The Layered Approach - Interviewing for Scenes
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Hi everyone, Rob here. Thanks for tuning in. Sound School from PRX and Transom. I probably wasn't very fair to Simon Adler. I feel this much guilty about it, not too much.

Just a little. While we were chatting, I sprung an idea on him out of the blue. So there's something I want to try out with you right now. We didn't talk about it, so maybe this is a little bit of a surprise, but I hope you gain. I love surprises. Great. I'd have been interviewing Simon for about half an hour at this point in our conversation, and per usual, I was the one asking the questions. Well, now I asked him to take charge.

I'd like you to interview me about an incident that happened at my house many years ago. Okay. What would you want to know just to get started? Well, just tell me the story and I'll just put you through the ringer then. So one day at my house, I was living in Maine at the time, this dude shows up at my door and he had blood on his face. He was holding his hand to his face and there was blood dripping down his arms.

And so I helped him out and I, I just, I brought him home after he had an accident. Well, okay. My first question is, wait, I, was he at the, he was at your door, but then you took him home? Yeah. Cause he didn't live with me. You know, it was a stranger. There was a stranger at the house standing at my door. Okay. You invited him into the house. Yeah. Cause it looked like he needed help. Right. Okay. So you're saying you were just, yeah. Just tell it to me again if you would. So yeah, you're up in Maine. What happened?

I was at home and I heard the doorbell ring. And, you know, of course, I went to the door. And much to my surprise, there was this guy, this guy I didn't know who was standing there. And he had his hand on his forehead and there was blood everywhere.

We went back and forth like this for a while as Simon peppered me with questions, attempting to excavate the whole story. And to make things a little harder for Simon, I was purposefully not forthcoming. I wanted him to work. Got it. Okay. Now talk to me again. So we're in Maine in the winter. We're going to go back to the top again. Is it winter? What time of year is it? Like when you're looking out the window before this guy shows up or like, yeah, what does it look like outside? Yeah.

No, it's summer. It's spring, summer. It's warm enough. It's warm outside, you know, to be outside doing things as opposed to dressed in polar gear from head to toe. Yeah, I guess I just imagine that Maine is always snowy. Okay, so it's sunny outside. Simon is a senior producer at Radiolab. And the reason I asked him to play this game with me is because I wanted to see him in action interviewing for a scene.

Simon has a very particular interviewing method for pulling out the details of a scene. It's a granular approach where he seeks very specific scene components. There are mechanics to this thing, and if you look at it in this diagrammatic way, you can get a lot better or a lot faster at the craft. Before we talk about what he means, it might be helpful to define terms for a moment.

Oftentimes people refer to a scene as a section in a story that was recorded on location. Like if you were reporting a story about a dairy farmer who installed a new milking machine, you might want to record the farmer early in the morning using this machine to milk the cows. You'd record the cows and the farmer and the machine and the effort that it takes to milk the cows and so on.

But of course, you know, reporters can't always record on location, unfortunately. So in order to include scenes in a story, you have to ask the right questions during an interview. Questions that prompt an interviewee to provide all the details necessary for a scene. That way, when it's time to assemble a story, you can weave all these details together to paint a picture for listeners.

Simon says he listens for moments that cause him to think, ooh, scene. As I'm interviewing somebody and they say perhaps like, yeah, on that day, I had a thought I'd never had before. Or that day, I learned some terrible news.

If somebody says that to me, I'm like, oh, this is an important moment in the larger story that I'm being told because this is a moment of change. This is a moment of discovery. I need to back that person up real quick to get all sorts of other information to help create this scene. That other information includes three key elements. One of them is plot. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. I might jump in and say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay.

I want to slow down and go beat by beat through this with you. So where were you before you learned this information? And then they tell me, oh, well, I was standing, I don't know, I was standing in the backyard. And then I walked into the living room and that's where I had the thought that, oh, my gosh, blah, blah, blah. Simon says the plot of a scene should ideally lead to a problem the character has to deal with or a question they need to answer.

In other words, think of a scene as like a small story within the larger story.

Okay, on to the second element, visuals, the view from the perspective of the storyteller. What does the place look like? Where are we in space? Was it a screen door? Was it a wooden door? Did it creak? So you have plot, visuals, and the third key element, meaning. The emotional meaning, the emotional importance of that moment. Simon doesn't have a list of specific questions to ask. He just sort of asks what comes to mind in the moment to fill in gaps.

But there are times, and it's rare, but there are times he'll walk an interviewee through a scene three separate times. Once for plot, once for visuals, and once for meaning. Does this approach have a name? It doesn't. You want to come up with one? I'll let you name it if you want to. I would be honored. It sounds...

Like it's a layered interview. Great. Yeah. That's the best word I can come up with on the spot that you're layering the scene. Sure. And the different layers are plot, visuals, meaning. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's call it that. The layered interview. The layered approach. Done. So what have you been up to? Annie, do you need a microphone? Ah.

I think we're going to share because what else are we going to share? Simon used the layered approach during an interview he recorded for an episode of Radiolab called BitFlip. Jad Abramrod and Robert Krolwich were the hosts, and Simon reported the story along with Annie McKeown.

It's a story about a glitch in a voting machine in Belgium. We've been exploring what happened on May 18, 2003, in the great city of Brussels, specifically in Skarbek. Skarbek. Skarbek, one of the municipalities in Brussels. Story starts with this guy. This guy is Emmanuel Williams.

Simon told me Emanuel was not an easy interviewee. He was quiet and reserved. We had to, like, crack him open a little bit. And when he wouldn't crack open all the way for us, then it's like, OK, I'll just I'll use this technique that I know is going to at least get me material that I'll be able to use. In this four minute clip, you'll hear the results of Simon's layered approach. You may need to push aside all the whiz bang production to hear it. But the layers are there. Plot, visuals and meanings.

So it was around 11:30 p.m. and I was with one of my colleagues at a restaurant to have one of the good meals of the day. This is Emmanuel. Emmanuel Willems.

I am the one everybody calls when shit hits the fan. Yeah, let's put it that way. And that evening, Emanuel, along with much of the rest of the country, was waiting around for that day's national election results. The results for all the different parliamentary assemblies. But Emanuel's mind was on something else. Because across the country that day, millions of people had just voted on computers.

Belgium was in the early days of experimenting with electronic voting. And so instead of filling in a paper ballot, in the voting booth was a touchscreen computer and voters would walk in, insert this white credit card sized card into the machine and then vote by selecting names on that screen.

And it was Emmanuel's job to make sure that all these hundreds of computers worked properly. Mm-hmm. I'm an IT guy. So something like that. And at that point, at 11.30 at night, after the polls had closed... Besides the usual computer glitches... It seemed like everything had gone well. And so we were... There were two of us... He and one of his fellow IT guys. Waiting for the others, I guess, to talk about the day. Pat each other on the back for a job well done. And that's when the...

That's when his phone rang. It was unexpected. And it was one of the officials of the ministry. They said that they had a problem, that they had detected a problem in Skowbeek. And so I said, OK, we're coming over.

And so you pay the check, you hop in the car. I hope we paid the check. We dashed out of there. We just didn't leave like that. 15 minutes later. They arrive, they get out of their black Escalades, as I like to imagine, and they enter the polling station. The townhouse of Skarbek. This ornate building with big tall ceilings. It's a very old building. Filled with this crowd of confused looking people.

Well, they explained to us that going through the numbers, they noticed one of the contestants, this relatively unknown Communist Party candidate, Maria Vindovogel, had a very high number of votes from this one polling station. Okay. And taking a closer look, they noticed that the number of votes for this contestant was impossible. ♪

Wait, impossible? Yeah, a mathematical impossibility. Essentially, she received more votes than there were voters who could possibly vote for her. And so as Emanuel's hearing this... I'm curious. Is this just a fluke? Is there an explanation? Fraud. You're thinking fraud? I'm smelling fraud. It could have been tampering. It could have been a bug. It could have been a hardware glitch. Could have been a... It could be anything. Yeah, absolutely. So first things first, they got all of the ballots back.

those white plastic magnetic cards that the voters had loaded their votes onto. And recounted, reinserting every single magnetic card one by one. This took several hours. So now it's like 1.30 in the morning. And they print out the new recounted report, hold it up against the old one. And they are the exact same results for every single contestant to the vote.

Except the contestants, which had had this abnormal number of votes. This time around, Maria had far fewer votes. And at that point, one of my colleagues did the math and said the difference between the number of votes she had in the first count and the number of votes she had in the second count. It's exactly 4,096 votes. She had 4,096 fewer votes. Does that mean anything to you? 4,096. No, it means nothing to me.

Well, 4096 is not a random number. It is a it's something about the number. This I don't know. I don't know the answer, but I have this deep sense. I'm feeling tingly. So if you guys were I.T. people and you heard the number 4096, you'd be like, great Scott. Would we? Yes, you would. Yeah, absolutely. To every I.T. guy in the room, the number 4096 was was very meaningful.

That's the opening few minutes to BitFit, an episode of Radiolab going back to 2019. Could you hear the elements of the layered approach? I hope so.

So that you can hear him at work using the layered approach, I want to bring us back to where I started this episode, turning the tables on Simon. He had no time to prepare questions. I just threw him into the deep end. But he quickly fell into the groove of the layered approach. He started by clarifying plot. He was at your door, but then you took him home? And another plot question. Okay, you invited him into the house.

Then he asked me to review the plot from the top. Yeah, just tell it to me again if you would. So yeah, you're up in Maine. What happened? After that, he switched gears. He moved to visuals. What does it look like outside? Once Simon felt like he had the visuals in place, he moved on to the third layer, some emotional meaning. What about blood? Like, is it your, do you, what's your, are you queasy? What did you, when you see the blood, what are you feeling? I actually wonder if there should be a fourth layer when interviewing for scenes. I don't know.

Dialogue. Asking people, what did you say? And what did they say? Because Simon asked me, did he say anything to you? And I had a good answer. One that you'll hear in a moment because I pieced together my full story based on all the questions he asked me regarding plot, visuals, and meaning. Actually, it's not the full story. We stopped at a certain point due to time, but he was able to ask me enough questions so that you can hear how the scene took shape based on those questions.

One day at my house, I was living in Maine at the time, I was getting ready for work, music's loud, heard the doorbell when I came out of the upstairs bathroom and stood at the top of the stairs and I looked down and I could see a pair of feet at the door. And as I walked down, more of his body revealed itself to me.

And much to my surprise, there was this guy, this guy I didn't know, who was standing there. And he had his hand on his forehead, and there was blood dripping down his face and his hand and down his arm. When you see the blood, what are you feeling? I'm kind of shocked, like startled. He'd been bicycling, and he clearly looked like he needed help. Did he have a helmet on? No, he didn't. Did he say anything to you?

Yeah. You know, through the door, he said, look, I've had an accident. I'm wondering if I can use your phone. Then I said, yeah, sure. Come on in. And then he said, well, no, no, no, no. I don't want to get I don't want to get blood on your carpet. And I said, well, you're not going to get blood on the carpet because, look, there's tile right here by the door and it cleans up. He came in and I got the phone. And so he makes the call. No one answers. And I say, well, look, I'm more than willing to drive you to the hospital. Let's go to the ER.

And he's like, no, that's all right. If I need some help later at the ER, I'll just call. Really, I just want to go home. It sounds like you were worried on this guy's behalf. A stranger shows up at your door, you know, blood. He's clearly addled. And I didn't think driving him home was going to be the proper help. I mean, who am I to decide for this guy? I don't know. But nevertheless, in that moment, my gut said hospital.

"Okay, well I sort of feel like we've gotten pretty damn good coverage of everything that happened." And like, hearing you tell the story from you being upstairs and you walking down and seeing those feet, like, that was wonderful. Suddenly I am like watching the movie through your eyes in a way that the first three times we went through the story I definitely wasn't seeing. I was just like in the living room and suddenly there's a guy at the door.

That was so lovely. So after that experience, I stand by the layer method. It provided exactly what I was hoping, which was more information and more interesting things. Simon Adler. He's a senior producer at Radiolab. Simon and I did keep talking a little bit longer because he was curious how the rest of my story played out.

So what I've decided to do is upload that whole part of our conversation from when he starts grilling me through to the end so that you can hear more of how he works and how the story ends. And I will say this about the rest of the story. Wear a freaking helmet when you bicycle. And don't ride a bike with your dog running next to you on a leash. Listen to it all at transom.org.

You might remember a few episodes ago, I wrote about my local public radio station, WCAI. It's where I record my narration. It's where I'm recording my narration right now. I reported that WCAI's owner, WGBH, surprised station staff and the local community when they announced they were moving WCAI and selling the historic building in Woods Hole, Massachusetts that's been the station's home for 25 years.

Well, a quick update. There's good news. Because of a huge outcry from the community, WGBH sold the building to a local nonprofit, the Woods Hole Community Association. The association owns a handful of public buildings, such as the Woods Hole Library and a community hall.

The association has been clear. WCAI can stay in the building. In fact, they want CAI to remain in the community. So much so, they've offered to let the station stay in the building for five years, rent free. The question is, will WGBH let CAI stay? I have my doubts, but hopefully I'm wrong and I'll have good news for you soon.

This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling from PRX and Transom. My editors are Genevieve Sponsler and Jay Allison. Jennifer Jarrett mines the store at Transom's website. My thanks to Stellwagon Symphonette for the scoring music. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thank you very much for listening.