Ten Minutes Before the Cameras Roll

When you interview the President of the United States, or any other world leader, there is genuine tension in the room before the cameras start rolling. Real tension. You can feel it.

It is almost never coming from the principal. It is coming from the staff.

I interviewed four presidents as a producer, which meant I was the person responsible for the interviews. Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump. Each was different, and the people surrounding them were different too.

The Clinton people were especially nervous. They would try to keep us from asking too many questions or prevent the interview from running too long. Those could be very tense moments.

Obama was the easiest of all of them, and the reason is worth noting. Robert Gibbs was his press guy at the beginning, with David Plouffe and Axelrod also around. They were smart, and they did not care what we asked because they had complete confidence that he could handle whatever question we put to him. And he did. There were some people running the press office later who were annoying and could make things tense, but the top of the operation never felt that way.

I was only involved in three interviews with George W. Bush. I found him to be a most likable guy, who started both of the ground wars and who came to regret the one in Iraq. His people were very nervous because he did not do many interviews and was prone to misspeak in certain ways.

So there was tension before an interview began. And there was usually tension at the end as well, because they would be shouting at me. Cut. Cut. That is enough. You are finished.

I tried to ignore it and let the correspondent get in one more question. Sometimes, if you know what to listen for, you can hear that exchange going back and forth in the background of the broadcast.

That is the part of the job nobody sees. The interview the audience watches looks calm, just two people sitting in chairs. Ten minutes before it begins, though, the room is filled with people who have spent weeks preparing for something they know they cannot fully control.

The lesson I took from twenty years in those rooms is that the nervousness of the staff is almost always in inverse proportion to their confidence in the person they work for. The ones who trusted their principal let us ask anything. The ones who did not fought us over the clock.

It was nerve-racking every single time. It was also usually pretty interesting.