting actor was O. J. Simpson.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 5:29 AM on June 4, 2013 [18 favorites]


Yeah this was both funnier and way more gentle than I expected from the lede. Btw if anyone wants a really good dismantling they should talk to my grad school advisor.
posted by en forme de poire at 5:46 AM on June 4, 2013 [4 favorites]


I thought it was pretty entertaining, but I think creative editing has much to do with that. I don't think they really had enough footage to make Eisenberg look like a true asshole, but at least they tried for the sake of publicity. I mean, who had heard of Romina before this?
posted by antonymous at 5:56 AM on June 4, 2013


i'd be all about jesse's zings except i can't hear them! mumble mumble what? subtle delivery attempts, yes, but if we can't hear it then it's a fail.
posted by cristinacristinacristina at 6:29 AM on June 4, 2013


I can hear it.
posted by sweetkid at 6:34 AM on June 4, 2013


Christ, what an asshole.
posted by Debaser626 at 6:40 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


Vicious dismantling of interviewer (who deserved it (Jim Rome)).
posted by bukvich at 6:51 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


re:Now You See Me

Does anybody else think it's ridicules to use cg in a movie about magic tricks?
posted by xjudson at 6:57 AM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


I thought that *was* Natalie Portman at one point and a spin-off of B2F. I had to check to make sure this wasn't originally posted on Funny or Die.
posted by yeti at 7:21 AM on June 4, 2013


Hmm. I kind of assumed this was supposed to be a Simon Amstell on Pop World sort of thing. But of course, the reason it worked with Amstell was because he was usually way smarter than the celebrities he was picking on. And it sometimes backfired, too.

Still, I'm all for dismantling the celebrity interview bullshit.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:47 AM on June 4, 2013


I too fall on the "christ, what an asshole" side of things.

There is something we all forget here: he is pitching a product. He would not be there if he didn't have a movie to sell. This is like a car salesman berating a shopper for not asking the right questions about the floormats. The whole point of these interviews is to answer the same insipid questions for all the different audiences of the different interviewers. If he didn't want to subject his delicate genius to such debasement, he should have told his agent not to put that in his contract.
posted by gjc at 8:34 AM on June 4, 2013 [5 favorites]


The whole point of those interviews is to give ABC a couple thousand more hits, and to let this young interviewer try to develop her quirky persona.

Jesse Eisenberg sold his movie a whole lot better doing this than he would've if he had actually answered the questions straight up. I mean, we wouldn't be talking about him otherwise.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:04 AM on June 4, 2013


she wants a cute clip with a celebrity, he wants free airtime to promote his movie

And everyone won. Seriously, this little mini-shitstorm is the best thing that could have ever happened for a young hack with four videos on Vimeo. And here we are, talking about Jesse Eisenberg, did you hear he's in a new movie?
posted by Nelson at 9:05 AM on June 4, 2013 [4 favorites]


The thing that bothers me the most about the interview is that the interviewer seemed to think that the interview was about her. Despite what she may have been led to believe, she is not a famous talk show host granting some talk time to an unknown bit player.

It's her sense of entitlement that grates on me.
posted by leftcoastbob at 9:07 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


That was nothing, check out this Will Arnett interview. I don't know if it legitimately went of the rails or is some kind of extreme cringe comedy act. Will is brutal.
posted by Ad hominem at 9:29 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


"Wait... So you're saying she's being unprofessional (banter, fluff) in the field of showbiz?"

Yeah, more broadly in the field of journalism.

Hah! That's the field she's in, and the field Jesse's in, especially seeing as he's doing press for this in the first place. So maybe you don't have as good grounds for piling on the, um, pandering, ditzy, lowbrow hack as you think."

Well, no, the idea that because the form is often hacky and trite isn't an argument that it should be hacky and trite. Really, it seems more a hang-up of your contempt than any clear defense of her.

"There is something we all forget here: he is pitching a product. He would not be there if he didn't have a movie to sell. This is like a car salesman berating a shopper for not asking the right questions about the floormats. The whole point of these interviews is to answer the same insipid questions for all the different audiences of the different interviewers. If he didn't want to subject his delicate genius to such debasement, he should have told his agent not to put that in his contract."

This keeps coming up. His job is actually to, you know, act in the movie. The junket interviews are ancillary requirements that he has to do in order to keep doing his real job. If you don't have anything at your work where you have to go outside of your core skills to do bullshit busywork, and you manage to keep a smile on your face the entire time you do, well, god bless your perfect employment. Otherwise, that's a particularly vacuous complaint and your analogy is terrible — it's more like the car engineer talking about the engine he built and instead getting asked about floor mats. Of course you'd be dismissive.
posted by klangklangston at 9:40 AM on June 4, 2013 [5 favorites]


I've worked as a technician on movie press junkets. It's brutal.

It's hard to say which are worse: the interviewers who ask the same boilerplate as the last dozen or the ones who try to be cute and sell their schtick that's made them Columbus Georgia's favorite funnyman.

My favorite moment was doing a junket with Elijah Wood. He was courteous, generously warm, and kept trying to steer questions toward subjects that interested him. No one would take the bait when he brought up trying to make a movie about Iggy and the Stooges. He'd throw it out there and every single interviewer just let it sit, dying, no interest at all. It killed a little piece of my soul. Finally we get a little break and I totally broke protocol and asked about his meeting with Iggy. The PR handler stared daggers at me, but Wood seemed so relieved to know that someone actually cared about what he cared about, that it was worthwhile. He absolutely lit up.

Every time I hear a painful interview, I just assume that the victim has been terribly, terribly alone, for many hours, in a dark room, full of people who often have no interest in their work.
posted by rock swoon has no past at 9:53 AM on June 4, 2013 [16 favorites]


Mila Kunis is now my template for how to behave at auditions.
posted by EatTheWeek at 10:13 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


Huh. Between the two people never in the same shot and the incredibly generic questions I've always seen for press junkets, I had long assumed that they were staged with the actor just answering one person, and then you splice in the different interviewers reading from the same script. Probably would be more humane and just as useful if that was actually the case.
posted by ckape at 10:39 AM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


worth it just to hear Hank Azaria say "junket" repeatedly.

I forgot about this. Reading this thread with that pronunciation is hilarious.
posted by dogwalker at 10:47 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


I just wish she had asked what it was like to work with The Freeman.
posted by Partial Law at 11:19 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


This keeps coming up. His job is actually to, you know, act in the movie.

His job is to do whatever his contract requires him to do, which presumably includes promotion of the movie.
posted by Unified Theory at 11:24 AM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


Probably would be more humane and just as useful if that was actually the case.

Yeah, last night when I was first watching the video and reading this thread I was kind of wondering why they don't just do, like, video press releases or something rather than have the cast answer the same five questions for dozens if not hundreds of media outlets that are all going to print/air identical articles.

Maybe grant real interviews to people who pitch specific ideas (Jesse Eisenberg teaches Ellen to do magic tricks) or want live appearances (Jesse Eisenberg goes on The Today Show) as opposed to canned answers to stock questions.
posted by Sara C. at 11:43 AM on June 4, 2013


Like, why does a 22 year old intern at Univision with a youtube series get to interview Jesse Eisenberg, anyway? Surely the studio PR people have some say over who gets press credentials for this stuff.

(I know a little about studio publicity and almost nothing about how actual press junkets really work.)
posted by Sara C. at 11:45 AM on June 4, 2013


Univision has a program to develop new talent.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 11:52 AM on June 4, 2013


Like, why does a 22 year old intern at Univision with a youtube series get to interview Jesse Eisenberg

Isn't Univision known for choosing young, attractive Hispanic women to do reporting, kind of like what Fox News does with blonde women?
posted by FJT at 11:52 AM on June 4, 2013 [3 favorites]


Also: I can't imagine experienced journalists are really foaming at the mouth to land a press junket interview. Seems like the training wheels of journalism assignments.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:03 PM on June 4, 2013


I understand why Univision wants this girl to get this interview. I don't understand why the studio people aren't like, "well it's not live and your pitch doesn't sound like something we're interested in so why don't we send you this pre-prepped EPK we make specifically for this purpose?"

I mean, do the studios just green-light media outlets as a wider brand rather than wanting to know who they're sending and what their angle is? Considering the publicity budgets for big studio movies that sounds kind of shortsighted.

That said I just got off a phone call where I said "Today Show" and they said "sure what can we do to help?" so...
posted by Sara C. at 12:07 PM on June 4, 2013


There are lots of experienced journos who salivate over junkets. They're usually hacks, but even Lester Bangs wrote a great piece about scamming swag at junkets. And for some folks, especially ones who are good at their jobs, junkets are easy mini-vacations where they get to ask some interesting questions that they can then spin into a feature by getting three quotes on one theme that they'll explore in a broader piece on whatever they reviewed.

Hacks and flacks make junkets hacky, the flacks on purpose and the hacks by habit.
posted by klangklangston at 12:10 PM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


"I mean, do the studios just green-light media outlets as a wider brand rather than wanting to know who they're sending and what their angle is? Considering the publicity budgets for big studio movies that sounds kind of shortsighted. "

A lot of flacks do, especially on a movie that needs a bigger push. They go for the volume theory, and as long as you don't have an actual reputation as causing trouble for the flacks, yeah, getting a Univision camera spot is totally worth 15 minutes of a star's time to a flack.
posted by klangklangston at 12:11 PM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


Are you sure she wasn't under the misapprehension that Now You See Me was filmed on Arrakis?
posted by klangklangston at 12:24 PM on June 4, 2013


His job is to do whatever his contract requires him to do, which presumably includes promotion of the movie.

The reason for that is because every part of Eisenberg is a commodity - his face, his voice, his breakdancing ability, etc.. The thing is he could go somewher like Japan and get paid five to ten times of an average MeFite's yearly salary to look into the camera and say a name. There is a reason people like him have around three other people that get paid very well to fend off stupid requests of people who want a piece of him. That whole back and forth probably wouldn't have happened if she had told him why she wanted him to say her name, and then not act all jerky after he obliges.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 1:38 PM on June 4, 2013 [3 favorites]


Maybe she sucks at her job. Maybe the whole thing is a charade. Maybe she's a little pathetic.

I always go back to something my grandmother likes to say: "There's never a good reason to be rude to somebody."

Seeing this doesn't make me think anything good about Jesse Eisenberg. I see that some of you are referencing the fact that Bob Dylan did this in the 1960s. I feel the same way about how Bob Dylan acted then.
posted by snottydick at 2:39 PM on June 4, 2013


That interview with Will Arnett didn't seem bad at all. It certainly seemed like they were both having fun to me.
posted by Carillon at 2:57 PM on June 4, 2013


> I always go back to something my grandmother likes to say: "There's never a good reason to be rude to somebody."

I keep reading this and trying to interpret it in the manner in which your grandmother meant it, and I am sure your grandmother is less cynical and world-weary than I am, and I know how poorly that reflects on me given how much more recently I started existing.

And I get what you're saying about said maxim's applicability in this situation, in which it can be argued that Jesse Eisenberg is inordinately rude to a person who is just trying to do her job.

Still, I must reluctantly disagree with your grandmother: there is sometimes a good reason to be rude to somebody. If you are offended or insulted, rudeness is the correct response. To remain polite in such a situation is to let people walk over you.

There is no cultural rule that says that awful people are entitled to get your absolute best demeanor at all times. Such a rule would remove the main disincentive for being awful.
posted by savetheclocktower at 3:26 PM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


He probably should have just ended the interview the minute she asked him to look at the camera and say her name.

Oooh, or better yet, look at the camera and say

MY NAME!

In the most exuberant tone he could muster.

I'm curious if Jesse Eisenberg is the only celebrity who has balked on the "say my name" gimmick.

Then again there's also that guy who makes the "Seven Minutes In Heaven" celebrity interview series where he interviews them in a closet and makes a bunch of makeout jokes. My feeling about that is that, while it's silly and more about the interviewer/gimmick than the subject, the interviews are always really interesting and he doesn't ever ask "What's it like to work with... uhhhhh... [stares at hand]... Freidman?" Like, he seems baseline professional and like he actually gives a shit.
posted by Sara C. at 3:39 PM on June 4, 2013


Not for nothing, but:

Austin's Alamo Drafthouse has been pretty successful in getting visiting actors or other celebs to make "be quiet and turn off your damn cell phone" bumpers or shorts for them. It's a quest for them, and they're super serious about it. Don't talk, don't text, just watch the damn movie. I can get behind that.

Lots and lots of people have been involved -- most recently, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, for example, or Will Ferrell. One of the really great early ones featured the late, deeply lamented former Governor of Texas, Ann Richards.

When it was his turn, Eisenberg was a dick about it.
posted by uberchet at 4:16 PM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


Is the main disincentive for being awful really just the fact that people might not be nice to you if you're awful?

According to the rule of reciprocity, yes.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 4:26 PM on June 4, 2013


Seeing this doesn't make me think anything good about Jesse Eisenberg. I see that some of you are referencing the fact that Bob Dylan did this in the 1960s. I feel the same way about how Bob Dylan acted then.

yes the fact that he was a groundbreaking artist delivering a hilarious takedown of a highly paid hack is less important than the fact that robert zimmerman wasn't perfectly polite


Is the main disincentive for being awful really just the fact that people might not be nice to you if you're awful?


I kinda disagree. If you're memorably awful, you'll get publicity.

anyway, Eisenberg's interview was barely nasty, and he's not fit to lick Dylan's Cuban heels
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:47 PM on June 4, 2013


When it was his turn, Eisenberg was a dick about it.

I didn't realize all actors were obligated to promote this one movie theater in Texas.

I probably wouldn't opt to shoot an Alamo Drafthouse commercial, either, if I were an actor.

Also, watching the actual video you linked, I don't think Eisenberg comes off like a dick at all, and I find it weirdly passive aggressive that the way Alamo Drafthouse enlists people to make these videos is by stealthily slipping it into an interview. Like, if you want me to be in your cell phone thing, JUST ASK, and then I can say yes or no depending. Don't slyly ask me, "what do you think about people who talk in the movies?" and expect me to play some unspoken role of Movie Star Who Doesn't Want You To Talk In My Movie. I like Jesse Eisenberg even better for refusing to play along.
posted by Sara C. at 4:49 PM on June 4, 2013 [7 favorites]


Well, yeah, because part of the implicit premise of an interview is that if you ask someone a question, it's because you're actually interested in the response they give you. That's why trying to slip a PSA grab into there doesn't work, because if the interviewee doesn't agree with the premise in an interview, it's actually pretty great (generally) if they push back on it for the interview, but not so much for the PSA. It's ulterior bullshit.
posted by klangklangston at 5:03 PM on June 4, 2013


She was treating him like a dancing monkey. The monkey bit back. End of story.
posted by smithsmith at 6:04 PM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm still a pretty big fan of that MTV interview with Ol' Dirty Bastard,

I saw a Spin magazine interview where they had some naive white girl interview Old Dirty Bastard. She asked him, "How did you feel when you got shot?" ODB replies, "I kinda felt like I didn't like being shot."
posted by jonp72 at 6:19 PM on June 4, 2013 [5 favorites]


By the way, I've seen actually good interviews with Eisenberg, even on his junkets for his current film. For example, his mom was a hippie birthday clown, and he just recent debuted a play he had written. There's all sorts of interesting info about Eisenberg that would make for a good interview, but this interviewer couldn't be bothered to do even a nanosecond of preparation either about him or about the movie he appears in.
posted by jonp72 at 6:21 PM on June 4, 2013


I'm still so surprised people think one or the other did anything majorly beyond the pale or unprofessional. I thought their little banter about the direction behind "Say my name" was cute and funny - "like you're trying to find me in a crowd," " I was actually trying to stay alone."

I think if I had happened upon this without any framing I would have thought it was a lighthearted little conversation where they were ribbing each other.

Maybe people who think she was hostile or he was hostile live somewhere where people are overly polite in social situations.

I live in New York City.
posted by sweetkid at 6:27 PM on June 4, 2013 [3 favorites]


Then again there's also that guy who makes the "Seven Minutes In Heaven" celebrity interview series where he interviews them in a closet and makes a bunch of makeout jokes.

Mike O'Brien. He's a writer on SNL, which is why he has access to all these celebrities and why they're more comfortable with his shtick -- he's already a friend to many of them.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 6:30 PM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


re: the Alamo Drafthouse "refusal"

What's funny about that to me, is he didn't come across so much as a dick, as someone who took the question literally and missed what they were trying to get him to do. I can easily imagine Abed responding similarly to such a question, though Jesse might have been taking the piss.

Seriously, they never actually ASKED him to do a PSA. They just kept trying to corral him towards saying some "famous" catch phrase or bit, and got cagey when he started to deconstruct the idea.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 6:40 PM on June 4, 2013


I'm still so surprised people think one or the other did anything majorly beyond the pale or unprofessional.

You think it is perfectly professional for a journalist to write down questions on their hand and make the interviewee do tricks and stunts? I guess we have differing levels of professionalism.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 6:49 PM on June 4, 2013


...she asked him to do a magic trick because he's playing a magician in a movie.

It's just, like, a funtimes interview. I'm plenty professional thanks.
posted by sweetkid at 6:51 PM on June 4, 2013


I wasn't aware I was asking about your professionalism. I hope it doesn't include writing to dos on your hand.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 6:53 PM on June 4, 2013


I am tired of these jokes about my giant hand. The first such incident occured in 1956 when...
posted by sweetkid at 6:56 PM on June 4, 2013 [3 favorites]


...when you got the blues?
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 6:58 PM on June 4, 2013


no it was a Simpsons reference. There are Giant Hands in that book too though right?
posted by sweetkid at 6:59 PM on June 4, 2013


Eh, thumbs. My Simpson references are (k)rusty.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 7:02 PM on June 4, 2013


I'm sure they're perfectly cromulent.
posted by sweetkid at 7:03 PM on June 4, 2013 [1 favorite]


The members of Dinosaur Jr. are rock gods to Gen Xers (and the Gen Yers who discovered the influential band via Kurt Cobain).

No no no no no. From the get-go she lost me.
posted by limeonaire at 7:19 PM on June 4, 2013 [3 favorites]


I came here for a vicious dismantling and some deeply unprofessional interviewing. I saw a couple of awkward, sarcastic, vaguely flirtatious kids. (Odds are that one is either crying in his pillow or writing a McSweeney's piece on this now, while the other is planning her next move up the media ladder, but still -- this was not a big deal.)

I'd ask for my 5 dollars back except that I never paid my 5 dollars.
posted by maudlin at 9:06 PM on June 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


Oh hey wow new McSweeney's piece. Not about this. Sorry.
posted by maudlin at 9:24 PM on June 4, 2013


Mchelly: "Came in to also say America's Sweethearts pretty much is a romantic comedy about a junket. Mostly forgettable, but almost worth it just to hear Hank Azaria say "junket" repeatedly."

As opposed to say, Sally discussing the Herkimer Battle Jitney?
posted by Samizdata at 10:18 PM on June 4, 2013


Well, it's no You're afraid of my guatemalaness...
posted by Mchelly at 4:22 AM on June 5, 2013


If you are offended or insulted, rudeness is the correct response. To remain polite in such a situation is to let people walk over you.

I don't agree. It is actually quite possible to stand up for yourself without being rude. You can be strong and insist on being treated with respect without being disrespectful to the other person. There are a number of tools you can use, including outrage and anger, without going out of your way to belittle and demean the person with whom you have a grievance. He was condescending and enjoyed making her feel stupid. There is a difference between standing up for yourself and being a dick.
posted by snottydick at 6:47 AM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


There is a difference between standing up for yourself and being a dick.

Eponysterical.
posted by Madamina at 8:24 AM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


"...she asked him to do a magic trick because he's playing a magician in a movie.

It's just, like, a funtimes interview. I'm plenty professional thanks.
"

She wrote her questions on her hand, she didn't have any decent questions prepared, and you know what? It's often obnoxious to insist on forcing someone else into your whimsy, which is what it looked like she was trying to do. And while he wasn't flat out mean, he was pretty barbed in reply.

So, yeah, she was unprofessional and hacky. She's not Nardwuar.
posted by klangklangston at 8:38 AM on June 5, 2013


That's because you aren't awful.
posted by lordaych at 9:04 AM on June 5, 2013


Wow, Sara C, you like him *better* after the Alamo interview?

That's... odd.
posted by uberchet at 9:19 AM on June 5, 2013


After watching the Alamo Draft House thing and also reading a ton of Eisenberg's McSweeney's columns, my theory is that he's actually not "acting like a dick" or intentionally being a Big Bad Meanie at all.

I mean, I think he comes off as insulting and not a warm or personable individual at all, but I just get the sense that he's hard to talk to, like, in general, as part of who he is. A lot of his responses that people are calling "dickish" are really just him kind of beanplating the question or going in an unexpected direction or being overly cerebral and hard to follow.

I guess a more generous person with better social skills would smooth over the awkward moments in an interview that was headed into the toilet rather than stomping around in the shitpile. But I also think it's unfair to expect actors to be universally charming and not to ever step in an awkward situation. I mean, it's a fucking press junket interview, not a hostage negotiation. And it's not like he yelled at her or stormed off, he was just like, "Wait so are we doing this magic trick or not..."

Though I'm sure he plays up the No Social Skills thing as a defense mechanism in shitty Dancing Monkey situations. As an actor you learn to be attuned to taking direction from others, and it's pretty clear that he's picking up what the Alamo Draft House guy is putting down and using the tools in his arsenal to refuse without directly being a jerk about it. Which I also think is not such a terrible thing.
posted by Sara C. at 9:23 AM on June 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


uberchet - maybe it's because I'm not from Austin and have no stake in whether he shoots a PSA for their movie theater.

I'm vaguely familiar with the Alamo Draft House as an Austin institution, and frankly what I know of the people who run it makes them sound like assholes. The whole thing is just so parochial and self-congratulatory and Big Fucking Deal you have a movie theater that also serves beer whoop de fucking do.
posted by Sara C. at 9:25 AM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]



I mean, I think he comes off as insulting and not a warm or personable individual at all, but I just get the sense that he's hard to talk to, like, in general, as part of who he is. A lot of his responses that people are calling "dickish" are really just him kind of beanplating the question or going in an unexpected direction or being overly cerebral and hard to follow.


Yeah, I don't see anything "dickish" about the Alamo conversation. It just seems like he wanted to be honest rather than giving a boilerplate answer to the question.
posted by sweetkid at 9:26 AM on June 5, 2013


She wrote her questions on her hand

What is this obsession with the fact that she wrote notes on her hand. I have done it before and I am an award-winning journalist. Sometimes you don't have a piece of paper.

In fact, if there is one thing I have consistently noticed about professional journalists, its that many of them never have a pen or paper on hand.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:52 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Really? The one thing I've consistently noticed about professional journalists is that they're prepared for an interview.
posted by klangklangston at 9:54 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Here's a clip of an appearance he did on Ellen to promote The Social Network. I don't think Ellen is the world's best interviewer, and her questions are all pretty boilerplate things like "wow, how did you learn all those lines?" and "are you on facebook?" But he doesn't come off like a colossal asshole or anything, and yet you can still see his socially awkward cerebral "I like when movies have long scenes" schtick which has a high potential to make him sound like a snob on a daytime talk show for middle American moms.

And yet Ellen doesn't let him come off that way, she turns a dismissive comment about most movies just being people running toward stuff into a joke and gets the audience to laugh with her, and thus with him.

I can see that Ellen has a lot more tools at her disposal, and she does this every day so she probably has an edge on a 22 year old kid. But it's very easy to see how someone like Jesse Eisenberg can come off as an asshole interacting with an inexperienced and underprepared interviewer.
posted by Sara C. at 10:02 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Really? The one thing I've consistently noticed about professional journalists is that they're prepared for an interview.

I am not sure you're clear on what these junkets are. They are promotional tools for the studios. They do not benefit the actor and they do not benefit the reporter. The actor is subjected to endless rounds of inane five minute interviews from cub reporters (experienced reporters generally shy away from junkets), while the cub reporters are given such stringent guidelines that all the really can ask are the same inane questions everybody else asks.

If you want to see a junket interview come to a screeching halt, watch what happens the moment a serious questions is asked. Publicists rush in, the actors start complaining they were promised this wouldn't be discussed, and the media outlet gets a call saying that the interviewer is banned.

I rarely have a pen or paper on hand because my most important interviews are unscheduled. I just run into people, because I have known them for years and built a network of connections -- what used to be called a beat. And so I will just be talking to somebody and a story will emerge, and I will run to the next room to jot it down with whatever and on whatever is at hand. Lately I have just noted stuff into my iPhone.

Of course, I do a lot less of this since the profession of journalism collapsed.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:21 AM on June 5, 2013


I don't think the problem here is the level of seriosity of her questions. I don't think Romina really wanted to ask Jesse when he stopped beating his wife, but she was thwarted by the evil studio suits.

I think she's a little girl who didn't do her homework, and it really shows with a difficult subject like Eisenberg.
posted by Sara C. at 10:26 AM on June 5, 2013


But it's very easy to see how someone like Jesse Eisenberg can come off as an asshole interacting with an inexperienced and underprepared interviewer.

This kind of sounds like 'it's very easy to see how assholes come off as assholes in interviews without someone very skilled at and invested in making them seem not assholish'
posted by jacalata at 10:26 AM on June 5, 2013


What were the hard hitting questions she was supposed to be asking though? I thought most of the appeal of press interviews were just about watching the celebrity talk about the movie and maybe their personal life if applicable, just to get a sense of their personality outside of the characters they're playing.

Also, yea I too don't get the obsession about the fact she wrote stuff on her hand.
posted by sweetkid at 10:29 AM on June 5, 2013


I guess?

I don't have a problem with the idea that actors are people, and they have personalities just like other people, and they're not always friendly/kind/gracious/polite. Nor should they always be.

I'm perfectly happy for someone like Jesse Eisenberg to do the job of being an actor, and put up with the silly junket crap as best as he can despite not being a good fit for that kind of thing. I don't need to believe that he LOVES performing like a dancing monkey.
posted by Sara C. at 10:31 AM on June 5, 2013


I don't think the problem here is the level of seriosity of her questions. I don't think Romina really wanted to ask Jesse when he stopped beating his wife, but she was thwarted by the evil studio suits.

I think she's a little girl who didn't do her homework, and it really shows with a difficult subject like Eisenberg.


Well, that's my point. That's the sort of person who is sent to junkets, and that's the sort of questions that are encouraged. If we're demanding high journalistic principals from her, we're asking the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong junket. There is a strange sort of evolutionary pressure being applied by the studios, the publicists, and the erosion of any profit margin from serious journalism that ends up with gimmicky junket interviews.

People keep complaining that she wasn't prepared, but she knew is was a film about magic and she knew that Eisenberg had a card trick. That's exactly enough questions for a five minute interview. She was probably fed the latter by a publicist.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:32 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


yea, I also feel like maybe people think she wasn't appropriately deferential, but I hate when interviewers do that oh Gwyneth Angie Julia, tell us how you stay so beautiful blah blah and your KIDS are the cutest smartest things that ever lived!
posted by sweetkid at 10:42 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm not really demanding high journalistic principles. I just think she was underprepared and the interview didn't go great partially for that reason, and then she blew it into a HUGE DEAL via the internet for reasons that aren't really justified. Because he wasn't that big an asshole to her, and to the extent that he was an asshole, she deserved it.

I think if I just saw this on Extra! or something, I would think "wow this girl isn't very good at interviews" (which is what I think of pretty much every one I've ever seen), but because it was framed BY HER as Jesse Eisenberg ruining her life, she just comes off like a colossal fucking moron.
posted by Sara C. at 10:50 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


yea I agree that her reaction afterward is ridiculous. I mean I saw nothing objectionable in what either of them did in the interview, so I don't know why she came out swinging. She was like "I really did want to cry" but it didn't seem that way at all in the clip. It seemed like she was just being sarcastic. I think the interview was like three times more interesting the way it came out than if Jesse Eisenberg had been super polite or she had asked him super deep questions or something.

That said I don't even want to know what Dudes of The Internet might be saying about her.
posted by sweetkid at 10:55 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


If I didn't have a bunch of boring work stuff to do today and a production meeting for my web series tomorrow, I would SO write a parody of this in the style of "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold."
posted by Sara C. at 10:57 AM on June 5, 2013


You know, these 'priorities' of yours are starting to concern me.
posted by sweetkid at 11:07 AM on June 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


Regardless of professional requirements at something like this, if someone asks another to do something for them and that person is like "sure, but what for" and the response is "forget it" I think it is obvious to most how that would set up an odd dynamic from the beginning. That falls on her, and her not being skilled enough at simple niceties or not having enough worldly knowledge to understand the faux pas. I don't exactly overly care for Eisenberg but I can see how that would be the starting point for a downhill conversation, and obviously something went wrong because the reporter reported exactly that. I'm sure neither sat down thinking "look at this stupidface, I think I shall treat them badly!"
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 11:12 AM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


A lot of his responses that people are calling "dickish" are really just him kind of beanplating the question or going in an unexpected direction or being overly cerebral and hard to follow.

I don’t know, it seems a lot like a passive aggressive "I’m a afraid I don’t understand the question". "I’ll try to answer this as best as I can, but seeing how it’s such a stupid question I just don’t know…"

Yeah, I don't see anything "dickish" about the Alamo conversation. It just seems like he wanted to be honest rather than giving a boilerplate answer to the question.

I think he knew what they wanted and didn’t want to give it to them. Good for him, they weren’t paying him for an endorsement or a PSA and they were trying to trick one out of him. So he played dumb. I thought that was kind of funny, but not driven by a desire to be "honest".
posted by bongo_x at 11:22 AM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


There's a thing on Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast where they often ask the guests to say "Enjoy your burrito" as part of the lead-out. But the thing is, the host is so self-effacing about it, he explains that it's a thing they do, and okay it's silly, and would you mind saying it, and it's okay if you don't. There's a real sense of respect for the guest in asking them to do what is essentially a promotion for the podcast at pretty much no benefit to themselves.

Compare that to this girl's approach of basically assuming Eisenberg will want to promote her, with no explanation - his "what for?" is in my opinion a valid question - how is she planning to use this and what are the ramifications to him once it's filmed? Not to mention, the basic actor's question of how do you want me to say it? And the Alamo thing is just weird. It really reads to me as him not having been told he was expected to be filming a No Talking promo for them, so he did what most people do when they're interviewed - answered how he felt and was a little quirky about it.

I think Eisenberg may be missing some social cues that most actors-being-interviewed gloss over, but I think calling any of it him being an asshole is really ungenerous. The interviewer really does have some responsibility for managing the conversation they're initiating; otherwise they get what they get if it's not what they intended.
posted by Mchelly at 11:30 AM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I don't have a problem with the idea that actors are people, and they have personalities just like other people, and they're not always friendly/kind/gracious/polite. Nor should they always be.

Well, me either, but I do have a problem with the idea that an interview where the actor is obviously not gracious/friendly/polite is obviously the interviewers fault for not adequately massaging the actors social inadequacies into something looking like a reasonable person.
posted by jacalata at 11:58 AM on June 5, 2013


Basically - if the interviewee wants to appear a certain way, including 'not dickish', they do bear a lot of responsibility for making that happen.
posted by jacalata at 11:59 AM on June 5, 2013


Sure, but dickish or not is subjective.
posted by sweetkid at 12:01 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


"I am not sure you're clear on what these junkets are. They are promotional tools for the studios. They do not benefit the actor and they do not benefit the reporter. The actor is subjected to endless rounds of inane five minute interviews from cub reporters (experienced reporters generally shy away from junkets), while the cub reporters are given such stringent guidelines that all the really can ask are the same inane questions everybody else asks."

Like I said, I've been on a junket. But I also know at least a couple writers who make their living on this junket stuff and end up turning out consistent, quality work. That they are often crappy is not an argument that they should be crappy; I said as much here.

"If you want to see a junket interview come to a screeching halt, watch what happens the moment a serious questions is asked. Publicists rush in, the actors start complaining they were promised this wouldn't be discussed, and the media outlet gets a call saying that the interviewer is banned."

A question doesn't have to be probing or gotcha to be a good question. As someone above pointed out, these junkets have already had Eisenberg talking about his mom's clown work, and a play he premiered. I don't know why you've decided to be guardian of the hacks today, but it's an odd place to stan from.

Seriously, a good reporter can still ask smart questions about safe topics.

"I rarely have a pen or paper on hand because my most important interviews are unscheduled. I just run into people, because I have known them for years and built a network of connections -- what used to be called a beat. And so I will just be talking to somebody and a story will emerge, and I will run to the next room to jot it down with whatever and on whatever is at hand. Lately I have just noted stuff into my iPhone."

I had a beat too, and never was without a notebook because I knew that a story could pop up at any time. That just meant I put my notebook in my pocket along with my phone and wallet every day. I still carry a notebook with me everywhere, even though I'm on the PR side of the equation more these days.
posted by klangklangston at 12:03 PM on June 5, 2013


okay, haven't read the whole thread ... but finally saw the interview.

Mr. Eisenberg destroys Ms. Whatzhername with complete impunity to my mind insofar as she started it, she chose to make "play" of the interview, he just happened to do so at a far higher level than she could muster. Totally fair game.

And anyway, nothing he says or does is that extreme. He's just doing his thing, like Miles Davis jamming with some bar band lughead -- he plays rings around her. What's he supposed to do, some leaden twelve bar blues?
posted by philip-random at 12:36 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


If nothing else, his "you're on my time" thing was pretty pompous, and untrue. I mean unless he's paying her to sell his movie, no; he's on the dime of his studio, she's on the dime of her venue, and they both hope to mutually benefit. However flailing her five minutes or so with him was, I was kind of rooting for him until he said that shit.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 12:43 PM on June 5, 2013


I had a beat too, and never was without a notebook because I knew that a story could pop up at any time.

Well, good for you. I guess we do things differently, and it has worked out just fine for me. If you want to discuss personal approaches to journalism in more detail without derailing, feel free to email.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:04 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


But PROFESSIONALISM
posted by sweetkid at 1:13 PM on June 5, 2013


I've got to get one of these jobs where apparently no one gives a shit about how seriously I take the it.
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 1:24 PM on June 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


So the video itself is such a silly non-story, and I'm not sure why it was posted. However, the reaction to the video is fascinating (and not really in a good way).

c'mon sea legs: But really, she's touched some weird ancestral high school memory or something.

This. So some novice host with some online entertainment fluff outfit that no one's ever heard of did a crappy interview. If that warrants any attention at all, it warrants a brief moment of light scoffing at best.

But instead, we get this visceral "GAWD what a contemptible hack, she deserved all that and MORE, how dare she insult Mr. Jesse Eisenberg like that, people like her are parasites and should be shamed".

I can't help but wonder whether the reaction would be the same if the interviewer weren't a young, pretty female.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:46 PM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm more annoyed that when I write out a lengthy comment about why I think this is unprofessional, you fixate on the I NEVER HAD NOTEBOOKZ detail rather than the broader thrust. If you want to continue the conversation by email, I suppose you could start with that.

"But PROFESSIONALISM"

ooh stunning rebuttal from pro-stupid-interview all-caps!
posted by klangklangston at 1:47 PM on June 5, 2013


"I can't help but wonder whether the reaction would be the same if the interviewer weren't a young, pretty female."

Chances are, she wouldn't have that gig if she wasn't a young, pretty female. And, frankly, young, pretty females turn in excellent work all the damn time, so while sexism in journalism is a real, serious thing, sometimes derps (even young, pretty female ones) just get called out as derps.
posted by klangklangston at 1:49 PM on June 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


But really, she's touched some weird ancestral high school memory or something

Well, we had someone in the thread say she must have never had anything bad happen to her in her life. I'm pretty sure that comment was based on how she looks.
posted by sweetkid at 1:59 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


If nothing else, his "you're on my time" thing was pretty pompous, and untrue.

I'm on the fence about this. I think it's one of those things that's probably good to just never ever say, period, especially on camera. Even if you're perfectly in the right.

On the other hand, yes, she is "on his time" in the sense that he only has limited time to do these junket interviews, and (in my understanding) it would be her media outlet pitching his studio trying to get the interview in the first place. Presumably there are other reporters who didn't get a slot, and other things everyone there could be doing besides humoring her.

It's the kind of humiliation you get when you show up to class without having done the reading, not really so much "I own you."

But again, "you're on my time" is up there with "don't you know who I am" and "you'll never work in this town again" in terms of things to probably never ever say if you're an A-list hollywood actor.
posted by Sara C. at 2:01 PM on June 5, 2013 [5 favorites]


More than a Michael Cera comparison, does anyone else feel like Jesse Eisenberg is kind of replacing Paul Dano? I haven't heard much about him lately. That Ruby Smiles movie or whatever that was didn't seem to do well.
posted by sweetkid at 2:16 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'd like you all to know I just wrote important info on my hand, for PROFESSIONAL WORK PURPOSES. (It was even somewhat journalism related, though more on the PR end.)
posted by Sara C. at 2:43 PM on June 5, 2013


now if she had written her notes on his forehead, THAT would have been unprofessional.
posted by sweetkid at 2:47 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


"Hello Mr. Day-Lewis, I understand you play Abraham Lincoln in this movie? Could you sign my hand declaring that black people in America are free?"

"What!?"

"Look, I don't need paper, I'M A PROFESSIONAL!"
posted by Rocket Surgeon at 3:00 PM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I can't help but wonder whether the reaction would be the same if the interviewer weren't a young, pretty female.

There's a subtext of PYF teasing her whimsy out of youngish awkward male for certain. That's a thing, right?

The only way to be certain is to recast this a number of different ways. What if she was asking some random nonfamous person to do the same thing, you perhaps? Reverse genders, homogenize genders, change ages, ethinicities...
posted by Ogre Lawless at 3:37 PM on June 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


really just him kind of beanplating the question or going in an unexpected direction or being overly cerebral and hard to follow.

He does have a habit of beanplating. When I first took notice of him, I remember joking that he was probably a closet MeFite. A cat foster parent prone to overthinking things? Yeah, he'd fit right in.

Rory Marinich: For my money, his best performance that I've seen was in The Squid and the Whale, in which he's the older son of an asshole English professor or some such

I like this (unofficial?) trailer better, it's less ~quirky~ and gives a better idea of the mood of the actual movie. If you guys are lukewarm towards Eisenberg, watch the film for Jeff Daniels--it's fantastic work that regularly lands him a place in various should've-gotten-an-Oscar-nom lists. As for Eisenberg, I can't really say which performance of his I like better, in Squid or The Social Network, but those two are certainly his best movies so far. I remember reading about behind the scenes stuff for Network and wondering whether his performance was just a fluke since there were tons of takes and editing for it (but that's just how David Fincher works and acting under many, many takes is a separate challenge), but then I saw Squid which had a smaller budget and a shorter shooting schedule, and realized that yeah, it's not a fluke. There's this one scene where his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend tells him exactly what her parents think of him, and it's revealing, painful, hilarious, dramatic, and absurd all at the same time, and he hits all the notes he needed to hit perfectly. So yeah, I don't think he's Daniel Day-Lewis or anything, but I enjoy his work. 30 Minutes or Less is garbage though. AVOID AT ALL COST. It'll be interesting to see what kind of movies he'll make as he gets older.

sweetkid: More than a Michael Cera comparison, does anyone else feel like Jesse Eisenberg is kind of replacing Paul Dano? I haven't heard much about him lately. That Ruby Smiles movie or whatever that was didn't seem to do well.

He literally did replace Dano (who dropped out, I think) in a movie recently. It was for a Kelly Reichardt flick, opposite Dakota Fanning. Dano's doing fine though. Just saw a trailer of a thriller where he plays a suspected pedophile opposite Hugh Jackman, and then he's got Twelve Years A Slave by Steve McQueen with Michael Fassbender. Anyway, Dano's problem is that he has yet to find a part where he can convincingly muster enough leading man charisma. It's like he suddenly turns into a boring wet noodle when he's the lead. I don't know, maybe it's just his choice in scripts. He seems to fair better as a supporting actor.
posted by Wonton Cruelty at 12:49 AM on June 6, 2013 [2 favorites]


Sara C.: "If I didn't have a bunch of boring work stuff to do today and a production meeting for my web series tomorrow, I would SO write a parody of this in the style of "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.""

I am with sweetkid. I think we need to have an intervention.

Another other MeFi's with me?
posted by Samizdata at 5:10 AM on June 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


> frankly what I know of the people who run [the Alamo Drafthouse] makes them sound like assholes

I submit your information is drastically insufficient, then. Tim League and his partners are fantastic people. He's a guy who loves movies, and does his best to create places where people can enjoy them in a way not really possible at plasticy megaplexes.

Because we're two degrees apart socially, I also know him to be personally kind and generous. But I wouldn't expect that to be part of a stranger's evaluation. Even so, I'm baffled as to what would lead you to believe that "they sound like assholes."
posted by uberchet at 5:57 PM on June 6, 2013


That whole thing where they made a gigantic stink about the fact that they kicked someone out of the theater for texting.

I mean, they don't sound like horrible villains or anything, just pricks.
posted by Sara C. at 6:04 PM on June 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


The thing where they used that idiot girl's voice mail for a "don't text in our theater" bumper?

Can't get there with you. The girl was clearly being an entitled brat to (a) ignore the policy and (b) get so wound up after having the *explicit policy* enforced that she decided to call them and bawl them out over it. The rules at Alamo are not secret, nor is the fact that they WILL enforce them. It's part of what makes seeing a movie there a better experience than your average theater. It's part of what makes Alamo a better business than the megaplexes, too.

I suppose it's possible you're down on the policy and its enforcement, too, in which case we have even less in common.
posted by uberchet at 7:24 AM on June 7, 2013


No, not at all. I thought it was jerkish of them to make a big stink about her later phone call to complain.

Maybe it's just that I grew up in an insular southern town, and like 90% of everything I've ever heard about the dynamics of the people who run the Alamo Draft House reminds me of the catty passive aggressive bullshit that I put up with every single day I lived there.

Like, you ask someone privately for what you want them to do and accept their answer. Don't dance around it in the middle of a (taped) interview about something else, without coming right out and saying what you want, and then when the person doesn't cooperate, make a big stink about how mean they are.

Or, like, when a jerk customer calls to complain about one of your policies and you think it's funny, just laugh to yourself and move on from the situation. Don't broadcast her angry voicemail to the whole community just for the lulz.

It's so fucking high school. And everything that's awful about the south. Which is probably the main reason I was rooting for (obviously non-southern) Jesse Eisenberg in that interview.

I have no problem with their movie theater as such.
posted by Sara C. at 7:33 AM on June 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ah, I get it. Antisoutherner bigotry. Gotcha.
posted by uberchet at 10:24 AM on June 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


Sara C.: "That whole thing where they made a gigantic stink about the fact that they kicked someone out of the theater for texting.

I mean, they don't sound like horrible villains or anything, just pricks.
"

Why the hell are you even posting? If you can post, you can parody.

grin
posted by Samizdata at 1:42 AM on June 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


Antisoutherner bigotry.

I grew up in the south. My whole family mostly still lives in the south. I visit the south twice a year and generally have a lovely time. I'd move back in an instant for the right opportunity.

But yeah, the default social language has always bothered me, and the way that catty passive agressive cliquishness is the default setting for a lot of people is the major reason I left. Life's too fucking short.

I find it fascinating to watch someone like Jesse Eisenberg, who would have no familiarity with that style of social interaction, negotiate it by simply refusing to cooperate.
posted by Sara C. at 9:50 AM on June 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


But yeah, the default social language has always bothered me, and the way that catty passive agressive cliquishness is the default setting for a lot of people is the major reason I left. Life's too fucking short.

I find it fascinating to watch someone like Jesse Eisenberg, who would have no familiarity with that style of social interaction, negotiate it by simply refusing to cooperate.


I’m not sure that’s "The South" you’re talking about.

And the most off putting thing about the Eisenberg interviews for me was the incredible level of passive-aggressiveness. It pours out of him in every exchange.
posted by bongo_x at 10:28 AM on June 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


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