Why We Send Interview Questions In Advance

Sep 17

One of the questions that comes up constantly when we're preparing for an interview-driven production is whether the people appearing on camera should see their interview questions ahead of time.

Our answer is almost always yes.

In fact, at Bunker Hill Media, Boston’s leading video production company, we like to get interview questions to people as far in advance as we reasonably can. If we have them ready a week before the shoot, great. If we can get them out earlier, even better. We don't see much benefit in deliberately keeping someone in the dark about what we're going to ask when the entire purpose of the interview is to help them tell their story as clearly and confidently as possible.

The reason is pretty simple: in almost every area of life, being prepared makes you more comfortable. And being interviewed on camera is already an uncomfortable experience for a lot of people. You walk into a room that has been transformed into a set. There are cameras pointed at you, lights surrounding you, a microphone hanging over your head, and a group of people listening carefully to everything you say. Then somebody asks you to explain your company, your work, or an experience that's important to you in a concise and compelling way.

Why would we make that harder by intentionally keeping the conversation a secret?

We want people to know what's coming. We want them to have time to think. We want them to show up feeling like they're ready to have the conversation we're asking them to have.

There is, however, one very important distinction we make with every interview subject: preparing your answers and memorizing your answers are not the same thing.

We want you to read the questions. We want you to think about them. We want you to remember relevant stories or examples and consider what you actually want people to understand.

We don't want you to write a script and memorize it.

Do the preparation, then come to set and have a conversation with us.

We're Filmmakers, Not Journalists

I have a particularly strong opinion about this because, early in my career, I was a journalist.

When you're taking courses in school for journalism, there are legitimate reasons you're taught to be careful about providing interview questions ahead of time. A journalist may be trying to uncover information, challenge someone's version of events, hold someone accountable, or get an unrehearsed response to a difficult question. Giving someone every question days beforehand can give them time to formulate an answer specifically designed to avoid what you're actually trying to learn.

In that context, withholding questions can make complete sense.

But here's the thing: we're filmmakers, not journalists.

If we're producing an investigative documentary, that's obviously a different conversation. There are absolutely documentary projects where journalistic practices and ethics apply, and the interviewer may have very good reasons for not showing someone the questions beforehand.

But if a company hires us to create a brand film about who they are, what they do, and why their work matters, we're not conducting an investigation. We're not trying to catch their CEO off guard. We're not trying to get an employee to accidentally say something the marketing team didn't want them to say. We're certainly not trying to prove that we're somehow more authentic filmmakers because nobody knew what we were going to ask until the cameras started rolling.

We're trying to make a great film for our client.

Sometimes we think filmmakers get a little too caught up in treating every interview like they're conducting it for Dateline. If you're making a documentary investigation, sure. If you're interviewing a politician about a scandal, sure. But if you're making a three-minute brand film about a company and you're about to ask its founder why they started the business, give up the act. Let them think about it beforehand.

For us, this isn't about proving something about our interviewing methodology. It's not about us at all.

It's about giving our client the piece they deserve.

Our client deserves the strongest film we can possibly make. The people they've trusted to represent their organization deserve an opportunity to think about what they're going to say. And if allowing someone to spend a few days thinking about their company, customers, experiences, and stories results in a stronger interview, then that's exactly what we want.

Preparation And Memorization Are Two Completely Different Things

The biggest argument we hear against sending interview questions beforehand is that people will rehearse their answers and sound scripted on camera.

We understand the concern. We just haven't found it to be a problem.

People aren't stupid. If we send someone their interview questions and say, "Please read through these and think about what you'd like to say, but don't write out or memorize your answers," they understand what that means.

And in our experience, they do exactly that.

We've filmed hundreds of interviews, and people showing up having memorized paragraphs of perfectly rehearsed answers simply isn't a recurring issue for us. If anything, we encounter the opposite problem far more often: people haven't spent enough time thinking about what they want to say.

That's when you get someone sitting under the lights, looking at you with panic in their eyes because you've just asked them a question they technically know the answer to but have never actually had to articulate before.

There is nothing fake about thinking through an answer before an interview. If we ask a founder why they started their company, spending a few days thinking about that question doesn't make the answer less authentic. If anything, it might help them remember a detail or story they wouldn't have thought of while trying to come up with an answer on the spot.

We want those details.

Preparation isn't about deciding the exact words you're going to say. It's about making sure you've thought about the ideas you want to communicate.

Prepare the ideas, not the sentences.

Shoot Day Isn't The Time To Figure Out What Your Company Does

This might sound a little harsh, but we've been on enough sets to know that it needs to be said.

If you're appearing in your company's brand video, shoot day should not be the first time you've seriously thought about how to explain what your company does.

And yet, it happens.

We'll ask what sounds like the most basic question imaginable: "What does your company do?"

Suddenly, the person sitting across from us realizes that's actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer well. They know what the company does, obviously. They work there. But they've never thought about how to explain it clearly in a few sentences to someone who knows absolutely nothing about the organization.

The same thing can happen when we ask who the company serves, why the work matters, what makes the organization different, or what they want someone watching the video to understand.

Those questions sound easy until two cameras are rolling.

This is exactly why we want people thinking about them beforehand. We don't necessarily want a perfectly polished elevator pitch. In fact, we'd usually rather not have one. But you should have some idea of what you want to say.

We can help you get there. We can ask the question differently. We can follow up. We can ask you to explain something as though you were talking to a friend. We can have you start over. We can pull the strongest pieces from several answers together in the edit.

What we can't do is know your company for you.

There is some responsibility on the person sitting in the interview chair. If you're representing your organization in a brand film, know what your company does. Know who you're trying to reach. Know why the work matters. Know what you believe makes your organization worth talking about.

You don't have to say any of it perfectly.

But know it and own it.

Being Prepared Makes People More Comfortable On Camera

It's easy to forget what a professional interview setup feels like when you're around cameras all the time.

For us, two cameras, a boom microphone, lights, stands, monitors, and a crew are completely normal. For the person we're interviewing, this might be the first time they've ever sat in the middle of something like that.

Even confident people can get nervous.

Suddenly they're aware of where they're looking. They're thinking about what their hands are doing. They're wondering whether they're talking too quickly. They can hear themselves stumbling over a word they normally say a hundred times a day without thinking about it. Meanwhile, they know the things they're saying could end up on their company's website, in an ad campaign, or in a film that thousands of people will watch.

Now imagine adding another layer to all of that: they have absolutely no idea what we're going to ask them.

We just don't see the benefit.

Sending questions ahead of time removes one enormous unknown from the experience. The interview subject already knows the general territory we're going to cover. They've had time to think about the difficult questions. They've remembered a couple of stories they might want to tell. They aren't sitting there wondering whether we're suddenly going to ask something they have absolutely no idea how to answer.

In our experience, that preparation makes people feel more comfortable, and comfortable people tend to give us better interviews.

Ironically, it can also make the conversation feel more spontaneous. Instead of using half of their mental energy worrying about what's coming next, they can actually listen to the question we're asking and talk to us.

Everyone Gets Their Own Interview Questions

Sending questions beforehand doesn't mean we create one list and email the same thing to everyone.

We customize our questions for each person we're interviewing.

That's incredibly important because everyone should have a different reason for being in the film.

If we're interviewing a founder, an executive, two employees, and a customer, we don't want to ask all five people the same 15 questions and come home with five slightly different versions of the same interview.

That's not particularly useful in the edit, and it usually isn't particularly interesting for the audience either.

Instead, we think about the perspective each person uniquely brings to the story.

Maybe the founder is the person who should tell us why the company exists in the first place. Maybe an employee who's been there for 20 years can explain how the organization has changed. Maybe someone actually doing the work every day can give us a level of specificity that leadership can't. And maybe the customer can talk about the company's impact in a way that nobody who works there ever could.

Those are different perspectives, so they should be different interviews.

There may absolutely be questions we ask multiple people. Sometimes we intentionally want different perspectives on the same subject. But generally, we're trying to avoid bringing five people onto set only to have them tell us the same shit five different ways.

We want each person contributing something we couldn't have gotten from somebody else.

Our Clients Help Shape The Questions

Interview development is also collaborative.

During pre-production, we'll create questions based on the creative direction we've established, what we've learned about the organization, what the finished piece needs to accomplish, and what we believe each interview subject can contribute.

Then the client gets to look at them.

They can add questions of their own. They can point out something we've missed. They can tell us there's a particular story we absolutely need to ask about. They can explain that one employee has a perspective we wouldn't have known about from our initial conversations.

That's valuable information.

We know interviewing and storytelling. Our client knows their organization.

Those two things should work together.

Maybe we've written a great set of questions for an employee, but the client knows that person was there during a defining moment in the company's history. We'd obviously want to know that before the interview. Maybe there's a customer story that gets talked about internally all the time. Maybe there's a particular reason the founder started the company that wasn't mentioned on the initial creative call.

That's why pre-production matters.

We're not walking into the room cold and hoping we stumble into a story. We're doing the work beforehand so that once the cameras start rolling, we know where the interesting territory probably is.

The Questions We Send Aren't A Script

Here's another important distinction: just because we send someone 15 questions beforehand doesn't mean we're going to sit on set and mechanically work through Questions 1 through 15 in order.

The questions are a framework.

The conversation is the interview.

We may ask every single question we sent. We may skip several because someone already answered them naturally while talking about something else. We might ask a question and hear something in the answer that takes the entire conversation in a direction we didn't anticipate.

When that happens, we're following it.

Some of the most valuable questions we ask during an interview are incredibly simple follow-ups: "What do you mean by that?" "Why?" "Can you tell me more about that?" "How did that make you feel?" "Wait, go back—what happened after that?"

Those questions usually aren't on the document we sent beforehand because we couldn't possibly know we'd need to ask them.

That's the skill of interviewing.

You have to actually listen to what the person is saying rather than sitting there waiting for them to finish so you can read the next question on your list.

If someone says something during Question 3 that suddenly feels like the emotional center of the entire film, we're staying there. We don't care that we planned to spend only five minutes on that subject. The story is telling us where to go.

Preparation gives us a strong place to start.

It doesn't determine where we have to finish.

Knowing The Questions Doesn't Make An Interview Less Authentic

We also think there's a slightly strange idea floating around filmmaking that an answer is somehow more authentic if the person had absolutely no opportunity to think about it beforehand.

We don't buy that.

If someone asks you why you started your company and you spend ten minutes trying to remember what happened 15 years ago, the first thing that comes out of your mouth isn't automatically more truthful than what you would have said if you'd had a week to think about it.

In fact, preparation might make the answer better and more honest because you've had time to remember.

You might remember the person you called immediately after deciding to start the business. You might remember what your first office looked like. You might realize there was a specific customer who changed the way you thought about the company. You might finally put into words something you've understood instinctively for years but never had to explain.

Those details are storytelling gold.

We'd much rather have someone arrive saying, "I was thinking about that question you sent me, and I remembered something," than watch them struggle to produce an answer simply because we decided spontaneity was more important than substance.

Authenticity isn't created by surprise.

It comes from getting people to talk about things they genuinely know, believe, remember, and care about.

Your Video Will Only Be As Good As What You Give Us

There is also a larger truth about interview-driven filmmaking that we think clients and interview subjects should understand.

We can only work with what you give us.

We can spend weeks on pre-production. We can build a beautiful set. We can bring great cameras and lenses. We can light you perfectly. We can make sure the audio sounds incredible. We can develop thoughtful questions specifically for you. We can conduct the interview well, listen carefully, ask follow-ups, and make the experience as comfortable as possible.

Then we can take everything into post-production and spend days finding the strongest moments, restructuring conversations, building sequences, adding B-roll, shaping the pacing, and turning hours of material into a cohesive story.

But somewhere in the middle of all of that, someone still has to sit in the chair and give us something worth working with.

That's why preparation matters.

You don't need to be the world's greatest public speaker. You don't need to be naturally charismatic. You don't need to speak in perfect sound bites. You can stumble. You can start over. You can ask us if what you just said made any sense. That's all completely normal, and we know how to work with it.

What we need from you is substance.

If you're talking about your company, understand your company. If you're talking about a customer experience, think about that experience. If we're asking why something matters to you, spend some time considering why it actually does.

Your video will ultimately be stronger because you did.

Final Thoughts: Read The Questions. Don't Memorize Them.

So yes, we send interview questions in advance.

Almost always.

And we send them as early as we can because we don't see a downside to giving someone more time to feel prepared for an experience that may already make them nervous.

We aren't trying to catch anyone off guard. We're not conducting an investigation. We're not trying to prove our journalistic integrity while making a brand film for a client.

We're trying to create the strongest story possible.

So when you get our interview questions, read them. Think about them. Consider what you want to say. Think of specific examples. Remember the stories that might help explain your answers. If there's a fundamental question about your organization, make sure you've thought about how you'd explain it to someone who's never heard of your company before.

Then don't memorize a damn thing.

Don't write yourself a script. Don't practice every sentence until it comes out exactly the same way. Don't worry about finding the perfect words.

You've already done the important part.

You know what you want to talk about.

Now come to set, sit down, and have a conversation with us.