Press The Meat

Today I had my first experience of being on a press junket. Because the Polish distributor got word that a member of the WALL-E crew would be in town, I was asked to give interviews about the film. Disney publicity liked this idea, and thus it came to pass. Fortunately, most of the questions were about what a great company Pixar is and what the job of a Technical Director entails. I knew how to answer those questions quite well.

Unfortunately, once the interviews are edited and translated, who knows what the Polish people will think I said -- but I guess that is the nature of interviews, especially for foreign-language press. You do your best in the room with the journalists, and hope that they are respectful and responsible with your words when they start editing.

It is a bit of an odd feeling knowing that in a few days millions of people will believe I said something which may or may not resemble what I actually said. The feeling is somewhat similar to when I wrote a few articles for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which were translated into German before publication, except that in that case I had a written record of what I had given the FAZ. In this case, I have no recourse but to trust the journalists (and they were all very nice folks) to do right by my words.

Despite being fairly exhausting, it was much more enjoyable than I had expected. Perhaps it wouldn't have been at all enjoyable if I had been discussing with fellow native English speakers anything more controversial than my experiences working on the latest film from the world's most beloved animation studio. By that measure, I suppose I couldn't have asked for a better first major press experience.