Director Oliver Hermanus joins us to discuss 'The History of Sound,' drawing from his South African background to explore how cinema can foster empathy across divides. Oliver reflects on his commitment to creating narratives that invite audiences into unfamiliar perspectives, shaped by experiences in a country where marginalized voices were systematically silenced.

Our conversation explores his collaboration with Ben Shattuck, who adapted his own short story despite having no screenwriting experience. Oliver reveals his supportive approach to this creative partnership and his thoughtful use of narration to enhance storytelling without overwhelming the visual medium.

You are listening to the we need to Talk About Oscar podcast, and this is our conversation with Oliver Hermanus, director of the History of Sound.

I was living in a country I was born into, a country where the narratives and the stories of the majority of the people were being denied by a system of hate.

And so my initiation into cinema was about social action and about telling stories where I wanted an audience to exist inside somebody else's footsteps and somebody else's shoes so that you have a commonality and an understanding.

So it was the fiddle and the harp.

It was all the strings.

And, you know, that's another aspect of my job that I love, which is seeing somebody else bring themselves to your film in a way that makes the film more alive.

As far as I know, the History of Sound is a first in the sense that even though you've directed numerous films where the source material was adapted by a different writer, but here, both the short story and its adaptation is penned by Ben Shattuck.

Yes.

So I'm wondering, how do these different collaborative dynamics with the screenwriter writer play out for you as a director?

Well, in this case, it was quite.

It was without, like, too many fireworks because Ben had never written a screenplay before.

And so it was kind of asking him to do something very new and try out a new form of writing.

And there was a real freedom about that.

It was the.

It was.

It was my responsibility, I guess, to.

To encourage him in just being as open to the.

To the formatting, I guess, of a screenplay.

A screenplay is not the.

A novel is like the product.

And the novelists, you know, they're right.

They have full control.

They're the directors.

A screenplay is.

Is the blueprint.

It's on the way to the product.

And so it's about making or getting Ben to understand that we're going to write this and it's going to have this tone and.

And these details.

But that.

That was evolved when the actor starts saying the lines and the director starts lighting it or whatever.

So, yeah, but it was a good process in general.

And so now so much in hindsight, what was the harder sell if you.

Being becoming the right director for this story or getting Ben, as you just said, with zero film writing credits to his name, to adapt the short story into a feature film screenplay?

I mean, that wasn't hard at all.

I think Ben was born to write screenplays.

I think it was just that it was the right time for him to do it.

So I was.

It was very much just about watching.

And then whenever you approach the Prospect of directing anything.

There's always the fear I think actors have that when they approach the prospect of acting as well.

You always worry that you're going to mess it up or, you know, destroy it or do something.

You know, it's a very precious piece of material, anything you want to make, so you, you want to do right by it.

There's always that anxiety of, of will I be the, the weakest link?

Well, no, not at all.

And to talk a little bit about some technical specifics in terms of the script and you translating it onto the screen without spoilers, of course.

First of all, the use of narration as a storytelling tool.

While of course we know the short story is in first person, how did you translate a familiar, no pun intended, of course, instrument, that internal voice to film without losing what's probably most integral to the story?

Intimacy itself.

Yeah.

Narration is such a particular device in making a film.

I find one reason for that is because you can always add it at the end.

You can direct your film, you can cut your film and then you can decide, oh, it needs narration to make it make more sense or fix problems.

And so you can then record narration.

And so it can often be perceived as an easy get out.

And that might seem like it's not the most compelling or interesting way of telling your story.

And then of course, there are incredible examples of films of narration.

I think Martin Scorsese uses narration to like exceptional, in exceptional ways in almost all of his movies because there is a power to great narration.

But I think for me, this particular form, it was the economy of narration, making sure that when we used it, that we were using it in the right places and that we were using it for the right reasons.

It's always that fear that you're over baking the telling.

There's the famous Hitchcock quote that you shouldn't say it, you should show it.

And so the narration kind of goes against that instinct.

So for me it was always like, okay, is there is what the narration is saying at this particular moment?

Something is outside of the showing.

And one of the lines that I think is particularly powerful is when Paul's character says that my grandfather says happiness is a moment.

And so it's hard for him to talk about that period of the two weeks that they were together, because that's like a, that's an idea and that's an internal idea.

And so to put that, you can't really visualize that.

You can just sort of show, show them climbing a mountain, but then you have him saying it.

You kind of understand the impact of this on his life.

Yeah, but at the same time, not every word, sentence or dialogue can be big.

Because then to a point, no dialogue is big after all.

And I don't know how much you think about stuff like this, but I'm so curious.

And let me ask you about what might at first seem like a tiny detail, which is small talk in a sense, but here, of course, we are talking 100 years ago, small talk.

Where and when did you and Ben find the balance in forming, constructing period appropriate dialogue that doesn't feel stilted or, I don't know, overly formal?

I mean, that's all Ben, to be honest.

It's his taste, it's his creative output and finding the voice of the characters and making them feel, period, correct, familiar, special individual that I think existed in the short story.

He already knew who these people were.

He understood their voice.

And so expanding it and creating a dimension inside of each of the characters came quite swiftly and quite naturally to him.

And as for the characters and the actors who portrayed them, Paul Maskell and Josh o', Connor, they remained attached to this project for what, four years before filming.

What do you see as the key to keeping them committed through that entire development process?

Especially as we now know, and of course to a point, back then, their careers were exploding big time.

It was never really.

I never really felt the need to keep them interested because their interest was always in the material.

They're the kind of actors who respond to material and have great taste in material and they, they have the possession over the material.

So when knowing that this was a script that existed that they loved, they, until it was made, they would never want to let it go because they, because they want to play those characters.

They want that opportunity not from a career point of view, but.

But the actor in them, the artist in them want, wants to, wants to spend.

Be inside of those characters.

So it was just.

The pressure on me was more so just to make sure that it didn't happen before they were both in their 50s and.

And then they couldn't play the roles because they wouldn't be the right age anymore.

Or you're shooting for 20, 30 years, like Linklater on.

Yeah, which is also a choice.

I actually met him for the first time a couple of days ago and I was asking him about that, which I find to be such an incredible cinematic effort.

So, so, so great.

Incredible.

And not to push it, but did their growing profile change anything regarding your approach to the material?

Or did you.

Could you stay true to your Original vision, no matter what.

No, there was.

The growing success and careers was.

Was most helpful, I suppose, in just getting people to finance this movie and getting it made.

There was.

There was nothing.

There was nothing that their fame sort of curtailed in any way, in anything.

It sort of just.

It just annoyed us when we had photographers trying to take their picture.

I guess that was the downside of trying to shoot a movie with them was that they.

Their privacy is fairly compromised some of the time.

And getting them to sing, as Paul and Josh aren't primarily known as singers, what was that process like, creating the space they needed to feel comfortable performing?

Well, they're actors, so they love performing.

Paul likes singing.

He always has liked singing.

He has a relationship with music.

He's about to play a very famous musician.

So that was a very easy.

It was a very easy ask on him.

It was something that drew him to the character, I think, as well.

Josh, you're right, is a less enthusiastic singer.

But I think any performer, any actor who chooses to play a role, the nuance of those characters, the detail, whether that's being able to ride a horse or play the piano or drive a certain kind of car, be a pilot or pirate or an astronaut or whatever the text or whatever the outline of that character is, is part of what I think attracts actors to acting, is embodying and existing as other people in some way playing as other people.

So the playing for them in this movie was the aspect of singing, I guess.

And I know we are not exactly talking about a musical, but how does such a great amount of singing reflect back in the script?

You know, I would love to make a musical one day in the sort of classical sense, the 50s sense.

I think what was interesting in this film is.

Is having moments of singing like.

Like songs being sung quite completely and.

And taking the time with those songs and having the audience listen to the lyrics of those songs.

Because it's kind of the tapestry of this film is that the content of the songs that are being sung, then the narrative of those songs is an echo of the narrative of this film.

And so it's.

The audience is asking the audience to sit and listen to music inside of watching a film, which I think is an interesting.

Is an interesting kind of film.

And how does that relationship with the score work?

How do the live performances and compose score complement one another?

That is a challenge because you do want them to complement each other and you do want them to exist in the same kind of chamber that is, again, the genius of our composer, Oliver Coates.

Who is, well, literally a musical genius, but also somebody who has a very exploratory mind.

And he found a way of choosing instruments that had the raspiness and the kind of rawness of a Kentucky background or a kind of period background.

We avoided the piano, for example.

We avoided a kind of classical piano, pianoforte, because it felt like that was probably too tidy or too formal as an instrument or too European in a way.

So it was the fiddle and the harp.

It was all the strings.

And that's another aspect of my job that I love, which is seeing somebody else bring themselves to your film in a way that makes the film more alive.

Another thing we know by now is how important fashion is to you and your craft, its evolution on screen, in front of our eyes, et cetera.

With period work like here, especially when it comes to something this inner cultural, generational, there is, I'd guess, a tension between accuracy and what serves the story.

The narrative terms of the fashion, you mean?

Yeah.

I worked on my previous film.

I worked with one of the great costume designers of filmmaking history, Sandy Powell.

And working with Sandy, I learned a lot about.

I learned almost all I needed to learn about period came from her.

Because period exists in movies as what the actors wear.

It's the setting of a film.

Obviously, production design is as well, but.

But what's interesting about character and fashion and costume is that the way we think about what people wore 100 years ago, people still kind of did things that made it individualistic.

So people didn't always wear things that were supposed to be worn or they didn't wear them in the colors or the combinations.

And to create character through fashion is not about compromise.

It's about taking the historical elements and creating a detail of personality.

And I think the great costume designers are people who find a way of individualizing characters inside of period costumes.

And when it comes to fitting and everything else, working together in general with the costume designer, to what extent do Paul, Josh and the others have a say in what goes and what doesn't?

Well, they go for fittings on their own, and then together.

And then I go and we take a bunch of pictures and we look at colors.

And I base my films very heavily on a color palette, the color palette of this film or in general, how I make a film.

That color palette goes across photography, costume and production design.

So if there is a particular color that I think is at the heart of the film, and in this particular film, that color was a sort of brown and a mauve green.

Sometimes that exists in the landscape that we're shooting in.

Sometimes that exists in the costume.

And so Josh has a costume that's very cold, which is wool and blue.

And Paul wears a lot of green and brown, and he has this cravat that's a bit green.

And so it's the combination of finding literal pieces of costume that define the character.

But then the director comes along and goes, yes, but I would like everything to be in a particular palette that complements the other aspects of the film.

So that's the kind of collaboration, or I guess this, of challenges.

The actors have a say in the sense that they also have their own opinions about what they feel fits the character.

And we make choices together, and it's a discovery.

I enjoy that discovery, where we go, oh, you know, we pry things on.

And then the actor might go.

But I said, as Paul did, he was like, oh, this jacket feels a little bit too small.

Which I like, because it means that he got it when he was younger and they couldn't afford a new one, so he still wears it.

And that's why it's so tight.

And that becomes something that Paul uses as a character.

Incredible.

And to circle back to music for a couple of moments here we get to see Lionel's character making music, bringing to life and also listening to it, enjoying it.

And if I were to draw a parallel between that and you being the filmmaker making films versus watching them, do you see filmmaking as a whole, and maybe even your own, as a form of cultural preservation, like what these characters are doing here with folk songs?

It can be.

When I was younger, I was initiated into cinema by my parents, and that initiation was into the idea that cinema is an agent of social change, that the importance of storytelling in movies is to shift paradigms and to educate the world about the existence of other people's lives and the nature of their lives and how we demonstrate atrocity, how we demonstrate struggles.

I was living in a country.

I was born into a country where the narratives and the stories of the majority of the people were being denied by a system of hate.

And so my initiation into cinema was about social action and about telling stories where I wanted an audience to exist inside somebody else's footsteps and somebody else's shoes, so that you have a commonality and understanding.

But I guess in a way, that does become a timestamp, it does become an act of.

Of recording posterity.

Because who knows what people will think of these stories or these movies?

I guess in 50 years, in 100 years, if they'll still be around.

And what will this world that we're in right now look like?

What will people think of movie watching as some ancient art?

Like the Greeks going to the opera or something?

Like, will it be this equally ancient and bizarre piece of artistic expression?

I don't know.

Oliver, thank you so, so much for taking the time.

This was an absolute pleasure.

Thank you, YouTube.