The New Journalists: Influencers, TikTok Press Tours, and the Death of Good Interviews
by Hazel Anna Rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1984, at the poolside of an old French stone brick house, red tile roof. I am watching Christian Defaye interview a 17-year-old Sophie Marceau about her new film, Fort Saganne by Alain Corneau, where Marceau acts alongside the infamous Gerard Depardieu. The sun is shining, the pool is sparkling with turqoise ripples, the air is fresh and yellow with warmth.
The interview starts with Defaye cracking a joke about not being sure whether to follow through with the interview or whether they should just go for a swim in the pool. Marceau laughs, and agrees with Defaye; she says that it’s such a magical place that she doesn’t really feel like working.
The mood settles into concentration, and the interview continues. Marceau is smoking. She’s wearing an indigo shirt with a slightly darker indigo infinity scarf over top which drapes elegantly across her chest. Defaye asks Marceau about her favourite sequence in the film, Fort Saganne. Then he asks her about her trajectory as an actress, about her first experience of casting age 13, of the feelings of anxiety that it must bring up for an actor. Marceau answers frankly, and poetically, that, at the time, her naivety towards the world of cinema, her innocence, her ‘virginity’ in the whole casting process lent her the ability to recite the text given to her as though she were reciting a piece of writing at school. She was just looking to earn a bit of money in time for the school holidays, and instead she became a household name. It’s funny how life goes.
It’s a charming interview. A blend of profundity and gentle humour, facilitated by Christian Defaye’s probing, but respectful, style of interviewing. Defaye’s own formation as a journalist was long and varied; he did his schooling during World War II at a religious school in Lyon, then went on to study political sciences in Paris. Age 22, in 1956, Defaye took part in a competition hosted by radio station Europe 1, and radio journalist Maurice Siegel, impressed by Defaye, took him on as weather reporter at the radio station. Defaye went on to become a written journalist in the Progres de Lyon newspaper, then wrote for Swiss publication, Le Matin, and did some gastronomic journalism for La Suisse. Age 34, Defaye began his career in television journalism doing regional reporting on Swiss television. Some years later, after various twists and turns in his television career, Defaye, alongside Christian Zender and Christiane Cusin, created the pirate television show Spécial cinéma in 1974, a show which went on to become one of the most popular programmes on Télévision Suisse Romande. Defaye was praised for his candid, open style of interviewing, and his passion for cinema, which afforded him real insight into the lives and art of countless professionals working in film during the latter part of the 20th Century. After his death in 1997, Claudette Cottagnoud, Defaye’s wife of 22 years, said this of Defaye:
“I lived with this man for 22 years, and I was never bored for a second. Christian was a kind of sacred monster. I’m not saying he was Hemingway or that he was great, but he was an exceptional person.”
I’m describing all of this very meticulously. You see, I have been watching many interviews of around that time, the 1980s, with a focus on French language interviews of female film actresses. Interviews of Sophie Marceau, Isabelle Adjani, Emmanuelle Béart…the stars of their day. These actresses are young, sometimes only 17 or 18 years old, but they speak with intelligence, with humility, and with modesty for their craft. The interviewers, too, prove genuinely interested in the films they discuss with the young actresses, and they ask them myriad questions on their approaches to acting, on their philosophies about cinema and filmmaking, on their lives outside of the film world. The interviews are serious, but not dour; they’re respectful, insightful, and reveal a great deal about the actors being interviewed.
That’s not to say that there aren’t myriad examples of more disrespectful interviewers throughout the 20th Century. Oprah, while generally considered a courteous and highly skilled interviewer, asked Michael Jackson whether he was a virgin, resulting in the singer stating his embarrassment at having being asked the question. And Bill Boggs, interviewing a 15-year-old Brooke Shields in 1980, asks her provocative and perverted questions about her ‘uncanny ability to look older than she is’, and about her thoughts on her having been viewed as a ‘sex symbol’ since the age of 11, when she starred in the controversial movie Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1973). Interviewers have always tried to push the boundaries of acceptable questions in order to acquire truthfulness from their interviewees, but what we’re encountering now, in interviews in 2025, is a whole now world of interview technique.
I am an actress. I have not yet been interviewed in relation to the two films I have acted in; neither have been released yet, though one of them, Snapshot, by Joseph Archer, will be showing at festivals in 2026, so doubtless I’ll partake in an interview or two about the film. Who knows.
But interviews are different, now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Magazine and newspaper editorials about actors still seem to have an inbuilt respect in them for the actor, even when the piece sways to being a little more derisive of the actor themselves, as was the case with On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke, a piece by Michael Schulman for The New Yorker. But the difference with written media is that, most of the time, the interviewer and interviewee are speaking alone together, a situation which only the most insensible interviewer would jeopardise with the kinds of crass questions articulated by interviewers on press tour junkets in 2025.
These interviews, oftentimes hosted by inexperienced interviewers with backgrounds in content creation for platforms such as TikTok, are characterised by parasocially motivated questions, references to social media viral trends, and a general sense of over-familiarity with the interviewees.
For the new Fantastic Four movie, an interviewer openly admitted to having used AI to formulate his questions, which led to him making an error regarding the shooting location for the movie. This same interviewer also began a question, directed at celebrated actor Pedro Pascal, by saying ‘the internet can’t decide whether you are boyfriend, daddy, dad…’. Another interviewer was filmed on the red carpet asking actress Barbie Ferreira whether she’d prefer to have a ‘gay son or thot daughter’. A trained journalist asserted shamelessly to actress Vanessa Kirby that she’s become ‘a social media icon for her forcefield snatched c*nty fierceness face’. An interviewer made crass jokes to actress Cynthia Erivo about the exhaustion of acting in intense scenes being similar to ‘needing to pee really bad and you’re almost home’.
Even film studios themselves have turned to desperate attempts at achieving virality for the actors appearing in their movies by making actors participate in popular TikTok dance trends, ensuring their actors appeare on swathes of popular podcasts and internet interview shows in the hope of capturing ‘viral’ moments, and hiring celebrity influencers to conduct interviews in the place of trained journalists, such as our afformentioned Christian Defaye. The popular Wicked franchise, including the recently released Wicked: For Good, has been all over social media channels, not necessarily for the success of the movies themselves, but for the tabloid gossip surrounding them: the relationship between the two lead actresses, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande; the relationship between Grande and actor Ethan Slater, who also appears in the film; and the alarming weight loss of female actresses participating in the franchise. The movies themselves have taken silver beneath the gold that is our parasocial fascination with celebrities, our need to be able to ‘relate’ to them, our need to feel close to the rich and famous to distract ourselves from our own difficult lives.
Of course, many great interviews are still conducted by seasoned, brilliant journalists. I recently had a bout of listening to many interviews of Charlotte Le Bon, the Canadian actress and painter, on various French radio shows. One of the interviews in particular struck a deeply resonant chord with me; it was an interview conducted in Le Bon’s atelier in Paris, which was also the atelier used by the late David Lynch, who himself had spoken to Le Bon there, telling her she shouldn’t listen to music while she paints, that it wasn’t good for painting. The interview was intelligently crafted about the movement of Le Bon and the interview through the atelier, and I had a sense that I, too, was there, looking over Le Bon’s tableaus in a paint-spattered, whitewashed room above the streets of Paris.
The problem of interviews runs deep. The replacement of trained journalists and trained critics with influencers, during press tours for films, means a weakening of valid critical discourse on the movies themselves. An influencer, flattered and excited at being offered the chance to interview their favourite actor, would be unlikely to jeopardise this chance by being critical of the film itself, which leads to film ratings equalising across the board, with no distinguishing between genuinely great movies, and genuinely terrible movies. This inevitably leads to studios pumping out the same formulaic films which succeed in bringing in swathes of cash through incessant social media engagement marketing, with little to no focus on taking risks in making innovative cinema. Of course, this has been the case for a while, but criticism, previously integral to the success of a film and additionally successful in proving to studios that the public’s taste in cinema extends further than overused IP and fast-paced action flicks, is now so diluted that one can’t tell what films are actually good or not. And, thus, we go to see the films that people have praised so highly online, not knowing they were paid to do so, and we are sorely disappointed, perhaps even put-off the movies altogether for a while, but it doesn’t matter, because the cash has changed hands now, and the studios are a few dimes richer.
There’s also the issue of intelligence. I speak of the intelligence of interview etiquette, of on-the-spot thinking and a receptiveness to the comportment and attitude of one’s interviewee, coupled with a good knowledge of film history and study of the art itself. Without these factors, without this intelligence, interviews become vapid, become offensive to the actors involved in them, and we lose a beautiful medium which has succeeded in offering us priceless insight into how the whole beast of cinema works. In its place, we have brain-rot; awkward encounters, thirst-traps, distasteful questions, and new micro-trends coined.
I return, now, to the interview of Sophie Marceau by the late Christian Defaye. Defaye says:
‘So, Sophie, you’ve discovered Hollywood, because we’re about to discuss a very important film that you’re soon going to be shooting; I remember we were eating lunch in Paris with the producer, and I know that it must have been a formidable joy for you, to know that you were leaving for Hollywood…and I wanted to say that there was something wonderfully childlike and spontaneous in the way you reacted to the news. I wanted to ask how it all felt, for you, to go out there.’
To which Marceau replies:
‘Well…you see, I was a little underwhelmed when I got there. It’s no longer the Hollywood of stars, or fur and Rolls Royces…Now, Hollywood is…well, it’s a town in California, and that’s all. I mean, already the word, ‘Hollywood’, makes you dream, and when you see the studios, of course, it’s a dream, but…of course, I was going there to work, I didn’t have the time to be a tourist…but, anyway, Hollywood is a bit lost, and it’s a shame. It’s not that I’d like to be in furs and all that, it’s not really ‘me’, but…but I found it all so wonderful. That era really made people dream. The stars of old Hollywood, we saw them as beautiful objects, and they made people dream, and we didn’t see them as ‘actors’. Now, it’s the era of ‘actors’, actors in jeans and a shirt, with a motorbike, or any old car, and it doesn’t really make people dream.’
The interviews, the way that cinema is circulated now, is not intended to make people dream. It is trying, and succeeding, in making people react, in making people feel falsely personally attached to actors, in making them envious, in making them obsessive and chronically online. We no longer have room to dream. It’s all so loud out there. I can hardly hear my thoughts as I type.
============
This Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include On Friendships, Bowie’s Typewriter, and Initiations.
Carl Kruse maintained an old blog here.
