Why I don't do gotcha interviews
Empathy, challenge, and the questions we ask before making any film
Last week we released our film about Adrianne, the married mother of two who has spent five years in a relationship with an AI companion. It has performed really well, and the response has been a reminder of why we started doing this in the first place.
Because think about what that film actually is. A singular, nuanced, quiet story about one woman in one house in suburban America. No celebrity. No big name. No flashy hook beyond a question about how a person copes with being human. Stories like that just don’t really get told in a lot of places. There isn’t a load of room in legacy media for stories that are simply about the human experience: too small for a commissioner, too quiet for a slate, impossible to pitch as a returnable format. Which means those stories, and there are tens of millions out there in one form or another, mostly never get a proper hearing. When they do surface, it’s as a headline, a statistic, or a punchline. Rarely as a human being, sitting in her own living room, explaining herself in her own words.
That’s the gap Zandland exists to fill. And the response suggests people want exactly that. The comment that summed it up best, with hundreds of likes behind it: “I thought this was going to be about dunking on some weirdo creep and now I’m just crying and want to hug everyone involved.” Another, simply: “Shows you should never judge a book by its cover.” People are coming to individual human stories told with empathy. That journey, from judgement to understanding, is the whole point of what we do.
But the response has also had me thinking hard about the tension that sits inside that approach. Because empathy is only half of our job.
We’re still journalists
Here’s the tension. We lead with empathy, and it’s why people let us in. But we’re not making tribute videos. We’re journalists. Which means the other half of the job is to ask the questions the audience is asking. To challenge. To show things as they are rather than as our contributors might wish them to be seen.
Those two halves pull against each other constantly. A fair film about your life can still be a mirror you weren’t ready for. And sometimes for someone who’s the focus of a documentary, watching the film is not easy. Seeing your own life from the outside, framed by someone else’s questions, can be hard. We really aim to make all our films fairly. To treat people as human beings, and to give them space. But the balance between empathetic listener and journalistic understanding can often be a tricky one.
That gap has been sitting with me all week. Because it gets to the question underneath everything we do:
What does a fair hearing actually mean, when the truth might hurt the person you’re hearing?
Here’s what I’ve come to think, having sat with this across every film we’ve made. Empathy is, and will always be, the core of how we work. It’s not a technique or a tone. It’s a genuine belief that people deserve to be understood before they’re judged, whoever they are and whatever world they’re living in. It’s the reason people say yes to us. It’s the reason people who have never spoken to a camera before, who have every reason to distrust the media, let us into their homes and their lives. Without it, there is no access, no trust, and no film.
But empathy doesn’t mean the finished film will only ever contain what a contributor hoped it would. It can’t. Because our obligation is split three ways: to the person in front of the camera, to the truth of what we found, and to the audience watching. And when those pull in different directions, which they sometimes do, the job is to be fair to all three, not to be liked by one.
That’s the tension at the heart of this kind of work. A film made with genuine care can still be a mirror someone wasn’t ready for. Understanding someone deeply doesn’t mean agreeing with them, and it doesn’t mean leaving out the complicated bits. In fact I’d argue the opposite. The version of any film that airbrushes the difficult parts and asks no hard questions isn’t kinder. It just serves comfort instead of truth. And it would be a quiet betrayal of everyone watching who is living something similar and deserves the honest picture, not the flattering one.
The rooms where it gets even harder
Because if empathy and challenge are hard to balance in the gentle stories, they get properly difficult in the others.
A few months ago I sat across from a man who was days away from beginning a life sentence for first degree murder. Someone is dead because of him. And my job, as I understand it, was to treat him as a full human being. To ask honest questions. To arrive without a verdict, even though a jury had already delivered one.
Before that, we made Breaking Ranks, where Israeli soldiers described witnessing and taking part in things that have since been cited in a UN commission of inquiry. Some of what those men described is among the worst things I’ve ever heard a person say out loud. And we gave them a fair hearing too. Not a soft one. A fair one.
People sometimes hear “empathy” and think it means being nice. Letting people off. So let me be precise about what I actually mean. Empathy is not sympathy. It’s not agreement. It’s certainly not absolution. It’s the discipline of trying to understand how a human being ended up where they are, without pretending the harm isn’t real. Understanding is not excusing. If anything, the opposite: you cannot honestly hold someone accountable for something you haven’t tried to understand.
And with Breaking Ranks, the empathy was the accountability. Those soldiers didn’t speak to prosecutors. They spoke to us, because they believed they’d be treated fairly. And what they said, because it was given freely and heard properly, ended up in the official record of one of the gravest investigations on earth.
I made a decision a long time ago not to interview in the old Jeremy Paxman way. Or for the Americans reading, the Mike Wallace way. The combative style, the gotcha, treating every interview as a battle to be won. It makes for good television, sometimes. But it gets you nowhere near the truth. Hostility produces defensiveness. Defensiveness produces rehearsed lines and shut doors. And eventually, silence. Nobody has ever revealed who they really are while under attack. They reveal it when they feel heard. That’s not softness. That’s just what actually works.
And you’ll see this approach in action again very soon. We have a new film coming out about what’s been happening in Iran, in which the Zandland team employed exactly this tactic: getting people to speak on record about some of the biggest issues of our day, in a completely new way, built around genuine understanding. I can’t say much more yet. But it’s some of the work we’re proudest of, and it simply would not exist if we’d walked in swinging.
The ideas we kill
All of this shapes what we say yes to, and maybe more revealingly, what we say no to. We get through a lot of ideas at Zandland. Most die. And they tend to die for the same handful of reasons, so here’s a look inside a typical ideas meeting, in the form of the recurring ways I say no:
“That’s a topic, not a person.” The most common death. A film about wealth inequality is a lecture. A millionaire and a homeless man at the same table is a story. If an idea can only be pitched as an issue rather than a name, it isn’t ready, and it usually isn’t ours.
“That story has already finished.” We film life as it unfolds, in the present tense. If the pitch is a retrospective or people describing something that happened years ago, it’s someone else’s film. There has to be a live moment to walk into. We do access, and real life, in the here and now.
“Nobody would ever let us in honestly.” If the only way to get the story is deception, or the access comes with conditions that would make a fair film impossible, we walk. Everything depends on trust, and you can’t build a company on trust while cutting corners to get it.
“We already know what we think.” If an idea arrives with its conclusion attached, a villain pre-selected and a verdict pre-written, it fails the most basic test. The best ideas sit inside a question I genuinely can’t answer. That moral quandry of right and wrong.
“Everyone understands this already.” The gap we look for is between how loudly a world is discussed and how little it’s actually understood. Masculinity, communes, jails, AI companions: maximum noise, minimum understanding. If the understanding already exists, there’s nothing for the film to do.
And then there’s the hardest no, the one this whole newsletter is about: “There’s no version of this where a fair hearing serves the public.” Because there is a line. Some stories are just a platform in disguise, where the access is really an audition and understanding would add nothing the world needs. The test I keep returning to: does understanding this person help us understand something bigger than them? The murderer helped us understand a justice system. The soldiers helped the world understand a war. Adrianne helps us understand a loneliness that tens of millions of people are quietly living. If the answer is no, and it’s just proximity to infamy, we’re out.
That’s the honest picture. The empathy people responded to last week isn’t a tone. It’s a set of decisions, made over and over, about who to sit with, what to ask, when to challenge, and how to treat people after the cameras leave. Sometimes those decisions are easy. Sometimes the film is fair and it still hurts someone you care about, and you sit with that. I don’t have a tidy resolution to it. I’m not sure there is one.
What I do know is that these stories, the quiet, human, unflashy ones, need somewhere to live. That’s what we’re building, and it only works because you keep showing up for them. So thank you.
If you’ve watched our films and ever thought “why did they give that person a platform”, or for that matter “that film was too hard on someone”, I’d genuinely like to hear it. That conversation is the work. Tell me in the comments.
If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. The AI companion film is on our YouTube now if you haven’t seen it.
Thanks for reading.
Ben Z