“I Think We Forget That The Sound Of Silence Is Still Sound”: Oliver Hermanus On His Subtle Queer Romance, The History of Sound.

Arriving in UK cinema screens on Friday 23rd January, Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, sees a deep love affair set against the backwoods of rural Maine. It promises to pull at your heartstrings.

Put to one side the intimate embrace of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in black and white poster close-ups, and you’ll come to find that their latest immersion in queer romance cinema of tragic proportions is by no means your average love story. So long, All of Us Strangers.

Navigating rural New England in the early 1900s, the slowly unfolding journey of The History of Sound’s two protagonists intersects with histories of displacement and erasure. As young, talented music student, Lionel Worthing, Mescal finds his first great love through a chance meeting at the Boston Conservatory. He instantly bonds over a deep love of folk music with O’Connor’s David White, leading to a quest, of sorts, visiting Malaga Island with a mission to collect and preserve, on wax cylinders using a phonograph, the folk songs of a community facing eviction.

South African filmmaker and writer Oliver Hermanus, who grew up under the repressive regime of Apartheid, is at the helm of this sensitive adaptation, based on source material from American writer Ben Shattuck. It is inevitable, then, that he brings a distinctly individual moral gravitas to behind-the-camera operations, ensuring the needle points to truth rather than rose-tint.

Anchored by restrained performances, the film challenges the sweep of conventional romantic dramas. But Hermanus is attentive to the universality that comes with the weight of pushing forward a project carrying the histories of love, loss, and survival across generations. “I think that for a lot of people, we have those sliding door moments,” he says. “We wonder about people in our past, and we wonder what life would be like if we had stuck with them, or if we did something differently, if we didn’t behave that way. I think that’s still something that galvanises people’s interest.”

Hermanus, whose previous work includes the Queer Palm Award-winning Beauty, and 2022’s Living, starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood, has long been drawn to themes of interiority and emotional restraint of one’s authenticity. Though The History of Sound does more than simply redefine queer representation.

In conversation with Man About Town, Hermanus opens up about the challenges of making a period drama, the experience of collaborating with two Hollywood heartthrobs, and the power of film preservation.

You’ve previously spoken about the financial difficulties that came with making a “quiet film” like The History of Sound. What did this struggle reveal to you about where the industry currently stands with period dramas of this nature?

I think that’s just the nature of where we are, in terms of the metrics and the marketing and the numbers out there that reflect what people are going to watch. The fear that finances and equity, finances and studios, have about purely dramatic films these days. There’s a concern that people don’t go to the movies for these kinds of films anymore, that they’re sort of being sucked up by limited series. There’s the great fear of the death of the dramatic film at a certain scale. It obviously becomes more complicated when your film is set during a particular period, because that immediately makes movies more expensive. The real want and hope of The History of Sound was for us to make a film that we’ve kind of grown up with in the late 90s and 2000s, which were these slightly sweeping, dramatic films set in landscapes and felt sort of luxurious in some sense. That was really a big challenge, and we made this film for, more or less, the exact amount of money they made Brokeback Mountain for 20 years before.

There’s a sense that this film almost didn’t happen, from a logistical standpoint.

One of the big challenges in the beginning was that Paul and Josh, they had become very, very famous. It was about finding the time for all of us to just be able to make the film. I was doing something in England, and eventually, with the three of us through a text exchange, we’re just like, “Okay, if we’re doing it in the beginning of 2024, everything’s clear, we’ll make it happen.” It was perfectly planned, we’re gonna shoot the movie in New Jersey, and then the actors’ strike happened in late 2023. Paul was still shooting Gladiator II, and he was still enormous, so he was maintaining his weight for the whole of the strike. Not knowing when the strike would end, and it was getting closer and closer and closer to the end of ‘23 and we were like, “Well, we’re going to miss the window to make this movie,” and we literally just made it. I think he finished Gladiator in, like, early January. He had about four or five weeks to lose a lot of weight and then start shooting this film.

You mention wanting to make a film in the vein of sweeping, decades-long dramas. I can imagine it being tough to not romanticise the past when you are creating a period romance, especially in a wartime setting and one where, historically, an interracial community was forcibly evicted.

People lean into romantic films, romantic stories, because they’re seeking out some kind of comfort, some kind of encouragement, some kind of hope and dream. I mean, I think the reason why the world is going crazy for a show like Heated Rivalry right now is because it’s connecting with people’s desire to certain communities, desire to fall in love and to have some deep sense of romance. I think that’s still a very, very powerful and compelling genre of storytelling. The History of Sound, for me, was always a film that wanted to celebrate these movies from the past, which were about the slight sense of what could have been and the impossibility of certain things. I didn’t want it to be a film where the impossibility was more so about the fact that they were two men, and that this time and place would not allow that to be the reality for them. The film does not concern itself with that.

The film concerns itself, quite specifically, with the fact that they’re just not giving each other the time and space because they are distracted by things. David is very much about moving on, and we know that he’s got other things going on in his life. So the impossibility isn’t fear. The impossibility is just that these are two young people who assume that more things will come in their lives. It takes Lionel the majority, or the rest, of his life to really realise that there was a moment, as he says, where if he had stayed or if he had done this thing, that his entire life would be different, and that might have been the life he preferred. But you’ll never know, and so he has to find the joy, and the happiness, and acceptance of the life that he’s lived.

You’ve also previously said that you don’t necessarily view Lionel and David as “exclusively queer or repressed” characters. How do you respond to today’s audience expectations influencing how queer love stories are told, and who is allowed to tell them?

The world is such a complicated place today, I still think probably the vast majority of queer people are living in situations and countries and environments where they have gone very unsafe and they don’t feel any sense of liberation. I’m still very aware that, as a storyteller, I have some responsibility to provide or offer something that is encouraging, that is positive and heartfelt. I’ve made previous films about the experience of queer characters. [Beauty] is about an incredibly repressed man who resorts to violence, and [Moffie] is a coming out story set during the worst time, during the apartheid regime. My interest in those stories was always trying to demonstrate people’s, well, triumph in some sense, not so much in the first one. It’s more so the impact of repression, and the danger if you don’t live an authentic life, even though you’re very scared.

The History of Sound is, essentially, the third film I’ve already made about some context of relationships between same sex people. It is the fact that it has the full potential to be as dynamic and complicated and messy as we’ve assumed that heterosexual love stories can be. They don’t have these kinds of problems that queer people have to face about coming out, or being accepted or rejected, or never knowing if the person they desire desires them. We’ve seen a lot of work about that, and I wanted to make a piece of work for a queer audience where it was about, well, what if you meet the love of your life, but you’re just kind of too distracted not to realise it, and that can happen to anyone.

It’s become a point of discussion that early reactions have noted the film’s lack of explicit sex scenes.

A long, long time ago, I was advised that when you finish a film as a director, the film is now separate from you, and the film kind of speaks for itself. You won’t change it, you won’t remake it, it is its own thing, and it exists as its own thing. It’s such a strange process and journey to make a film, especially when you’ve taken years of your life to put it together. There’s something quite liberating about the film kind of existing outside of you finally.

This is the film where I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve received so much incredible personal correspondence from directors who I really admire, who I do not know, I’ve never met. They’ve been so encouraging to me, and congratulatory, and I realised that that’s such an important part of this business. I’m very proud of this one, I think the actors and I made the film that we wanted to make, and we worked our asses off. It’s one of the best filmmaking experiences I’ve had. It’s very hard to explain to the press, I think the press think that filmmakers live by critical reaction.

The History of Sound had this very mixed reaction, and if I was to read any of it, I’d read the good, I’d have to read the bad, I guess. So, I don’t read any of it, but I can’t avoid it if somebody sends me an email, or sends me a text, or calls me and tells me how much they like my film. So in a way, in my experience of The History of Sound, the entire world loves it, because I’m only getting all the positive feedback. I’m very aware that obviously people have different opinions, but that’s what I think is important about cinema. I love that it’s not for everyone, and I’ve made different kinds of things. The things that I’m about to make, I approach the same way, where it has to be from my perspective. Then when it leaves me, it belongs to everyone else.

What was the intention behind the scene with Paul as Lionel, floating naked in a fountain?

The character is kind of acting out, he’s trying to embody something in that moment of, “What would David do?”, I guess. The sensory experience of being in water to shoot a scene like that is an absolute nightmare, with Paul Mescal. We had pretty much controlled this entire square. We had spoken to every single person, every single window, and everyone had closed their shutters very politely, and we felt very safe. But, of course, the paparazzi somehow got into one of them, and there were pictures the next day in the Daily Mail of Paul running in and out of this fountain, which is always very annoying, but, you know, it happens.

In adapting Ben Shattuck’s short story, how did Paul and Josh expand the way you came to see these characters beyond what was on the page?

It’s always interesting when you write a screenplay or you have a screenplay and, in some version of filmmaking, you can do auditions, and you get a sense of actors or actresses embodying the character before you make a film. In a different kind of filmmaking, you hire or offer roles to actors who are successful and famous, and so you never really get a sense of what the character might be until you’re kind of in the process. For me, that often happens when I see them in costume for the first time, and you go like, “Oh, there’s the submersion into the characters.” What I realised in a particular day of fitting was how incredibly tall Josh is, and how incredibly not as tall Paul is. So, it felt like a dynamic emerged in the visual of these two actors suddenly embodying these two men, wearing the costume of these two men. I immediately sensed that I would want to lean into that.

Visually, where Paul and I clocked particular moments where he’s always looking up at Josh, he’s always physically lower than him, and it happens in the very beginning of the film, where he’s actually standing and Josh is sitting. But then when they leave the bar, Josh stands up, and this is the first time Paul kind of looks up to him. It’s sort of a symbolism of Paul’s admiration of Josh as an actor, which is very true. Paul really admires Josh. But there was the sense that this was a way of a detailed dynamic that fit between the two actors, that became helpful to the two characters.

Lionel and David’s wordless goodbye, at Augusta’s defunct train station, is my favourite moment in the film. It relies on incredibly subtle physical gestures, David’s trembling hands are a devastating image. Of course, music is a key component to The History of Sound. Concerning the slow passage of time, how did silence function for you?

I think we forget that the sound of silence is still sound, and we’re never really in a space where we don’t hear anything. If you have a movie that has “sound” in the title, there is some kind of pressure to have an attitude towards sound, or to have some kind of technical or stylistic approach to it. Music is the other character in the film, what we’re witnessing is this moment in history where people’s interaction with music, and their ability to experience music, was always historically before that, they had to physically be there. They had to hear it in the room or in the space with the person who was singing. Here we are at this major time in human history where Edison invents something that changes that, and now you can listen to the sound of somebody’s voice even if they’re hundreds or thousands of miles away. That was an important thing for me to fully understand.

Imagine, we take it all for granted. Today, we are surrounded by sound. We have mobile phones, we have computers, and Spotify. You’ve got speakers, you’ve got record players, you’ve got televisions. 100 years ago, we had none of this, and so the world was quiet. If you were in nature, that was all you’d hear. It was a more quiet time, and I think I wanted to luxuriate in that a bit in this film.

Prior to shooting, did you share any specific films, historical recordings, or sound archives for Paul and Josh to help get into character?

We had a Spotify playlist that we shared, and they could hear and listen to, and it was how we slowly decided on the songs that they would sing in the film. We were always sending each other things and making choices that way. The other helpful things, when both of them were having to learn their accents, we had original recordings from the period of people from Kentucky and people from Newport. That became interesting because you’re hearing these singing voices from 100 years ago or more, they’re these exact references for what the actors’ voices became. They kind of learnt to speak exactly like these two random, specific people. We don’t know their names; we just found these recordings. That’s interesting, recorded sound playing, having a tapestry inside of this form. 100 years after these songs were created, we had access to them on Spotify, and could find them and listen to them, and then re-sing them inside of a movie.

How did the Boston and Maine landscapes function for you as a visual metaphor and an emotional container for the story?

Ben is from Massachusetts, I think Boston is at his arm’s length from where he grew up, and it just felt very familiar to him. With The History of Sound, particularly Maine and Boston, it’s the sensory experience of the writer. You sense that in the writing, where he knows these landscapes, and he’s walked and travelled through these landscapes, as much as he knows and has travelled through the songs that were in the movie. For a director, you’re always encouraged when you read something, and you feel a sense of strength in the writing, where you can tell that the writer is being specific in a way that will be helpful to the adaptation. That was very much what was happening here.

The recreating of these two spaces, ironically, we did all of that in New Jersey. It was the challenge of having to conjure the sensory experience of this, and that’s obviously a production design thing and a photography thing, and that becomes a group activity. In terms of the colour palette, I started out as a photographer. So, for me, any movie that I make, the beginning of this process is a very detailed colour document that I would present to the production designer, and to the director of photography, and the costume designer, as a conversation about the control. Sometimes I do a weird thing where there’ll be a colour that’s kind of banned. In this film, we didn’t really have an “absolute no”, but it helps to have an “absolute no” sometimes, because then it focuses everyone’s attention on a certain palette of colours.

We shot during the winter, mainly, and it was cold, and it sort of leaned into why they wore lots of browns and dark blues. We shot through the seasonal change, and things became greener, then we ended the shoot in the Lake District, which was incredibly lush. It’s the part of the job I love the most, because it’s a collaboration. I can engineer this to a certain point, but I love the fact that then it includes other people, and they come on, and they bring their own creative ideas to it. This was an incredible set of people who were involved.

As much as it is a love story, The History of Sound is a film about preserving ephemeral experiences. Folk songs function not just as a soundtrack. What do you hope audiences carry with them, particularly in relation to ideas of preservation and memory?

By the nature of cinema, people will watch this film in 10, 20 years, assumedly, it will hopefully always exist in some form that people can access. So, it does become its own kind of message in the bottle as a movie. It’s a movie about, essentially, the idea of the retainment of memory and sound. It will be interesting for me to watch this movie in 10 years, because usually when I finish a film, I don’t watch it for many, many years. I do like to grow some distance between myself and the film, and I feel like it will be the same thing for me. I will watch The History of Sound, and it will conjure, for me, the entire memory of making this film and creating this film, and my relationships with all the people that made it, and my friendships and our time spent together.

My intention with any movie I’ve ever made, I always would hope that people will see it more than once. My previous film Living is about what happens when suddenly you realise you have very little time left, and you want to do something with your life. I wanted people to go to see it in Christmas time, I thought it was a Christmas movie, although it’s about death. Thankfully the American distributor, Sony Picture Classics, released it on Christmas Day in the United States. Egotistically, I want people to think, “Oh, I want to feel good, so I’m going to watch Living again,” or “I want to cry, I’m going to watch The History of Sound again.”