Hearing things

Star Rebecca Hall and director Janicza Bravo reveal why they believe their BBC drama The Listeners is a unique project and discuss how the story taps into themes of connection and belonging that feel particularly relevant today.

When it came to her next screen project, Rebecca Hall wasn’t specifically looking to work in TV or even in the UK. But in The Listeners and director Janicza Bravo, she found a project and a creative partner that were on her wavelength.

“I was just looking for something that would excite me,” the star tells DQ. “And it was funny, I think I’d said to my agents, ‘I don’t want to play any more women whose lives are unravelling,’ and then, of course, I’m really only interested in women whose lives are unravelling, clearly.”

That Bravo was already attached to the project piqued the actor’s interest before she even read a script, having been a fan of the US director’s “brilliantly innovative” 2020 feature Zola. The chance to work with one of “a really exciting next generation of filmmakers” on a female-led series meant Hall started lobbying “pretty hard” to play protagonist Claire, whose life is unsettled when she begins to hear mysterious ‘hum’ audible to no one else.

Then when Hall did read the first script, she found the four-part drama resonated with her desire to take on roles in stories that speak to themes and issues in contemporary society.

“I was so struck by the potency of the metaphor because, if you think about it, it’s something that exposes how fragile all of our realities are in the sense that a tiny difference, actually, in the experience or perspective of one person can then separate them from that community,” she says. “Once a person is isolated, then they’re vulnerable and susceptible to different ways of thinking and different beliefs and everything that entails.

“In a sense, isn’t that the experience that we’re all having? We no longer live in a world where there are institutions or communal experiences, even, that allow us to fact-check our realities with each other in real time. Instead, we’re all living in these algorithmically mediated environments that are tailored to our own separate experiences. We’re all isolated and we’re all going crazy. This is a metaphor about how beliefs are made in isolation and, yes, conspiracies.”

She adds: “But it also taps into this low-level anxiety that we’re all experiencing right now in this quite isolated way of living. That to me was really exciting and spot on. This will make people feel stuff.”

Debuting last night on BBC One, with all episodes now on BBC iPlayer, The Listeners centres on Claire, a popular English teacher who begins to hear a low humming sound that no one around her can hear.

Seemingly innocuous at first, the noise gradually begins to upset Claire’s life, increasing tension at home between her, her husband Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and daughter Ashley (Mia Tharia), while she can find no obvious source or medical solution. When Claire discovers her pupil Kyle (Ollie West) can also hear the sound, the pair strike up an intimate friendship that leads them to fall in with a disparate group of neighbours led by Jo (Gayle Rankin) and Omar (Amr Waked), who also claim they can hear The Hum – and who believe it could be a gift heard only by a chosen few.

Filmed in Greater Manchester, The Listeners is a cinematic, visual and audible spectacle as viewers are immersed in Bravo’s picturesque framing and use of slow zooms, not to mention the undulating hum that becomes a constant presence through the story.

“The sound is in the title, and so we had to really honour that in our execution. We don’t get to have that title and not have a grand gesture around how we play with sound,” Bravo says. There was a time when the director considered making the series without any noise at all, “totally nude and devoid of sound.” But while editing in post-production, she found that iteration of the show “too invisible.”

“A lot of it had to do with Rebecca’s performance, wanting to mirror what she was bringing, and she is so emotive,” Bravo observes. “She’s so raw, so close to the surface that it seemed almost disrespectful to not have the [sound] design meet her or try its best to meet or cradle what she was offering.”

Bravo came to the show just over two years ago, when she was sent Canadian writer Jordan Tannahill’s pilot script, series outline and his book upon which the series is based. Having previously directed a lot of episodic television – Kindred, Poker Face and Atlanta, among others – she was feeling “burnt out” working on titles where she wasn’t the lead director, while opportunities to direct every episode of some miniseries were perhaps too demanding. “Doing eight episodes of a series is really tough,” she says. “I would do it if I wrote it, but to be a director who’s directing someone else’s writing, eight episodes is a really big commitment.”

The Listeners proved to be “the perfect morsel,” as four episodes felt very close to making a movie. “I was at a place in my life where I wanted to make work that felt pretty far away from the last thing I had done,” she says. “I also tend to gravitate towards the thing I need exorcising in the moment. ‘What’s the thing I’m working through right now?’ We’re really in conversation with fulfilment and, specifically for me, what female obligation looks like and when one gets permission to change themselves.”

The idea of connection is another theme that runs through the series, as Claire finds the support she needs from her new friends that she can’t get from her family. The idea she might be walking into a cult “is not on my list, though I know it’s there,” Bravo says of conspiratorial elements to the show. “When I look at that group, I saw them as found family, the family you allow yourself to make that aren’t blood. But I also recognise the other thing is true.”

“I suppose what’s striking about her as a character is that she’s pretty normal,” Hall says of Claire. “There’s nothing exceptionally out of the ordinary about her. She’s a smart, regular woman who’s a mother and a teacher and getting on with the world and has a pretty good marriage, pretty good relationship with her daughter. Everything is pretty good.

“The quick, reductive analysis is she’s going crazy. But the point is, she’s not going crazy. So who do you believe in this situation? It’s nuanced and complicated and all the stuff that I hope things get to be.”

Hall had “high hopes” when signing up for the hugely ambitious series. As a filmmaker herself, she always imagines how a project might be filmed or come out in the edit. “And this surpassed all my expectations,” she says.

Her first clue that The Listeners would be something special was when she discovered Bravo and cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes would be shooting the series with 35mm film. Then during her first costume fitting, she noticed the production design was echoing Todd Haynes film Safe, John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence and the world of Éric Rohmer (My Night at Maud’s) – visual references that place The Listeners in “a world that is not really real, but it’s real-adjacent so it feels global and universal.”

“When I got an inkling of all those things, I was really excited because I was like, ‘This could actually do that thing that everyone wants to do when they talk about long-format television as being just a long movie. This could really do that.’”

Bravo tapped into another reference in photographer Gregory Crewdson, to whom she wanted to pay homage in episode one, where most of the story takes place in and around Claire’s family home.

“We talked a good deal about his work because it spoke to a kind of suburbia where the air felt incredibly still, where things were very settled, where colour felt maybe diluted or desaturated,” she says. “Some of the house design actually is very much inspired by Safe. There’s black furniture throughout, which feels like inky poison. And we talked about how you let the space that Claire lives in, the home she’s built for herself with Paul and with Ashley, feel sterile, like it could make her sick.”

Often the actors wouldn’t know exactly the kind of shot Bravo and Lipes were planning. Hall recalls one example where she was filming an “intimate” scene with Rankin while Lipes and the camera were “many feet away.”

“It’s only because I’m a film nerd and have some understanding of this that I was like, ‘He’s using one of those massive zoom lenses. This could be a close-up for all I know.’ Often we’d be acting, doing the business, like a pretty intimate scene, and then it would be done and the camera never came anywhere near us.”

When it came to the hum that Claire hears, Bravo was looking for a fluid noise that could evolve depending on the emotions the character was feeling. “It wasn’t a one-size-fits-all hum,” Hall jokes of the noise, which is at once strange and yet familiar enough to think nothing of it, until it comes to completely destabilise Claire’s life.

Composer Devonté Hynes, sound designer Steve Fanagan and the show’s sound department were responsible for producing the hum that can be heard during the series, while Hall sometimes wore an earpiece playing the hum on set. At other times, she relied on the ‘tick, tick, tick’ noise produced when the film was rolling inside the camera.

“That’s something we’ve all forgotten about because now we shoot everything digitally,” the actor notes. “But it used to be a very familiar sound in my life. That became the hum for me because it was always there no matter what [was happening] in the scene.”

Known for film roles including The Town and Vicky Cristina Barcelona and series such as Parade’s End, Hall is now establishing herself as a filmmaker in her own right, with a slate of her own projects currently in development. Her first film, Passing, which she wrote and directed, was released in 2021.

“I’m ticking along,” she says. “It’s a grind trying to get people to sign off on everything, and there are all the fundraising aspects of being a filmmaker that are tough. I sometimes probably go off the boil by going off and doing acting for a while. I never want to stop doing either, but I have I have a bunch of stuff I’m trying to develop to direct, and I’ve written too.”

But starring in The Listeners and working with Bravo was enough of a pull to bring her to appear in front of the camera. “It was a really dreamy working relationship,” she says of the actor-director partnership. “I really loved being directed by her and I would happily work with her for the rest of my life if she asked me.”

As for the series, Hall hopes viewers connect with the “unique” drama that’s “unlike anything anyone’s likely to have seen,” she adds. “I think it will really chime with a feeling that we’re all experiencing right now. It feels of the moment, exciting, interesting, unusual and real.”

tagged in: BBC, Janicza Bravo, Rebecca Hall, The Listeners