ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with The Silent Hour director Brad Anderson about his latest action movie. Anderson discussed working with stars Joel Kinnaman and Sandra Mae Frank, plus how being prepared is key for shorter shoots. It will be released in theaters and on digital on October 11, 2024.
“Boston Detective Frank Shaw (Joel Kinnaman) returns to duty after a career-altering injury leaves him with permanent hearing loss. Tasked with interpreting for Ava Fremont (Sandra Mae Frank), a deaf witness to a brutal gang murder, they find themselves cornered in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment building when the killers return to eliminate her. Cut off from the outside world, these two strangers must lean on each other to outsmart killers they can’t hear coming for their only hope of making it out alive,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Brad, you’ve worked with a lot of great leading men over the years. What stood out about Joel Kinnaman? Because he clearly gives a lot in this performance and he really did the work in learning ASL as well.
Brad Anderson: I think it’s that level of commitment and [he brings] that to whatever he does. I worked with him on the show called The Killing. That kind of put him on the map actually. Cool police procedural. I met him then and we really hit it off and I kinda really wanted to find something to work on together, a movie. I just think that he brings a kind of intensity and a realism to that intensity, but he also has a kind of emotional core that was really important for this movie, for this character. A guy who is struggling with hearing loss and loss in general, and just the way that he kind of confronts that, and ultimately, contends with it.
Plus, he’s just a real hard worker. This was not an easy shoot. A lot of these smaller independent films, it wasn’t a walk in the park. So you need someone who’s gonna really kind of put in their all and commit to it. He certainly did. As you said, he spent quite a bit of time learning American Sign Language so that he could not only play the character but also communicate with our lead actress, who was deaf. So it was great. He was a real team player.
The lead actress, Sandra Mae Frank, I’d never seen her in anything before, and she just blew me away. She has quite the personality from talking to her. How was it working with her? She mentioned that she was willing to give her input and was helping Joel with sign language as well after he had already learned some of the basics. So it seems like she was very passionate and very involved.
Yeah, she was. As you said, she’s real charismatic, a little bundle of energy. She was great. Sandra was lovely and great to work with. I had never had many encounters with deaf people, to be honest with you, before making the movie. So it was a learning experience for me, a major learning experience. Learning how to direct her and also just how to kind of tell our story in a way that was respectful and made sense to the deaf community. She brought a lot of that and helped us not just playing the character but helped the production in terms of figuring out how to do that.
I hadn’t seen her in anything. She had done some television shows, and she’s a New Yorker like myself. So she spent a lot of theater as well. But we interviewed a number of people for the role. There aren’t a lot of options, frankly. She was, in my mind, the one who had the most charisma and the most gumption. This needed to be a character that wasn’t gonna bow down in the face of these kinds of threats. She was gonna power through them. She brought that to the character and also to the production in a way that was great.
Joel had a lot of praise for your preparedness because this wasn’t a super long shoot, but you guys got a lot done. Can you just speak to the key of being very prepared for these types of shoots?
Well, I always have been that way just in general. Particularly on a movie like this where you don’t have a huge amount of time and finance, you’re always up against the gun. If you’re not prepared, then you kind of go and do it with the potential to sort of crash and burn really quickly.
We shot the movie in Malta of all places. Part of that was because the financial need of doing it there. But more so the need to be prepared was to shoot in a country [I wasn’t familiar with]. We had to know what our cement would be, we had to build our own sets, create a reality in a Mediterranean island off of Italy. So it was a little bit challenging. But I definitely think that preparation is a huge part of the battle, and you have to start in an intuitive way. I always do, whether it’s a movie, a TV show, or anything really.
