One Direction: Harry Styles and Niall Horan Interview

By: Lynn Barker

Cute as ever and casual, the “Fab Five” who have taken the world’s tweens and teens by storm, showed up in New York to talk about their new album, new film and lives since launching high and wide on a musical popularity rocket to stardom!

We noted that they are as “real” and “normal” as ever, still loving their moms’ home-cooked meals and being concerned about getting too raunchy on Twitter. What do they most enjoy doing when not working? Do the guys feel like other people are running their lives?

Check out these answers and much more. Let’s set the scene. Here come Harry and Niall to sit in front of a room full of reporters.

The guys: Hello! Wazzup? Who said I looked like I should be smelly? (laughter). Would anybody like a cookie? Hello everyone. I’m Niall and this is my club.

Q: Heavy question right off the bat. Do you realize the responsibility you have to your young fans?

• Niall: (to Harry) I love a challenge but do you want to take that one?

• Harry: I think we try just as hard as we can to just be ourselves. I think that is important especially with the way the world is at the moment. There are so many things telling people to be other than themselves. We try to be who we are while not being stupid.

• Like on social media when you are like tweeting stuff, you don’t rewrite a tweet ten times because you’re worried but you don’t put stupid stuff on especially if your audience is young and impressionable.

Q: You have fans of all ages. Got any quirky, crazy mom fan stories?

• Niall: One time about a year ago some woman came and gave me her number. Sometimes they are worse. You’ll be at concert and both the mom and daughter will (gesture to you).

Q: Would you guys do a more “acoustic” album (without the electric instrument back up)?

• Niall: I think so. It’s always fun to try different things and we haven’t done one yet. It’s fun to just sit around and play songs.

• Harry: Yeah. That’s more what we do actually. In our free time we sit around and I play guitar and we jam like that but the album that we’re making at the moment is a bit edgier.

• Niall: I’m doin’ rap with The Game but this time it’s a lot heavier with drums and all, the old school rock and roll. That’s the kind of music we all listen to.

Q: What do you guys look forward to doing in your downtime?

• Harry: I think the best part of having time off is you don’t have to set an alarm, like whenever I go home to my parents’ house, I usually fall asleep on the sofa for three hours. It’s just nice to go home and do the really normal things that you didn’t appreciate as much before, little sitting and havin’ a meal with your family is so nice. You behave for your parents and do all of your homework (laughs).

• Niall: Yes. I teach you everything you know.  I like to just do as many normal things as I can. That’s how we keep each other “normal”. I like to go to gigs and concerts and stuff. Just hangin’ out with friends and jammin’ on the guitar. I’ve recently started teaching myself how to play the drums so I have a drum kit now in me house and I wake up the neighbors and they’re not very happy (He drums on the desk). I’m really good at it.

Q: What was the best part about getting to film your own movie?

• Harry: I think when it was finished. It wasn’t a massive stressor or anything, not something you thought about every day because the whole point of the film was to just have a normal day while the cameras were there rather than do a lot of stuff for the camera. When it was done, it was exciting to just see the next step. That was the fun bit.

• Niall: Yeah. It’s kind of like makin’ an album. We’ve just finished our album and it’s not comin’ out for another few months (around Christmas time) and you want people to hear it but, at the same time, you’re nervous. That’s kind of what it was like with the movie. We finished shootin’ it in Mexico I think it was with paparazzi all around. Now we just can’t wait for people to see it….with 3D glasses and popcorn, cuz I love popcorn!

Q: How much creative input did you have on the final cut?

• Niall: A lot because the producer of the movie Ben Winston is one of our very close friends and we worked with him on a lot of things. He just did “The Best Song Ever” video, he did our “One Way or Another” video with us, the one for Africa. He did a documentary that we did in the U.K. and, obviously, when Morgan (Spurlock, the director) came in, we all collaborated together.

• We’ve seen like 10 cuts of the movie coming up to now so it was good to see everything come together. We didn’t really want to have too much creative input. The only way to make the best behind-the-scenes documentary is to give them all access to all areas and if you’re worried about what people are shootin’ then it’s not gonna be a good movie. Just be as normal as possible and hope they are good in the edit (room).

Q: Now that you guys are so super popular, are there more people trying to tell you what to do?

• Harry: I think the nice thing now is that even though three years is not a long amount of time, we kind of feel like we now know what band we are. So, there are less things going into it like “How do we want to do this? How do we wanna to that?” because it is like who we are now and it’s kind of….

• Niall: Fluid. It flows.

• Harry: Yeah and easier but we have an incredible team around us who help us make a lot of decisions and it seems to be a good team so far.

• Niall: And, if we’re wrong, we get told and that’s a good thing. You can’t leave lads our age just let loose (laughter). We have to be brought back in sometimes.

One Direction This is Us is in theathers August 30^th!

Read the interview with Liam, Zayn and Louis!