How ‘CODA’ Director Sian Heder Fought to Have Deaf Actors Represented on Screen

Sian Heder knew when she was writing the first draft of CODA that the dialogue would have to change. “As you’re writing a joke, or writing a line, you’re almost like, listening to your script,” Heder told Decider. “As a writer, I’m hearing the voices of my characters in my head.” But three of Heder’s four main characters in her coming-of-age drama wouldn’t be heard at all.

The voices of actors Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, and Daniel Durant—who play a Deaf family running a fishing business on the coast of Massachusetts—would instead be seen through American Sign Language. “I don’t think I fully registered that I would never hear these words, I would be seeing them,” Heder said. “To watch this visual expression of your ideas or emotion come to life was the most exciting process.”

CODA, which opens in theaters and on Apple TV+ today, is a remake of the 2014 French-language film La Famille Bélier, which tells the story of a hearing teenage girl who serves as an interpreter for her culturally Deaf parents and Deaf brother. (“CODA” stands for “Child of Deaf Adults.”) When the producers of the French movie approached Heder about an English-language remake, she was moved by the story—and intrigued by the ways she felt she could make the film her own. “In the French film, I felt that it was much more focused on Ruby, the hearing character,” Heder explained. “there was an opportunity to build out the rest of the family—to make those characters really three dimensional, and not defined by their deafness.”

Heder also didn’t want to repeat the controversial choices of the French film: two of the lead Deaf characters were played by hearing actors, and, some activists felt, used their deafness as an offensive source of comedy. “From the beginning, I felt I would rather see the movie not get made then get made with hearing actors,” Heder said.

The financiers Heder was working with to develop the film didn’t agree. “I wish I could say everybody was on board,” the director said with a sigh. The people in charge of the money wanted big stars and felt casting lesser-known Deaf actors would be too great a risk. Then Marlee Matlin—the only Deaf actor to ever win an Oscar for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God, and an undeniable star in her own right—joined the cast and threatened to quit the production if hearing actors were hired for the deaf roles. Said Matlin in a recent interview with The Daily Beast, “I just calmly said, ‘If you do it, then I am out.'”

Said Heder, “It was so undeniable once we started auditioning people, how much talent there was in the Deaf community. It was a lot easier to make the argument when I could put these auditions in front of studio executives and producers and go, ‘Look how good these actors are. And how stupid would you be, if you didn’t use this talent?'”

With Matlin on board as Jackie Rossi—a somewhat narcissistic former beauty queen—Heder cast Kotsur as her on-screen husband, Frank, a cheerfully grizzled fisherman with a dirty sense of humor, and Durant as their quick-tempered, prideful 20-something son, Leo. Kotsur and Durant, who were both born deaf, had actually played father-and-son before, in a Deaf West Theatre production of Stephen Sachs’ Cyrano. Along with Locke & Key star Emilia Jones as the Rossi’s hearing daughter, Ruby—an otherwise typical teen with a passion for singing—the cast became a family. Noted Heder, “True chemistry—when people just bond and know each other and love each other—is an ephemeral thing that you can’t really create as a director.”

Both Jones and Heder learned ASL for the production, and, as Heder suspected, changes to the dialogue were necessary. “My ASL masters were Alexandria Wailes and Anne Tomasetti,” Heder said. “Alexandria and I sat across the table from each other and went line by line through the script, and she would sign the line back to me. Then we discussed it. She would say, ‘Is this your intention?’ There are many ways to sign the same thing, just as there are many ways to write a line. I was getting inside the rhythms of ASL—understanding how a joke worked visually as opposed to with a spoken punch line.”

Heder’s favorite sign language joke in the movie? “The sign for ‘twat waffle!’ It’s twat, and then waffle.” (At this point, Heder demonstrated the signs for both “twat” and “waffle” over Zoom for me.) “Like that’s obviously a twat, and that’s obviously a waffle!”

CODA premiered virtually at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival to widespread acclaim, winning four awards, including the festival’s U.S. Grand Jury Prize and Best Director in the U.S. Dramatic section for Heder. It also set a festival acquisition record, selling to Apple for a whopping $25 million. But despite all of the accolades, Heder didn’t get a chance to watch her movie with a live audience until recently—at a screening in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the seaside fishing town where the film takes place. (It’s also not far from where Heder, a Massachusetts native, is from.) “For me, the biggest joy was hearing these big rolling laughs early on. All anybody tells me when they say they saw the movie is, ‘I sobbed so hard!’ I’m always like, ‘Did you laugh?'”

At both the screening in Gloucester and the virtual premiere at Sundance, “open captions”—meaning captions that are always on, and not just during the sign language scenes—were a given. Heder recalled that she “pretty much knew the guest list [for the Gloucester screening]” and didn’t think any Deaf people would be there, but open-captioned the movie anyhow, just in case. And it’s a good thing she did. “This man came up to me after the movie, who was deaf, and he was so grateful,” Heder said. “He’s like, ‘I never go to the theater, because I hate those fucking glasses [which provide captions for Deaf folks] that you have to wear. They don’t work half the time, they hurt my eyes, they’re horrible. Thank you for doing this, because I loved the film, and it was so great to get to participate.’

“I hope that this movie does encourage more people to [open caption their films],” Heder said. “We’ve created a society that’s so focused on able-bodied people, and it’s fucked up when you start to engage with that community and see what it’s like to be left out. Though I’m sure my deaf actors and crew members would roll their eyes and laugh at that—like, ‘Well, this is our whole life!'” Reuters recently reported that CODA will be screened with open captions in all U.S. and U.K. movie theaters. (The caption option is always available on Apple TV+, as it is with most streaming services.)

CODA is Heder’s second feature film after 2016’s Tallulah, a dark comedy starring Elliot Page and Allison Janney. Heder shows no signs of slowing down—she recently signed an overall deal with Apple, currently serves as co-showrunner for the network’s critically-acclaimed anthology series Little America, and will soon direct a new Apple Original Film about the life of disability activist Judy Heumann. Heder first heard Heumann’s story in the Netflix documentary about the disability rights movement, Crip Camp, directed by Nicole Newnham and James LeBrecht, and was so drawn to Heumann as a character that she immediately bought the activist’s memoir.

“The moment I finished the book, I wrote her a cold email,” Heder said, “basically saying, ‘What’s happening with this book? Could this be a movie?’ [Her team] reached out to me and said, ‘We’re actually choosing a filmmaker. We’re in the last 24 hours of this process. If you want to meet with Judy, you can meet with her today at five o’clock.’ It felt like the universe was working for us. I met with Judy, and we just really clicked and bonded.”

Rumor has that Ali Stroker—the first actor who uses a wheelchair for mobility to win a Tony for her role in Oklahoma!—is being eyed to play Heumann, who had polio as a baby and has used a wheelchair for most of her life. Heder didn’t comment on the casting rumors, but assured that “we’re very determined to authentically cast this with people from the community.” She added, “I’ve been in a lot of conversations with Nic Novicki, who runs Disability Film Challenge, to make a set that is as inclusive as can be both in front of and behind the camera.”

CODA is unabashedly sincere, with an ending that will tug on viewers’ heartstrings. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s been labeled a “feel-good movie” by some, a phrase that can sound like a backhanded compliment, especially when it comes from self-serious film critics with large Twitter followings. Heder admitted the term sometimes rankles. “You want your Sundance indie filmmaker cred. Like, oh no, ‘feel-good’ movies feels like… are Hallmark movies feel-good movies?

“But I think we need to feel good,” Heder continued. “We’ve just been through a really hard year and a half as a human race. I think everybody is longing to see a movie that’s about connection and family, and it does make you feel good.” And so, she concluded, “I will take it as a compliment that it is a tear-jerker, and a feel-good movie, because I think it’s important right now that stories be healing for us.”

Watch CODA on AppleTV+