Last week, an old friend and former coworker called me: he was working on a story, he said, about how reporters will do their jobs if they can’t leave the house. Specifically, he was interested in how people who write profiles—something I do often—were going to manage. I didn’t have a great answer for him then. I certainly don’t now. But I’ve been thinking about the question ever since.
Even at their most successful, profiles are a strange and ephemeral form of art. You spend a bunch of time with someone. You describe what they look like, what it’s like to be around them, what it sounds like when they talk. I often like to reprint sections of our conversations verbatim, so a reader can watch their mind work in real time. This is not the kind of thing I would normally allow myself to write down, but I tend to think of the work as empathy in action: you try to get as close to the way another person sees the world as you possibly can, then relay it. And in doing so, maybe we all become a little less mysterious to each other.
There have been a few times, over the years, when because of various circumstances I have tried to write about a person without ever being in the same room as them. once, I was in Milan to profile a well-known and very mercurial fashion designer when he disappeared—I sheltered in place for three days, in case he resurfaced, then went home empty handed. He was later discovered in Rome, having fled the pressures of his job (and, I suppose, me). Would I like to still interview him via Skype? We’d already photographed the story—why not? I am trying to recall our conversation now, but I cannot. I remember watching him fidget through my laptop screen; I remember trying to figure out what else was in the room behind him. We were strangers when the conversation started, and strangers when the conversation ended. Another time, a newly in-demand actor was on set in Canada, too busy to even set an interview date. We eventually chatted via video on a Sunday morning. Some years later, she starred in a prestige cable series that I was watching—the performance was textured, a touch malevolent, fascinating. What kind of person is capable of this? I wondered. I googled her and found my own article. These were not very successful profiles.
But why not? More often than I would like, I have interviewed people in places that are nearly as abstract as a box on my computer screen: conference rooms, hotel restaurants, suites no one is sleeping in. Cars shuttling from one obligation to another. Cars driving around the block while a film set resets. And yet, it only takes a few minutes for a person to become a person. They make eye contact or they don’t, touch your shoulder or stare resolutely over it. They nod their head to the music on the stereo system. They order a second drink, or something gluten-free from a mystified waiter. They say: “Let’s walk.” I love it when they say “Let’s walk.” Let’s walk!
I’ve been picked up from airports by people I’m interviewing and been left to find Ubers back from places that definitely don’t have Uber. I’ve watched subjects shop for records and for clothes and for books, record songs, shoot movie scenes, get drunk, sob. one time, I was in the middle of a long conversation with someone when they abruptly stood up and walked out of the room, only to return with a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to their back. Another time, a subject not so furtively began to text under the table; within minutes, a whole parade of other people began to “spontaneously” appear and join us at the table—interview over. The weird thing is, it doesn’t really matter what they’re doing, I’ve found. It’s just that they’re doing it. In motion, in the world, how you move through it, what you do and how you do it: that’s you.
