In her documentary about the groundbreaking Deaf actor Marlee Matlin, director Shoshannah Stern realized that sound was everything. “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” is an intimate account of the performer and activist’s triumphs and struggles, which include her 1987 Oscar win as lead actress in “Children of a Lesser God,” a first for a Deaf actor. (She also holds the record for youngest person to win in the category, at 21.) Approaching the project as a Deaf actor herself, Stern found innovative ways to help viewers connect with Matlin’s perception of the sound around her.
“Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, this is a celebrity doc, very traditional.’ But then slowly the film does shift,” Stern says via her interpreter, Karri Aiken, on a recent video call. “You’re realizing that you do see things more from Marlee’s perspective.”
Most obviously, Stern presents her conversations with Matlin — the women curled up opposite each other on a cozy sofa — entirely in American Sign Language, using captions rather than a verbal interpreter or voice-over, which allowed for more accurate translation. “Sometimes, interpreters don’t get everything right in the moment,” Stern says. The soundtrack captures the subtle smack of lips moving and the flutter of expressive hands moving through air, as well as extraneous sound like the hum of a jet passing overhead. On a routine set, the interview would pause during the distraction. But Stern felt no need. “I wanted this to be an immersive experience for audience members.”
That thought also applied to the design and use of captions throughout the film, which begins with witty wordplay during the title sequence.
“For a long time, captions have been made by hearing people,” says Stern, who collaborated with d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel, whose 2023 documentary “The Tuba Thieves” reimagined closed captioning as a descriptive playground. “People always feel like it’s a burden to add captions … [but] it’s a place where you can enhance a film.” The creativity underscores Matlin’s advocacy before Congress, whose passage of the 1990 Television Decoder Circuitry Act mandated closed-captioning technology for televisions sold in the United States.
Among other details, the captions can pop up anywhere in the frame and are even coded to fit the personality of the person speaking. “We were trying to use certain colors to meet peoples’ aura,” Stern says.
To plunge viewers into Matlin’s world, the filmmaker worked closely with sound designer Bonnie Wild to illustrate the often confusing sonic free-for-all that Deaf people can experience through hearing aids (which both Matlin and Stern use). The scene is a family dinner in which ordinary household noises — the scrapes, plunks and clatter — and speech are pitched at irregular volumes and lack directional focus. At one point, Matlin’s brother Marc takes a moment to interpret a discussion she struggles to piece together.
“As hearing-aid users we can ‘read lips,’ but because we ‘read lips,’ people assume that I understand everything that’s being said,” Stern explains. “Really, there’s a huge amount of work on our end to catch one word. I’m like: noise, noise, noise, oh, word. I can catch one word, but then I have to figure out what were the noises that I missed, and then try to put them all together.”
Wild, who works as a supervising sound editor at Skywalker Sound, borrowed a hearing aid from the mother of a friend to get an idea. “I was taken aback by how the high end is so boosted,” she says. “Things don’t have the same depth of field. When my friend was tying her shoelaces behind me, it was just so loud. Things spatially were being thrown. It was disorienting.” Thanks to a Dolby Creator Lab Grant, Stern was able to work with Wild to shape a purposefully incoherent soundscape, using Dolby Atmos to fling sounds all around.
“A lot of times as a Deaf person in real life, you’re exhausted trying to go to an event like that. Everything becomes so muddy, sound-wise,” Stern says. “A lot of times we give up trying to understand sound. That’s what we tried to portray in that scene.”
Perhaps most resonant was another moment in the film, shot during an interview while the project was still in development. The scene finds Matlin reading a caption from a studio publicity still for “Lesser God.” It alludes to her being “sensually lost in her own silent world.” The camera tracks her reaction. “She’s shocked and then she’s laughing. And she says, ‘It’s not silent in here,’” and she’s pointing to her brain. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, yes,’” says Stern, who knew then that she had her thesis for the film. “I come from the fourth generation of being in a Deaf family and our Deaf family is so loud always.”
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