David Shields has given hundreds of interviews to promote his 22 books on everything from race to sports to sex to J.D. Salinger to Donald Trump. He's kept a record of every question, and uses those questions in the literary collage of his 23rd book, The Very Last Interview.

Director Nick Toti and screenwriter Rachel Kempf (who are married) set out to turn the book into a movie, and succeeded. "The Very Last Interview" arrived late last year, and is set around Christmas — though the book has nothing to do with the holidays. It's a daring, challenging adaptation, in which Shields endures probing-to-cruel questions that also serve as a searing monologue.

The film questions the motivations of Shields (played by Chris Doubek) and his interviewer (Ashley Spillers), and in this talk we examine the "perverse dialectic" between interviewers and interviewees.

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