The conversation happens in whichever language lets you think without translating first.
Émile grew up speaking French, learned German early in his journalism career, and has now spent eight years working in English. That's not a trivia point — it changes what's possible in an interview. Researchers who study bilingualism have long noted that people often reach for more precise, more emotionally direct language in whichever tongue they learned first, and reach for safer, more general phrasing in a second or third language, especially under any kind of pressure. A recorder and a stranger asking questions already puts pressure on a conversation. Removing the extra step of translating your own feelings tends to remove a layer of that pressure too.
You choose the language when you book, and it's fine to switch mid-conversation if a word or a memory only makes sense in another one — that happens often, and it's usually the best part of the recording, not a problem to edit around. On request, the finished piece can carry subtitles in the original language plus English, so the conversation stays legible to a wider audience without losing the way you actually said it.
If your first language is something other than English, German or French, mention it during the free consultation — it isn't automatically a no, and Émile can usually work out whether an interpreter or a bilingual approach makes sense for your story.
This matters just as much for media and brand projects as it does for personal interviews. A campaign aimed at a German or French-speaking audience lands very differently when the person on screen is actually thinking in that language, rather than performing a translated script — so language choice is worth raising early in any collaboration brief, not treated as an afterthought in editing.