2012 was a fantastic year to be a games journalist. There were plenty of amazing games released and as part of the pre-release tours for the majority of those titles many starstruck journalists, including myself, were fortunate enough to meet lots of interesting producers, directors, designers and voice talent. Interviewing such individuals is undoubtedly a perk of the job, but sometimes the nature of press tours puts a lot of pressure on the talent themselves.

Usually whoever is deemed important enough to be considered the voice of a game is sat in a room for hours on end with multiple journalists wheeled in and out every 15 or so minutes; some will be filming, others will be just recording, but whatever is said during these sessions is pondered over, played with and edited to produce the most interesting piece of editorial for readers, viewers or listeners.

That’s why sometimes odd comments, behaviour and footage can arise from these sessions as people are put in an artificial environment which can cause unpredictable and occasionally bizarre results – case in point Quentin Tarantino’s recent outburst with Channel 4’s (or more appropriately ITN’s) Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

As much as people are now condemning Quentin Tarantino for what is a ludicrous response to a perfectly reasonable question, I can’t help but feel as though the critics are not getting the real picture. For games, journalists usually get around 15 minutes to interview somebody for an article, for films you’ll be lucky to get 5 minutes. During that slender amount of time there’s no chance of the interviewee and the interviewer building up a rapport, so instead you get this bizarre stand-off where the interviewer knows that he needs to cut through the marketing hype to get that killer quote which can be spun out into a news story, whereas the interviewee just wants to answer the questions thrown at him or her in the least controversial way possible while churning out some positive buzz words about the entertainment product they’re talking about.

The complete unedited footage of this interview portrays the to-and-fro of that battle perfectly with Krishnan professing that he’s doing this interview for a “serious news show” where as Quentin extols that the chat is only to “advertise the movie’. This is the media world we live in, with independent news outlets, even the big boys like ITN and the BBC, only being granted access to popular figures when it’s convenient to the entertainment companies who control the talent’s time.

Tarantino doesn’t want to be there, hell 98.9% of people interviewed don’t want to be talking to who they’re talking to, but they need to sell their product for the benefit of their distributor, publisher or production company and occasionally people just snap when they’re pushed in these scenarios. Was the maker of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill right to “shut” Krishnan’s “butt down”? Probably not, but knowing the situation Quentin was put in I can’t help but feel a bit sorry him – after all he didn’t stomp out and he answered the next question put to him.

When it comes to pressure from the media everybody breaks, the only question is what PSI you can tolerate before doing or saying something a bit silly.