TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently wrote and asked if I would do a video on the subject of ethical interviews, on conducting ethical interviews of other people. And I love this subject, especially in light of how I started this YouTube channel back, what was it, in 2008 or nine, whenever it was, when I was sharing my documentary films on the subject of schizophrenia.
Some of the people who I interviewed in those early years actually were in very vulnerable states or talking about having been psychotic or schizophrenic at some point in their life and how vulnerable it was. And here I was asking them all sorts of very personal questions, sometimes even about sex and things like this, about their childhood traumas, so I could share this with the public. I recognized how vulnerable they were talking about this stuff that they maybe didn’t even talk about with their close relatives, with their friends, with their partners, let alone with the public. And here I was interviewing them for public consumption, for a purpose, but also for the public to see.
I think one of the things that made me feel comfortable doing this, feeling like it was okay, was that I found actually part of it was rather distasteful. I felt uncomfortable by interviewing them. I didn’t like the idea of, “oh I’m gonna get the dirt on them and I’m gonna make it public.” I didn’t want to hurt them. I didn’t want to have people share stuff that would in any way come back to harm them.
I think part of why I was so acutely sensitive to interviewing vulnerable people for public consumption was that I had been a therapist by that point for a long time already. And part of being a therapist is interviewing people about very personal, painful, vulnerable, confidential material. And part of what I loved about being a therapist was that it was purely confidential. I could ask questions, people could share things if they felt comfortable, knowing that no one else was going to hear about this. There were going to be no external negative consequences coming into their lives. That made me a lot more comfortable to ask people very, very sensitive personal, sometimes very taboo questions.
Whereas when I was sitting behind a camera and the camera was in someone’s face and it’s being recorded, that was a lot harder for me because there was a whole different ethical standard. I was very aware that this could negatively hurt someone in all sorts of different ways, aside from the fact simply they could just become very uncomfortable by what they said.
The main thing that I did when I was interviewing people who were vulnerable, but I did it at first with everybody I worked with, was that when I interviewed people, I had a consent form. There was informed consent. They knew what they were doing, and I shared this form with them. “Here, read this.” And I purposely made it very clear and very simple.
I’ve done interviews for documentaries myself, and I’ve seen the forms that most people hand me. Sometimes they don’t have any forms at all. Sometimes they just do the interview, okay done, and they take it. There is no informed consent. But sometimes, especially the fancier interviewers, the fancier movie makers, they have these long, long forms, sometimes four, five, six, seven pages long with all this legalese. I have no idea what it says, and they don’t really want me to read it. They want me to sign it and put a date next to it so they have no legal liability if I don’t like what they do with this interview. But really, the whole point of making it so long and full of legalese is so that I won’t even read it, so that I’ll just sign it quickly.
Now, also what they do, which I did not do, is they say, “here’s the form, sign it, then we’ll do the interview.” And I look at it, and I want to do the interview. I want to have my voice be out there. I want to be useful in the world. So I look at it, I say this is overwhelming. I read maybe like one paragraph and say, “I forget it,” and I sign it, move on, and I say I’ll just trust them to do the right thing.
When it came my turn to interview people, especially people who were really vulnerable and it could really hurt them if I didn’t do well with their interview, I would say, “here’s the form, my informed consent form, please read it, but don’t sign it, just read it, know what you’re getting yourself into. And after the interview, if you feel comfortable with what you shared, then read it again and then decide if you want to sign it or not. And please, if you don’t feel comfortable with what that form says, don’t sign it. I don’t want your interview.”
As it happened, I think I interviewed a couple hundred people back then. I think two didn’t sign it. I remember one woman, I interviewed her in Washington Square Park for my first film, “Take These Broken Wings.” She said, “I don’t know if I really feel comfortable with what I said. I think I maybe said a little bit too much, too much personal stuff.” Even though in my heart I knew I wasn’t going to use her for that stuff, I wanted to use something else because she said something good. But she said, “well, I just don’t know how I feel about it, so please actually just don’t sign it, leave it blank. I don’t want to use your interview.”
No, no, well maybe I want to be in it. I just need time to think. I think there isn’t time to think about it. It’s like, it’s kind of like now. I mean, I can give you my email, I can email it to you. She says, “yeah, why don’t you do that?” I actually, I really don’t feel comfortable signing it now. She says, “just email that form to me and I can print it out and send it back to you if I do feel comfortable.” So I did that, and she never got back to me. And I thought, good, I don’t want someone to sign a consent form if they’re not actually really giving me consent from their heart. Otherwise, it can really hurt people.
And then there’s actually the point of what did I put in that informed consent form? What I said was very blunt. This interview will be owned by Daniel Mackler. Daniel Mackler will have full rights to do whatever he wants to use this in film, video, on the internet, etc., etc. He can cut up your interview as he sees fit, but he promises to keep what you said in context. Because what I’ve learned is when you interview someone, even me interviewing myself right now for this YouTube video, it’s not that hard to cut it up to make someone say something very different than what they intended. And that was very important for me, and I put that in. I want to edit your interviews to keep what you said in context. I want to respect not just your words but the spirit, the idea of what you said.
I made it very, very clear, and that was something I have always honored, not to manipulate the way that I used their interview. I wanted someone to feel confident, and if they don’t trust me, well, how do I know you’re going to keep it in context? Well, please, if you don’t trust me, that is totally fair. Why should you trust me? Maybe you don’t know me. Let’s not use the interview.
I also felt actually that informed consent form, by showing it to them beforehand and then giving them the chance to sign it or not sign it afterward, built trust with people because they knew more that I wasn’t going to manipulate them and I wasn’t trying to turn the screws to get them to behave some certain way. And actually what I found is that it allowed people to be more safe and feel more safe to be more authentic, which actually made for a better interview.
What else did I say in that form? I can’t even remember. There really wasn’t that much, just that I was gonna own it, I was gonna do what I wanted with it, that it was very clear that they weren’t going to have any more say once they did the interview. I wasn’t going to show it to them again because I didn’t have time, I didn’t have the energy to go.
Back and show it again and again, and that I wasn’t going to manipulate them and take their words out of context. But then there was an exception. It happened in my third documentary called Healing Homes. I filmed it in Sweden. There was a young woman, her name was Therese, and she was going through some real problems that could probably still be labeled as, you know, kind of psychotic, her words. I interviewed her, did the same thing, showed her the form, she read it beforehand. She gave this very, very personal interview. She was very vulnerable.
I realized immediately, as I heard it, it was a great interview. I would totally be able to use this in my film to share the message that I was trying to share—a very positive message about healing from psychosis, about the value of getting support for healing, the value of not being blotted and numbed out with medications. She did a beautiful job. She was really, really lovely. She signed the form afterwards. She was very confident.
I went off. I actually was out of Sweden; I was in a different country. I edited the whole film. As I watched it, I thought, you know, she’s very vulnerable. She could really be hurt if she doesn’t like how I edited it, even though I edited it, I felt very fairly and in context. But I still felt, yeah, she signed a consent form. She should have a right to watch this film before I make it public because it’s so personal and private about her life, and it uses her real name, no disguise at all.
So I didn’t actually have her direct email or telephone number, but I had friends who had it in Sweden. So I called them and I told them, this is my dilemma. I said, I feel like she should get a chance to watch it again to really know what’s going in there because it’s so personal, so private, and she was in such a vulnerable state. I said, they said, you sure you want to let her do it? Will that hurt your film? I was like, yeah, that’s the problem. It’s gonna potentially kill my film if I have to remove her from it, but it’s gonna kill me if she’s not happy with how it is. And which is worse, a dead film or loss of self-esteem for me?
I’ve done enough things in my life where I lost self-esteem, and that’s the worst—to not love myself anymore, to not respect myself. It’s like, that’s the person I don’t want to be. And I took a deep breath and said, ask her. I want her to have the choice to watch it again, and I will fly back to Sweden to give her the chance.
I didn’t hear for like a week or something like that. According to my memory, this is over 10 years ago now. But I flew back to Sweden, and when I arrived in Sweden, they got in touch with her, and they got the message back to me. She says, no, no, this is what they said: she trusts you. She doesn’t need to see the film. She’ll watch it when it comes out. And I was like, yeah, I was so relieved because I really thought she might kill my film.
I certainly do know I’ve edited people’s writing, and I edit something they say, or maybe you should say it this way, no, no, no, and they take it out. And I’ve done compilations and books where people want to change things, and it’s like it can ruin the work. I knew it. It was a risk I took, but I felt like it worked out well to give her a second chance at informed consent, to give her the chance to say, you know, I changed my mind. I thought about it for three months, and I don’t want to be in it.
But actually what happened is when that film came out, the first screening we had in Sweden, she sat right next to me. I hadn’t actually seen her since the interview, and she sat right next to me. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She watched it, and at the end she says, I liked it, and she shook my hand. I was like, but I know if I hadn’t asked her for that second round of consent, I wouldn’t have felt good about myself. Yes, I would have been very relieved still that she liked it, but I just felt better by asking again just because I wasn’t totally sure that she really was confident by having put down her signature.
Because sometimes there can be a lot of pressure for people to sign something. They want to be good boys and good girls. I know that feeling myself. I don’t feel totally comfortable, but just sign it. So by asking again, I felt better. So that’s key.
Another thing, and I’ve had people suggest to me this. Oh, they say, well, if you really want to interview people, you should pay them something. And I’m like, no, no, payment. I’ve never paid anyone for an interview, and I like that because I think when people get paid, they feel like they have to give more than what they would otherwise give. And it’s like they might do things they wouldn’t otherwise do or say.
And also, it’s like something—this was very important for me when I’ve interviewed people for films, especially that I want to know that I’m interviewing them for a positive reason, for a healing purpose, for good motivations, not for, what’s the word, voyeuristic public consumption, not to humiliate them, not to make them look stupid, but to show respect. And therefore, it’s free. I want them to realize my motivation for doing this before they give their consent to participate in it. I want them to be inspired by altruism to have their painful things in life be shared to help others, to be youthful.
I certainly see a lot of examples of that in the world, certainly on the internet, when it’s not that way. I was, oh, some months ago, somebody tuned me in to a channel on YouTube. There’s lots of them out there that they were interviewing people for voyeuristic reasons. Yeah, it doesn’t even matter which channel it was, but making people look weird and stupid and, you know, humiliating them and just arousing the curiosity and the voyeurism of the viewer to look at these strange, troubled, odd people. And they were paying them. These people were paid to be in these interviews, and it was like a freak show.
And there’s a lot, yeah, lots of channels like this, and it’s like they can be very, very popular. And it can be interesting. You can see inside the lives of people who, you know, are bizarre in different ways or different. But it’s like, it’s not for healing, for love of the person. It’s not for love of a greater message. And for me, that’s very important.
And that’s actually something very similar to my time as a psychotherapist. When I interview someone, when I’ve interviewed people for films or for public consumption in some way, I want to love the person I’m interviewing. I want my perspective to come from, yes, sharing a message, a greater message with the world, but also for loving them, what’s loving, what’s best in them, loving their strength, caring about their well-being.
And I see some of these voyeuristic channels where they just throw money at people. It’s sort of almost like they’re treating them like prostitutes in a way. They’re just using them and giving them something where it’s like, what am I giving to people? It’s like I’m giving them respect and love, or at least doing my best to try to, and editing them in a way that yes, shares this message but also honors them.
And I do feel the same way that that’s how it was with therapy too, that my interviewing, my reason for asking people personal questions that you don’t normally ask people in regular everyday interchange was to help them grow for no other reason. Often this is also really, really important. When I was a therapist, sometimes my curiosity would take over. Sometimes people would be sharing about something that happened to be very interesting to me or very unusual, things I’d never heard about. Maybe even part of me was like, I kind of wonder about that. But then it’s like, you know, I filtered my interview questions through the lens of, is my question really motivated by being useful to them, or is it…
To satisfy just something in me, and if it’s just for satisfying something in me and doesn’t necessarily have something that I can be confident will be useful to them, then don’t ask it. Don’t ask it. Think about it more. Think about why am I really asking this question? What is my reason for it? If there’s any degree of voyeurism in it.
And early on, when I first became a therapist, it was like I’ve never heard people share so honestly about such personal and often taboo things. There was some part of it was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I’d want to ask, but then it’s like, don’t. Don’t ask unless you’re pretty darn confident that it’s really for their own good.
To the degree that I can, and I also know that from the other side, having been in therapy, having had some therapists who I hoped loved me, I wanted them to care about me and be there for me. Also, some interviews that I’ve done over time for certain documentary films, realizing that the interviewers, the therapists, were using me for various reasons of their own. Not out of respect for me, not out of respect for the vulnerable parts of me, not out of respect for my growth process, not with the purpose of helping me or others grow, but maybe even to harm me. Sometimes to humiliate me, to trap me.
I’ve had therapists do that, ask me questions where I realized, oh, they’re just setting me up to be trapped, to make me look bad, to prove to me that they’re right, that they know more. And it’s like, I don’t like that, and that’s not how I want to behave.
So maybe there’s some things that I left out in terms of interviewing people, but this is the basic summary for how I have tried to be an ethical interviewer and also, I would say, an ethical editor when I share, if that’s what the purpose of the interview was, to share it for public consumption.
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