About
How this started.
The idea for CAN WE SEE? has been alive for over a year. It started as a list. Then it became questions. Then it became a name. Then it became a project too big to keep ignoring.
Most interviews show the polished version of someone. The press answers, the rehearsed lines, the part of them that has been on tape before. The version that exists for an audience.
What I am interested in is the version underneath that. The thinking out loud. The small obsessions. The contradictions someone has not reconciled yet. The work behind the work.
So this is a project to find people who are good at something, and to spend the time it takes to see them properly. To ask the questions nobody else asks. To watch them in their own world rather than across a desk.
What we're making
Two formats, one idea.
CAN WE SEE? comes in two formats. The long work is the main series: sit-down interviews with people who have built, mastered, or questioned something worth understanding, filmed inside their own world and released when they are ready.
The field work is Outside: the same kind of question, asked to whoever is walking past, filmed on the street and posted weekly. One is slow and one is fast. Both are trying to get past the version of a person that exists for an audience.
Who's behind it
Two voices, one room.
Simer runs the project from Sydney. Sayeed is the co-host on camera, there to ask the questions she does not, and to slow the conversation down when it needs slowing. The show is two people in conversation with one person at a time.
How we work
A few things we will not do.
We do not publish a clip a guest has not approved. We do not run a thumbnail we would be embarrassed to show them. We do not chase a viral moment at someone's expense. The full list lives on the principles page, and we hold ourselves to it.
Where we are now
Pre-production, in Sydney.
The first interviews are being planned, and Outside starts before the main show, because we wanted to be filming while we figured this out rather than waiting for a perfect beginning.
If you have made it this far, thank you for reading. If you know someone who should be on this, tell us about them.
— Simer