Thank you for the replies people. As I'm interviewing musicians I'm at a lot of different venues, so I can have anywhere from 1 - 3/4 metres in distance away from the interviewee. So I need a lens that can handle tight spaces and look great with more room too. Is the 25mm not any good? How far away would you need to be from the subject with an 85mm?

The Appropriate focal length and distance should become instinctive. It's often a good exercise with media students to try to reproduce the shot sizes from footage of the same genre. Choose something fairly true to the medium and it's likely to have the right look. If your own talent and theme are something similar, just reverse-engineer somebody else's interview (Hey, there's no copyright on camera angles, go ahead!) Here's a fair -to-middling setup to copy if you ever need to interview a President ;-)

So it seems your 50mm is too long. Thus stick a Lens Turbo on your 50mm, and if that doesn't give you enough width get a Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8

@IS2

Sounds like you might have to think on your feet. You'll probably do best with a tight-range zoom in those circumstances. Then you can concentrate on everything else. Also, the music interview genre certainly allows for a judicious zooming - in on the face, say when the talent has a tough question to answer!

Strangely, an 85mm equivalent focal length can come into its own in a noisy environment: you place yourself further from the talent, and although they're wearing a perfectly good lavalier mic a few inches from their face - and there might be a shotgun mic nearby, the talent will naturally tend to project their voice across the room to you - guaranteeing good sound levels, if at the expense of intimacy you'd get closer .

Setting up for interviews itself - before the interviewer and talent arrive - has never been more affordable either: as students we used foam heads on sticks (much more tolerant than live stand-in people). Now there are cheap, realistic, life-sized busts. (try googling images for "foam mannequin bust")

Foam (jewellery) mannequin busts are better than plain (wig) heads because they have shoulders - for when you need to keep the interviewer's shoulders out of a shot of the talent. Mannequin wigs are cheap, too. Very important for sight-lines with long-haired subjects.

Few cents here. Distortion, lens choices and position relative to the subject should be based on what kind of footage you want in a given situation, not on "how it´s done on telly" or standard movie dialogue shot. There is no neutral (not really, though you can of course decide on either of the above), only different choices. You can make the subject look fat / skinny / wierd / cool / grotesque / sickly / beautiful / serious / fun depending on your framing / angle / distance from subject / lens choice and lighting (positioning). Obviously there are practical boundaries in there as well and going back to the OP - Don´t be afraid of the wide angle, a 17,5 or 20 - 25 can easily be put to good use at relatively close distances from the subject and you can have the subject look in, what I´d guess would be useful ways, for a nightclub interview situation. For a shot with minimal background you need to go longer, obviously.

You´ll want a lens that is very sharp at around f2-2.8 and I doubt you´ll want to go faster than that in any situation (very shallow DOF is difficult to master in any situation, nevermind a dark nightclub). I´d consider c/y zeiss 25mm f2.8 or 28 f2 (f2.8 if on a budget) coupled with a good adapter and a speedbooster for choice. I guess this would be more expensive than a panny-leica however you get a 2-in-1 lens with the speedbooster. If that´s not economically viable I´d go for a 20mm panny pancake.

@Rambo Was opening interview shot auto or manual focus with Panny 20 mm?

I have 45mm Olympus and 20 mm pancake. The interview length would be one hour, sit and talk. I plan to use 45 mm with etc ( 90mm ) for thru shoulder shot ( That would be my shoulder face to interviewer), and 20 mm angle setting like your opening. All of your inputs for this setting would be appreciated.

@goanna

All I want to do is to encourage people to think actively about their choices behind the camera. We see "properly made" interviews every day - the aesthetic is in your backbone already if you have an aesthetic backbone. Although it of course pays to know how to do all the basic stuff, it can pay even more to realize that something could be done in another way for a "better" end result.

Though, it´s certainly not the easy way.

I'll say...as I'm slowly going to remove myself from this board, that one thing I've learned....is that everything is subjective. If you like and and your clients likes it....well....then that's good enough. Peace guys and keep it in focus.

P.S. @Rambo Keep the good work sir. You've always been an inspiration ad motivator.

Idea: I can see how a skater dolly could be useful with a DSLR in an interview setup, thanks to its ability to roll in a curve (wheels adjusted to transcribe a wide arc with the interviewee at its centre). Any time the interviewee's movement invites a wider view - or the interviewer might have accidentally obscured them, the camera op could lightly roll the dolly through a few degrees of rotation, pulling back if needed, confident that the talent would stay in frame.

I imagine myself trying to build a huge curved tabletop! There must be a hassle-free alternative. Has anybody tried a skater dolly in this way? I'll try a few shots with a big table tomorrow,

@goanna Example of use in interview: http://vimeo.com/m/34852494

I use the same combo as Vic for interviews with a C300 and with my GH3 (room permitting). I like the way the 85mm renders the human face for close-ups and switch between 35mm and 50mm for wides depending on the room and how wide I want the 2nd angle. I use lavs so having a boom in the wide isn't an issue for my style.

I have found TV hosts will always complain at the results of using 35mm and below for closeups as it is not kind to their features and we all know how looks obsessed TV hosts are. They are their own biggest critics and its my job to make them look good.

I have fallen in love with the Nikon-M43 speedbooster from metabones as now my lenses have the same FOV I'm used to between the C300 and GH3.

Haha.. my subjects are usually not too concerned about how they look, they're usually sunburnt sweaty, covered in sea salt, snotty nosed and wind blown. No matter what lens it's shot with, if the client is not happy with the content, you're in trouble. I guess the difference between run and gun on the fly event coverage and preplanned studio interviews is the time factor in setting up, apples and oranges, some of us live in different worlds, there's many uses for a camera, I for one would be lost in a studio.