Stina Meets…. The Stockholm Bulletin’s Christine Demsteader turns the tables on Sweden’s star interviewer. “I’m the only journalist in Sweden who is not a workaholic,” says Stina Lundberg Dabrowski. But when she adds that she has spent hours pondering the word order of one single question and years chasing a top name interview, you are left wondering if that’s really true. “I envy you,” she tells me. “I am much more comfortable on the other side.” I am sitting where world leaders, Hollywood greats, pop icons and political giants have sat before. The list reads like an eclectic celebrity wedding list. Nelson Mandela, Hilary Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Tariq Aziz have all come face to face with Stina. And those are just to name a few. She has quizzed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on the virtues of love, played football with Maradona and talked girls stuff with Madonna. Over the past 20 years, she has brought these international faces to Swedish television screens, through her popular programmes and has dared to go where others have feared to tread. Or jump perhaps, a well-remembered gimmick in her early interviews, asking the guest to leap in the air, as the camera froze for a final shot. She recalls putting the request to Margaret Thatcher. “I don’t make little jumps in studios, I make big leaps in life,” was Thatcher’s quick-witted response. The former British Prime Minister left the biggest impression on Stina. “She was a very strong woman but in a pretty fragile woman’s body. But she was so tough, I have never sweated so much in my life as I did in that interview.” As for the jump, that has taken a nose-dive these days. “ I don’t do it anymore, but I miss it because it was very funny. Every time I do an interview now I can’t help thinking, I wonder if you would have jumped.” Mikhail Gorbachev did. Stina contemplates long and hard over her answers to my questions. The conversation flows easily and, from a relative novice to an experienced professional, I have a lot of questions to ask. “I’ve never talked so much in my life,” she confesses. At the turn of her teens Stina decided journalism was the profession for her. Her reasoning was simple. “Because I am so curious and want to find out everything about people,” she once wrote. She studied journalism in Stockholm and got her first break as a reporter for Swedish Radio. At the age of 32, rather a late-starter she admits, Stina entered the world of television. She took the art of freelancing and made it a permanent position during the years she was bringing up her four children. “For me the family was priority,” she says. Now she is a doting grandmother to four - a role which she describes as “better than taking drugs.” In 1993 she set up her own company, Stina Productions and has continued to interview the influential and to make thought-provoking programmes. In 2001, ‘Stina on Colombia’ was broadcast. Living with the FARC guerrilla, she interviewed kidnapped victims, President Pastrana and ex-guerrilla fighters for a unique documentary. This was followed by a portrait of family members of the KuKluxKlan as well as meeting a gay couple fostering five HIV positive children in America. One person continues to elude Stina. “I have tried to get an interview with Fidel Castro for 15 years. I went to Havana. I lived there. I learnt Spanish. I’ve spent a fortune. And I will probably never get to interview him but that’s the way to do it.” She won’t give up on Castro. “Not until he or I die,” she says despite the fact that the glitz of television is not proving lucrative these days. “It’s in such a crisis and has so little money right now that if I make a programme I almost have to pay for it myself.” Consequently, Stina has started to branch out and her sideline is speeches on the art of interviewing. At the receiving end of her advice are the masses of Stockholm’s media students. “They want me to teach them the tricks and I disappoint them. I tell them it’s only hard work, very hard work.” “I try to find out everything that is possible about the person. I read books, I talk to people and I investigate everything. I spend just as much time doing research as I do thinking. Walking and thinking, lying in my bed and thinking. “People seem to think that doing an interview is just about being nice. There is very little glamour, if any, but I love that kind of work so I don’t complain.” I imagine there is a wealth of stories, anecdotes and funny tales for each and every person she has interviewed. She tells about the time her tape recorder died a slow death – a true life nightmare when she met Ingemar Bergman. And she recalls waiting anxiously for days to meet Colonel Ghadafi and of being woken in the early hours and being flown to meet him in the middle of the desert – in his private jet. You could listen for hours. Right now, Stina says she is overloaded with work. “ I don’t like being too busy. I’m not very feminine in the way that women are supposed to be able to do many things at the same time.” Perhaps she would rather be in her green-fingered haven. “I like gardening. It sounds very boring. When I was young and I saw people raking leaves, it conjured up an image of the total meaningless of life for me. What’s the point of that? You do it and then more leaves come down.” It’s a tough life whether you’re a gardener or an award-winning journalist. “Interviewing is always hard. The people you have to struggle with often turn out very good. When you’re having a nice time an interview usually turns out pretty uninteresting so it’s good for you to sweat a bit. When you don’t come up against any resistance you don’t do your best because you are too relaxed.” I was just beginning to enjoy myself when I felt a hot flush sensation. And so to my grand finale. “So if Stina met Stina what would she ask her?” “I never reveal that.” Hmmm. Maybe I should put a few more hours of work into my questions. © 2006, Swedish Bulletin. All rights reserved