Jake Gyllenhaal gets two pages, max (Day 190)…
September 6, 2007As an arts reporter, most of my year is spent watching movies, interviewing actors and directors, covering press conferences and then writing about all of the above (I know, it’s a hard life). When the Toronto International Film Festival comes around, I do pretty much the same stuff — it’s just 10 times as much work every day (on a side note, if you have any pressing questions for Jake Gyllenhaal, feel free to post them in the comments section below, as I’ll be interviewing him tomorrow).
It’s not unusual for me to go through the entire memory card of my dictaphone twice and fill up four or five notebooks with my scrawled observations about Rachel Weisz’s unflattering top, Elijah Wood’s surprisingly cute and un-hobbit-like demeanor or the wilted salad Chloë Sevigny was eating for lunch.
Unfortunately, I’m not a good note-taker: I write things down that, later, serve no purpose whatsoever to the story I’m trying to tell; I write in a VERY LARGE, MESSY STYLE — my letters would probably have a font size of at least 20; and I rarely use both sides of the page because my feeble mind gets confused at where one interview ends and another begins, and the last thing I want to do is misquote someone.
This uses up a ridiculous amount of paper, though, so from now on I’m going to make a concerted effort to write smaller and use both sides of the page (perhaps with some extra-bold, underlined and highlighted headings like, “These are quotes from your interview with Ken Loach — NOT your interview with Cyndi Lauper”).
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