In 1987, 21-year-old Marlee Matlin won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in “Children of a Lesser God.” She is still the youngest person to ever receive the Best Actress award, and, until 2022, was the only deaf person to ever receive an Oscar, period.
At that very young age, Matlin was thrust into the spotlight and asked to represent the needs of an entire community. In the new documentary, “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” filmmaker Shoshannah Stern explores the ups and downs in Matlin’s life, including her advocacy, like her campaign for closed captions; her relationship with William Hurt, whom she accused of physical and sexual abuse back in 2009; and her journey to feeling less alone.
Stern’s film is one of the better celebrity documentaries to come out in recent years, in part due to Matlin’s willingness to be raw and vulnerable. Unlike most talking head interviews, Stern is not off camera, but sitting on a couch with Matlin. Stern, who is also deaf, speaks with Matlin in American Sign Language. This means that long stretches of the film play in complete silence, giving hearing audiences a peek into the experience of someone with different capabilities.
Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Stern about making the film. This interview was conducted over email, and Stern’s answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
How did you and Marlee Matlin initially meet? What did it feel like to have her recommend you to direct this film?
Shoshannah Stern: We met the first year I started acting in Los Angeles, on maybe the fourth television show I ever booked called “The Division.” We guest starred on that together, which was a dream come true for me. I really enjoyed working with her, and was awestruck when she asked to keep in touch when we wrapped. We developed a friendship after that, and while we’ve tried to find projects to work on together for a while now, including “This Close,” the television show I co-created and co-wrote, I had absolutely no idea she’d recommended me to direct this film until much later in the process. I knew I couldn’t say yes without her blessing, so once I learned it had actually been her idea, the magnitude of that gave me that extra courage I needed to listen to everything my instincts were telling me about what this film needed to be in order to tell her story the way I felt it should be told.
The interview style in this documentary is very casual, and unlike other docs, you’re in the frame. Can you talk about making those decisions and what sort of atmosphere you wanted to create?
Stern: That was a very conscious choice I made based on several factors. One reason was that sign language is a visual language, so I knew the audience would need to see me, in the same way they’re used to hearing the interviewer ask questions, especially when there are follow-ups. I was really excited about reconfiguring the form of documentary in that way, by using split screens to reimagine visual voiceovers, and discovering how using a visual language could push and shape the form of documentary as we know it.
I decided to put myself on a couch with Marlee because I knew that we would be talking about intimate things, so it was important for me to create a safe and comfortable environment for her. I told her that rather than it being an interview, it would be a conversation—two women sitting on a couch talking about shared experience. It was important to me to make consent paramount in our interview process because she is a survivor. I don’t think anyone should retraumatize survivors by forcing them to answer questions they’re really not ready to answer simply because it gives them the emotion they need for the film. When I see moments like that, it feels painful for me as well, like I’m witnessing something I shouldn’t. I want to believe there’s another way to do it, by sitting with them, by feeling what they are feeling and offering contextual support for that emotion so they know they’re not going through any of it alone—which is another reason the film is called what it is.
I read an interview with you where you talked about adding captions for Sarah in “Children of a Lesser God” for the first time within this documentary. You got emotional during that interview, and I wondered if you could elaborate on what that meant for you as a person and as a filmmaker.
Stern: I still tear up every time I see that scene, and I must have seen it hundreds of times by now after all the edits we’ve done. Like anyone who’s read the script knows, Sarah’s lines are scripted in the play. So I always knew what she was saying, but if you haven’t done the play or had the opportunity to read it, you will never know. That’s because the device of both the play and the film is that James speaks for Sarah, but in that particular moment, he chooses not to. Instead he keeps her words for him and him alone. By doing that, he ends up robbing Sarah not just of her voice but of her agency. Because the audience never learns what she’s actually saying, the focus becomes on how she says it, and whether the audience understands her or not, and it seems like most people never do. Maybe that’s even the conceit of the scene, I don’t know. All I know is that, like I say in the film to Marlee, I would feel sick every night I did that scene onstage until I realized why long after the fact—because that scene feels like a rape. James is forcing Sarah to use her voice without her consent, and even when she does finally speak, the scene is still about him and how the audience perceives her voice. It never feels like it’s about her, or even for her, so to be able to finally give Sarah her voice back will never not be emotional for me.
One of my favorite devices in this documentary is the way you return to different moments throughout, often with more context for the audience the second time around – the example I’m thinking of is the 1987 Oscars and Marlee’s win. How did you make those decisions regarding structure – did you have an idea for how you wanted to orient the story going into filming? Did something different emerge in the editing room?
Stern: I always wanted the film to make several cycles, because while life is linear, the way we process it never is. We return to the same places in our life repeatedly in our minds and hearts as we grow and learn more about ourselves and the world around us, and then we go, oh so that’s what really happened. So many ways we interpret moments we live or witness are shaped by different things—the senses we lead with, the way the culture is in that moment, or the way our focus is being pulled. We always talked about the Oscars being bookends, but now that I’ve seen the film in theaters several times, I think they’re more like figure eights. Sara Newens, our editor, has been with me from the start and was the most incredible collaborator anyone could ask for. We spent hours talking about this structure and she understood it immediately, as did our producer Robyn Kopp.
Marlee published a memoir in 2010, and she covers a lot of what this documentary covers in that book. Yet, I still found that this documentary felt like a fresh take on her life. How did you work to differentiate the movie from her book?
Stern: I always spoke about this film being a reframing and a contextualizing of her story. That’s what I wanted it to be, and what it always felt like the film wanted to be as well. I actually felt like because the book was already out there, it freed us up because there was nothing we felt like we were digging at or searching for. It was the story of a woman who was brave enough to reveal so much of her life, especially when she was thrust into representing an entire community to the world at such a young age and how our society received that bravery. It felt like the job of the film was to expose how stories limit our perception of people, especially if that story hasn’t been told from someone who has lived that experience themselves. I wanted to show just how different the stories can be if you shift that perspective by allowing the audience to immerse themselves into it.
At one point while speaking with Aaron Sorkin, you make the statement that every deaf actress has played Sarah in “Children for a Lesser God” at some point, partly due to a lack of other stories about deaf characters. The movie is bookended with the “CODA” Oscars, which was only a couple of years ago. Maybe you don’t feel this way, but it feels to me like the evolution of deaf characters on screen is moving at a bit of a slower clip than other communities. Do you have any thoughts on that evolution?
I talked a lot during the editing process about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk about the danger of a single story. One person, or one story, cannot accurately define an entire community. Stories are often a reflection of the times they are in, and not all of them age well. I’ve often said just like Marlee was alone for a long time, “Children of a Lesser God” was as a story too. Our society likes to decide who gets to tell stories and why, and while we need more stories, as many of them as we can get, I’m hoping that our film shows the value of the storyteller and why who they are matters so very much. I loved what Aaron said about it not being hard to write for deaf people because it is true—it is not hard at all. They’ve been here as long as there have been people, and have been around for every turning point in history, but we haven’t seen them there. Until we do, and until we see them represented in 20% of the stories we see, because the estimate is we make up 20% of the world, you’re right—the evolution of their presence in stories needs to increase considerably, and at a much quicker pace. Chop chop.
