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The first time I meet people, it's always taped. We have, obviously, a director and producer who have contacted people and pre-interviewed them to see what they're like. But I meet people for the first time on camera. I had a lot of war stories from working on "TV Nation," a lot of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and I always felt like that was the sort of thing that should be going on air. So that's one of the primary impulses behind "Weird Weekends," that there be no "behind-the-scenes."

It seems your subjects tend to be working- or middle-class. Is that by coincidence, or are you making some commentary about class in America?

It's less about class; it's about people on the cultural margins -- who almost by definition are not upper-class. Because people on the cultural margins don't have power. You could say Ted Turner is marginal in the sense that he's kind of eccentric, but he's not really marginal in the broader cultural sense.

I think the reality of it is, the show is about the relationships that form between me and people who are alien to me and my way of thinking. And for that friendship to develop, I think we sort of rely on quite a lot of goodwill from the people I talk to. And it may just be that upper-class people have better things to do than hang out with TV crews and British people. I mean, most of the people we do stories on are pretty excited or flattered to have us there. And so a lot of the goodwill and bonhomie that comes out of the programs, I think, flows from that.

Would a show exploring English subcultures be as interesting?

It would be a lot harder to do. For one thing, I think maybe Americans like British people a bit more than British people like Americans. It sounds harsh to say it, but there's a huge Anglophilia over here, because America's got nothing to fear from Britain, really. America's the most powerful nation on earth and so it has this luxury of being able to not feel threatened by other countries. Whereas Britain, this former empire, is now reduced to inferior second-class status in the world. So British people console themselves with the idea that maybe they're a bit more cultured and sophisticated.

There's a long tradition of programs in Britain that cater to that sense of cultural superiority. And I think some of the people in Britain who watch "Weird Weekends" get a sense of "Oh, those Americans, they're so vulgar and tacky and weird and stupid." I happen to think there's more to the shows than that.

You do walk a tightrope between taking a satirical approach with your subjects and seeming genuinely engaged by them -- and occasionally it seems as if you're about to fall off.

This has been a weird journey for me, because I'm not someone blessed with a tremendous amount of self-knowledge. And I think the first couple of stories I did, I was definitely being faux-naive. I was, what we call in England, taking the piss out of people. I did a story on some neo-Nazis in Montana, and they were talking about the "race war" and different planets the different races were going to go to. And I'd say, "Well, what's the black people's planet going to be like? What sort of facilities will it have?" And I just strung them along for a long time in this way, asking in ludicrous detail about their theology.

After that show, I tried to rein it in. But I'm actually aware now that, when I look at it, I'm capable of being insincere without really realizing it. Which is troubling. Sometimes I think the other people are being faux-naive also, and it's just part of the theme -- people know that I'm doing it, so it's OK. And other times I'm just being sincere. Sometimes the funniest stuff with people is stuff where I just don't get it, and I'm just being normal. You know, if you look at the shows, I'm usually laughing quite a lot. It's really about me being amused by people and them being aware of me being amused, and I suppose both of us being aware of a culture clash. It's not supposed to be satirical. It really is supposed to be about my authentic reaction to people.

There was one particularly tense moment during the show on male porn stars, when you ask a straight porn star if he enjoys being "gay for pay" -- if he actually enjoys the gay sex he's having on-screen -- and it really seems like he might clock you.

A lot of people say that.

It was pretty unsettling to watch.

At that moment I didn't feel like he was about to hit me, quite honestly. And maybe he was -- a lot of people have asked me about it -- and I just wasn't aware of it. But we actually had quite a good rapport going. If you analyze what is happening in the moment, I got slightly irritated with him because he was bragging about how much money he'd made. And I said, "Yeah, but you are going down on guys, right?" He'd told me he was straight. You know, if you're gay, that's absolutely fine, but if you're straight, that seems to me going against your nature, contradictory.

Because my take on him was that actually he was gay, but that he had kind of a homophobic streak and didn't want to admit to being gay. And so when he said, "Yes, unfortunately," I thought, that's unnecessary -- why say "unfortunately," like that? When he said "unfortunately," I felt like he was saying, "You and I both know that we don't like gay people," and he was trying to bond with me over the fact that gays are gross or whatever. So that's basically why I said, "Come on, you enjoyed it," and that was the bit where he flinched.

There's a certain mundane reality revealed beneath a lot of the more extreme behavior you stumble onto, so that by the end of each show, you really feel like you understand how, for instance, a roller-skating, Holocaust-denying survivalist came to be the way he is.

Yeah, it's really true. To me, one of the weirdest things about meeting weird people is how normal they are. I just thought of an analogy this morning: It's kind of like if you saw a naked person wearing a little leather cap -- that little bit of clothing makes them seem even more naked.
salon.com | Oct. 22, 1999

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