A Heritage Films session is not an interview. There is no list of questions, no clipboard. It is a conversation, and it feels like one.
People keep asking me what a Heritage Films interview is like.
To borrow the vernacular of my youth, and every kid alive right now, it’s not, like, an interview. Or it’s, like, not an interview. 6-7. Ok I have no idea what 6-7 is. 6’7″ is Penny Hardaway and Latrell Sprewell’s height. Where was I?
It’s not an interview.
Here’s how it actually starts. Before I ever show up, the family fills out a questionnaire. Easy one. Lineage, dates, places, the family tree as far back as they can dig it out. Names the younger generation has never heard. Towns that no longer exist. A great-great-grandfather who apparently did something nobody brings up at Christmas. Whatever they happen to know.
Most people assume this is administrative. Homework before the test.
Nope.
They’ll mention later that filling it out was the first time they’d ever tried to put the whole story in one place. Siblings get called. Boxes get opened. Old photographs surface from somewhere and now the whole thing takes three times as long because someone found the photograph and nobody can put it down.
The form isn’t paperwork. It’s the first conversation.
By the time I walk through the door, I’ve read all of it. More than once. Memorized the weird stuff.
I know the names. I know where they grew up. I know the year the whole thing shifted. I’m not going in hoping something interesting comes up. I already know where the good stuff is.
Which means I walk in genuinely glad to be there. Eager, even.
Ya know that feeling when you run into someone you’ve been meaning to catch up with and you actually have time? That’s the room. That’s the energy. We’re not conducting anything. We’re just finally getting to it.
We arrive. Set up the cams. Hit record (hopefully…don’t ask about the first session of the Mueller film). About fifteen minutes in, nobody’s thinking about them anymore.
Including me. At least not at a prefrontal level. Some vestige in my brain never stops looking at them for framing and focus. But that’s reptilian Chance brain. That one doesn’t talk.
But we set up, sit down, and then start talking.
It usually opens somewhere far back. Family lore. Long-gone relatives. Some ancestor who nobody’s thought about in forty years but whose name has been passed down through the generations like a piece of furniture nobody can get rid of. Somebody mentions the Mayflower, or a name on a ship manifest, or a village in County Cork that their great-grandfather left and never spoke of again.
And now we’re there. On the boat. In the village. Working forward through centuries, picking up thread after thread, and the whole room is leaning in because this is the stuff that’s been sitting in the family like furniture nobody thinks to look at anymore.
Then it’s the Depression. The war. The house they grew up in. The job that changed everything. The marriage. The hard year they don’t usually discuss with the kids.
And then.
Somebody mentions July 15th, 2026.
The Viking River Cruise they have on the calendar. The one the whole family has had planned for a year and a half. He can’t wait to try the food. She wants to see the castles. The grandkids are coming. Everyone is unreasonably excited about the castles.
From the Mayflower to July 15th, 2026 in the aforementioned blink of an eye.
That’s not a metaphor. It flies by. I would say literally but my fellow word nerds would spaz.
People sometimes worry it’ll feel formal. Clinical. That they’ll freeze up or say the wrong thing the moment the camera rolls.
They don’t. They never do.
By the time we’re two hours in they’re just hanging out with a buddy. They’re not thinking about the film. They think we’re just talking.
That’s exactly right.
People who haven’t done it call it an interview. I let them. But the OG’s know it was much more than that.
“It felt more like a visit.”
Yeah. It did.
If you’ve been thinking about making a Heritage Film for someone in your family, reach out. We’d be glad to talk.