James Lipton is more than than just a TV personality. The actor, director, producer, choreographer, playwright and founder of the Actor’s Studio Drama School is also the author of the novel Mirrors (which he adapted for TV) and the nonfiction book An Exaltation of Larks.
In mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? interview, Lipton spoke about how he prepares his questions for each episode of his popular Bravo show Inside the Actor’s Studio and explained why he doesn’t believe in pre-interviews.
“Nothing is handed to me. I get raw material from my researcher… and then I watch all the movies, read everything that the person has written about himself or herself, and I go through all the articles that have been written about them, and from that I distill the blue cards, which are approximately 300-500 [cards] for each person,” he told Amanda Ernst.
“And then they come to me and they’re on stage with me for three and a half to four hours, up to five or six hours, because it’s a class. The students would stay all night. I literally threw [the casts of] Mad Men and Glee out of there in the middle of the night.”
To find out which actor just wouldn’t stop crying during his Inside taping, read the full interview here.