As a former film journalist, I enjoyed Catherine Shoard’s piece on the discredited Clint Eastwood “interview” and the craft of film journalism (The good, the bad and the ugly, 4 June) – and can only recommend readers to the interview scene in Notting Hill.
The truth really is stranger than even that fiction. My own career included, on the one hand, a genuine, solo, hour-long interview with Clint Eastwood for an Oscars supplement of this very paper in 1993, but, on the other, too many of the film festival roundtable interviews that Shoard describes.
I can remember only three things in their favour. First, that sometimes another member of the ill-assorted international crew would ask a question you could never have brought yourself to pose (“So, Nicole Kidman, why did you and Tom Cruise not have children of your own?”). Second, that they could occasionally throw up a good experience, as in Venice, when Donald Sutherland swept the entire group up to his hotel bedroom, to sprawl on the rumpled sheets nibbling his favourite parmesan and pears.
Third, that there could have been no better training for my present role as a historical biographer, assembling profiles of celebrities who, being on average some 400 years dead, are in no position to answer any questions at all.
Sarah Gristwood
Deal, Kent
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