Re: Interview in boardroom - any advice?

For the head honcho, the aricraft-carrier-sized desk and big window view is a status symbol. They tend to insist on it, unless you can come up with eqwually cool-looking shots. If you have the right tools to keep those in the shot, you should. But a backlit window shot is one of the very hardest things to do right, when you don't have adequate time, tools, or budget.

You already got great and detailed advice, so I'll take another tack with suggestions for what to try if you can't do it the "right" way, but they insist on the window anyhow.

Set up the window shot without the chair and person in it, expose so the view out the window is properly exposed (the interior will look too dark, that's okay) and roll off several minutes of this shot, locked-down. Now, without moving the camera, add the chair and guest, adjust the iris setting to get a good exposure on the talent, and and do your shot. In post, you can composite these two layers and have a great amount of control of the window. You can even add in fake DOF effects. But a huge down-side of this is that it really only works with locked-off shots; shots with camera motion - zooms, pans, tilts, all the tricks that help make a shot "sexy" - you can't do those and keep the composite working, not without a heck of a lot of tracking and rotoscope work. Which you can't afford, or you'd have lit the room with HMI's to begin with.

A variation on this technique would be to shoot an unblocked, straight-on high def still of that window view, then block the window with green paper and expose the room normally. Only composite the window back-in during post. The re-positioning and scaling of the window in this context will be much less challenging than doing that to an entire room.

As far as the DOF issue, boardrooms have to be relatively big or long, so placing the camera at an extreme opposite end and zooming-in should work pretty well, though it restricts your framing and motion a bit. I have done shots in hotel rooms where to get the DOF control I needed, I put the camera and tripod way out in the hall, and zoomed in thru the open doorway. The audience will never know.