'The Listeners' | Deadline Studio at TIFF 2024 - video Dailymotion

Deadline

Connect with Deadline online! https://www.facebook.com/deadline/ https://twitter.com/DEADLINE https://www.instagram.com/deadline/

Transcript

00:00I'm Janicza Bravo. I'm the director of The Listeners. The Listeners is a show

00:17that follows Claire. It's played by Rebecca Hall. She's a woman that hears a

00:23sound that seemingly no one else can hear. She's a schoolteacher and one of

00:28her students also hears the sound. And the show follows their journey as they

00:33get close when they shouldn't. And it's about how their lives unravel after

00:40after this little seed kind of infects their lives. My first interaction

00:47with Jordan was, well, I saw him on the street and his legs were out and I

00:51really liked his legs. And I was really impressed because it was so cold and I

00:55couldn't believe his legs were out. That was our first interaction. And then our

00:59second, a real proper introduction, was me meeting his work. I'd been sent the

01:04pilot for The Listeners as well as a series overview and an outline for the

01:10second episode. My manager, Kevin Rowe, had sort of forced it in front of me and

01:14I'm really grateful. And I read it. I immediately fell in love with it. And I

01:19think what turned me on most about it was that it felt a bit different. It felt

01:25sort of left of where I was going. And it also worried me a little. And so after I

01:33read it, I then seeked out the novel. I read the novel and then we met soon

01:37after. And I was his first choice. I don't know that I was everyone's first choice

01:42but I was his. I think it's very hard to put yourself first often, especially if

01:50you're a mother and a wife and all these things that she is. And she's also

01:55a teacher. And so she's doing a lot of caretaking I suppose. But that's not, I

02:00think the thing that appealed to me actually, this sounds completely sort of

02:04counterintuitive, was her sort of normalcy in a weird way. Like it appealed

02:11to me that she felt like a kind of a person that any of us could relate to

02:17who has a, you know, a normal job and a normal family and everything. We know

02:21normal, whatever. But it sort of, it looks like a lot of people that we know and

02:27there's nothing out of the ordinary about the situation. And yet, and a tiny

02:30thing happens that means that even the most like 2.4 iteration of being a human

02:36can, is actually crazy and adjacent to chaos at all times. And like that was

02:43fascinating to me and I think held so many like metaphors for how we live and

02:50how reality is constructed without wanting to sound completely

02:54kooky doodle philosophical. But it is, right? It's like, you know, we all

02:59think reality is absolute and this is a show about like how we come to believe

03:05that and like what belief is therefore. For me, I was really intrigued by the

03:11nature of belief, why people believe what they believe and who we choose to

03:14believe or not. And that's about faith, that's about the conditions of our body,

03:20you know, symptoms, particularly those of women and female experiences are often

03:25so dismissed through history and to this day. So I was interested in what,

03:32you know, how belief is also created within a group. I think there are

03:40elements or I guess questions around the nature of conspiracy culture, even mania

03:47and sort of, I think those things are really appealed to me, I think, in the

03:51writing of the piece. But ultimately Claire and her journey is what really

03:56guides us through. And so I think as Rebecca is talking about what attracts

04:00her to the role, I think yes, this is, you know, ultimately Claire's story and that's

04:03what I had the most pleasure in writing, was really just getting into her

04:08psychology and walking with her step-by-step as she descends into this

04:12kind of, into this other world.

04:14I imagine that for each of us what it was or how it sounded was different.

04:20The thing that I found myself sort of drawn to was that I didn't want to be

04:27able to name the sound. There are sounds rattling around us all day, all the time,

04:32and I knew that whatever it was, wherever we landed, one, I think it's a multitude, I

04:37don't believe it to be one thing, but I also knew that regardless of where we

04:41landed, it wasn't going to be something I could name. And I think I imagined it was

04:47something that lived at like the deepest core of the earth, which I think I got

04:51that from Jordan's writing, or at least that's what led me there. And, you know,

04:56before Rebecca was like in our marriage, I do feel we are in marriage and in

05:02family, and before that I'd had this idea that our experience of the sound would

05:07be something that would be subdued because I wanted to mirror what her world

05:12was doing, which is invalidating her experience. But her performance, I think

05:16one of the big lessons of this job is very much about being present and in the

05:22moment and allowing what's right in front of you to sort of like actually influence

05:28the idea. You can do all the homework and show up very prepared, but if there is

05:33some like magic or spark right in front of you to actually follow that, like follow

05:36the thing that sort of makes you nervous or a little bit scared. And so I had

05:41thought it would be great to not hear the sound even though she hears it. I mean to

05:44invalidate her, but her performance, to me, I wanted to get under her skin so

05:51badly. I wanted to be really close to her. I wanted to be on top of her. I recognize

05:54that if you pull that sentence, that sounds terrible. I wanted to be on top of

05:57Rebecca Hall. I just wanted to be very, I wanted to be like close and deep and

06:08I'm not helping myself. And I just think that the performance that she delivers

06:14is so raw and so vulnerable that it sort of like undid the thing that we had

06:20intellectually all sort of landed at. And then we just, we went with her. We allowed

06:24her to guide us.

'The Listeners' | Deadline Studio at TIFF 2024

Category

Transcript

Recommended