Hollywood veteran Michael Goi tells how to nail a job interview
Identity expands and contracts. Let me try to explain. I’m Jewish. Jewishness can be a lens to view the eternal, to focus on ethics, knowledge, belief, ritual. Or it can be a set of blinders, the way some ultra-Orthodox sects neglect to teach their children math and science. This holds true for all religions, ethnicities, races. They can both widen and narrow.
Take Wednesday’s column. Columbia College pitched veteran director Michael Goi because he’s Asian American and the success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has thrown attention on Asian heritage in Hollywood.
That was one reason I agreed. But only one — the rest is because making movies is interesting work. Goi was a font of razor-sharp professional insight. As it was, Wednesday’s column ran 50% longer than usual. Even so, after turning it in, I realized I’d left out perhaps the two most interesting parts of our talk, because they were off-topic.
First, what Goi said about job interviews. This is relevant because people nowadays move from job to job, interviewing constantly. Goi said something that I have never heard before from anybody in any profession.
“The job interview is my favorite, favorite part of this business,” he said. “If I could get paid to interview
and never have to do the job, I’d be perfectly happy. I always tell people they should embrace the job interview process. The only time that a job is going to be perfect is during the job interview. Because you don’t have to worry about all the stuff you have to worry about if you get the job.”
Don’t try to flatter the interviewer. “People freak themselves out about the job interview and try to read the room and try to predict
what it is they want to hear,” Goi said. “I don’t do any of that. That’s how you convince them that you’re not right for the job. They can tell that you’re lying. They can tell you’re just saying things to make them feel better.”
Rather, the interview is a time to be honest, personal and celebrate yourself.
“What I love about the job interview process is it can be entirely, totally about me and my vision of what I think about this script is about and what I would do if I was hired for this job,” Goi said. “A few times the script inspired me to actually put together a two-minute trailer, based on clips from movies, that says, stylistically, this is how I see this move or show. Other times I’ll pull images off the internet. I actually walk them through their entire script using visual cues on what I think it looks like. More importantly, what it feels like.”
Don’t be reluctant to show your excitement.
“What you want to do is impart what your passion is,” said Goi. “Why are you passionate about a certain subject? In a job interview, the first question is always, ‘So what have you been working on?’ [Applicants] start reciting their resume, which is a complete waste of time. Because they have your resume, already. They don’t need you to tell them what you worked on. You should tell them something that speaks to your personal passion. That’s what makes you an individual worth remembering. I’ve told people I just built a railroad train around my house. I tell people I finally got my magic zig-zag box I’ve always wanted since I was a teenager at Lane Tech High School. Now I can put my assistant in it and cut her into three parts and put her back together again. These are things that make life fun for me. And that’s what I want to impart to people in the job interview. Ultimately, they only hire you for two reasons: because they like you and they trust you. It’s not based on experience. It’s do they like you? And do they trust you? To make that judgment call, they have to know who you are and what excites you.”
Second ... geez, out of space again. And I wanted to get into how, despite Chicago’s pretensions, the film industry is totally L.A.centered. “Everyplace else is a location, including Chicago,” Goi said.
A third column in a row would be overkill. We’ll have to save his remarks, perhaps for some future column in which Chicago’s aspirations toward world-class status will be introduced to verifiable reality.