What Happens in a Heritage Films Interview?

A Heritage Films interview is a conversation, not a questionnaire. We already know which stories we are after before we walk in. The camera is almost beside the point.

People want to know what they’re signing up for.

That’s fair. You’re going to have someone show up at your grandpa’s house with camera equipment and spend several hours asking them to talk about their life. That’s not a normal Tuesday.

So here’s what actually happens.

We show up an hour or so before we film.

We move furniture. We adjust the light. We find the chair that’s right, which is usually the chair they actually sit in, not the nice one. Unless they are a tiny little thing and they have this monstrosity cozy chair that swallows them. OK, sometimes we film in those chairs, comfort comes first. But ya get it. We set up in the room that says something true about who this person is without having to explain it. A workshop. A kitchen. The back porch. Living room.

The technical setup takes about as long as it takes the subject to stop feeling weird about the camera.

The interview starts easy. The oldest stories and lore about the family. Folks who are long gone. “My people came through Ellis Island in the 18-whatevers.”

“Well the McCourt in my name shoulda told you we were Irish. So I reckon we come from Ireland.”

Then we go through grandparents. Parents.

“Hell, I didn’t know my biological parents so, beats me. But my parents lived in Chicago their whole lives, Born and died.”

Then they are a little baby in someone else’s story. Where were you born. What did your parents do. Tell me about the house you grew up in.

These aren’t throwaway questions. They’re the foundation. People talk about their parents and their childhood and they find the rhythm of talking about themselves in an honest way, which most people don’t do very often. By the time we get to the harder questions, they’re already in it.

That’s the whole design.

Most interviews run the course of a day or more. We take breaks. We eat a little. Some are designed to run longer. People are always surprised by how fast it goes.

They’re also surprised by what comes up.

I ask questions nobody’s asked them before. Not because the questions are unusual, just because no one has sat across from them at this level of attention and asked: what did that feel like. What did you do next. What would you want your grandkids to understand about your life that they probably don’t.

Most people have had conversations their whole life. They haven’t had this.

Somewhere in the second hour, something shifts. The story they came in planning to tell starts making room for the story they actually have. The edited version gives way.

That’s what I’m there for.

After the interview we shoot what we call b-roll. The objects. The photographs. The place where things happened. A military medal. A wedding photo. The backyard where the important arguments got resolved.

The subject doesn’t need to have anything prepared. I’ll ask. The house is usually full of material if you know to look for it. And the forms before we ever showed up do a lot of the heavy lifting.

The edit takes time because we’re not making a slideshow. We’re making a film, which means we’re making choices about what goes where and why, what the structure is, where the story breathes. Again, this is derived from hundreds of films and the forms and feedback from the family. We learn what they want and then build it.

The finished film runs anywhere from forty-five minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the project. We deliver it in a format that plays on anything now and anything that exists in the future.

When people watch it for the first time, there’s usually a long pause after it ends.

That’s the right response.