By ELLEN T.TORDESILLAS
I’D like to thank Kris Aquino for giving me very good materials for our training of journalists.
Nothing beats her interviews with the stars of The Amazing Spide-Man2 for an example of “How not to conduct an interview.”
An interview is important when doing a story because that would enable the writer to present to the readers the person he would be writing about with first hand observations. Through well thought-out questions, he would be able to draw the interviewee to talk about his views which in the first place made him worthy to be interviewed.
In an interview, the star is the interviewee. The attention should be on him and the interviewer is just the facilitator, to bring out what can be elicited from him.
That’s not what Kris Aquino did in an interview with Andrew Garfield who played Peter Parker, the Spiderman and Jamie Foxx, the super villain Electro, in Singapore last month.
There’s a Tagalog word for what Kris did in her interviews with Garfield and Foxx: nagkalat.
One, she brought her son, Bimby. So improper . So unprofessional. So Kris Aquino.
Two, she talked a lot about herself- a no-no in interviews.
She bragged to Garfield that the movie of her son, “My Little Bossings,” beat The Amazing Spider-Man 1 in the box-office in the Philippines.
It was neither here nor there. The two movies were not shown at the same time. The gall to compare a Spiderman movie to the inane My Little Bossings. It’s like comparing a painting by Ben Cab to a tarpaulin streamer.
What can Garfield say but “Fantastic… Well, congratulations.”
But in a way, Bimby did something good because while she was telling Garfield how she was “blown away” by the The Amazing Spider-Man movie, Bimby, who was restless and distracting during the interview,blurted out, “And she was sleeping.” Garfield laughed.
Served her right.
In her interview with Foxx, she bragged that many consider her “the Oprah of the Philippines.”
Foxx replied, “Oh, is that right?”
Kris asked Foxx, who is known to be a good friend of Oprah Winfrey to tell the American TV superstar that she (Kris) is her fan.
Kris Aquino’s conduct was forgivable if she were someone, maybe 15 or 16 years old, who is new in the business. But she is 43 years old and has been in media (she even told Garfield that she is seen on TV mornings and evenings) for years and years.
But thanks Kris. In the next journalists training by VERA Files, I will use the video of your The Amazing Spider-Man 2 interviews with the instruction: “Huwag tularan.”
Related links:
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/entertainment/04/25/14/kris-tells-spider-man-star-we-beat-you-ph
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/video/entertainment/04/25/14/kris-meets-idol-jamie-foxx