The version you hear is roughly a fifth of what was recorded. That ratio is not a sign of a bad interview — it is the job. A conversation that would be perfectly good over dinner is, as tape, mostly throat-clearing: the warm-up, the repeated question, the story told twice because the first attempt lost its thread.
Record the room first
Thirty seconds of a kitchen doing nothing is the most reused file in the archive. It sits under the introduction, covers every edit, and is the difference between an interview that sounds like it happened somewhere and one that sounds like it happened in a booth. Record it before anyone starts talking, when the room is still behaving normally.
Ask the question, then say nothing. The four seconds of silence you have to sit through is where the honest answer comes from.
What we never cut
Numbers people get wrong and correct themselves on. Long pauses before an answer that matters. Anything the subject says after they think the recorder is off, provided they agree to it afterwards — and they usually do, because it is the part they meant most.
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Comments (3)
The silence after a question is real, and it is the hardest thing to leave alone once you are in the edit. Everything in you wants to close the gap.
Two hours down to twenty-six minutes is brutal. What happens to the rest of it — is any of it kept, or does it go?
Recording the room first sounds obvious until you forget once and spend a whole day trying to fake a sound you already had.