When Marlee Matlin was approached to be the subject of a documentary, she had one condition: that the film be directed by a deaf woman. As for who, one name immediately came to mind.

“I said, Shoshannah Stern,” she explained over Zoom on Monday. “It was a no-brainer for me because clearly to direct my life story as a deaf woman, who we both are and have similar journeys and have similar experiences. The rest is history. It turned out bigger than than we both anticipated because of Shoshannah. It’s because of Shoshannah, that’s why.”

Stern, a fellow deaf actress and writer who marked her directorial debut with Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, credits Matlin for the inspiration to follow her own intuition while crafting the film, seeing the Oscar winner get the chance to step behind the camera on an episode of Accused.

“To be able to see Marlee working with Lauren Ridloff, or to be working with other deaf actors on set, to have those one-on-one interactions. To see those, it was so emotional for me, and triggering too, because I was like wow, I’ve never been directed that way, the way that I saw Marlee direct on set.”

This very moment, which was captured on film and featured in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, also helped Stern communicate to the film’s editors how she wanted the documentary, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, to use American Sign Language (ASL) as its primary language.

Joined by ASL interpreters Jack and Karri, Matlin and Stern chatted with DECIDER about the new documentary, the importance of accessibility, and their hopes for more Deaf stories to be told.

DECIDER: How did you two meet?

MARLEE MATLIN: I found her walking down the street, just wandering about, actually. Some place in Venice, or some place like that. No. “Were you lost?” I said to her. “Were you lost, little girl?” [Laughs]. No, that’s not how we met. Actually, I can say she was a little girl because she’s a lot younger than I am.

SHOSHANNAH STERN: Just a little bit.

MATLIN: We met… gosh, I think Shoshannah has a better story than I do, a memory. She has a brief story about how we met. Actually, somebody in my family met her first and before I did. So I’m going to let Shoshannah fill you in on the details.

STERN: Yeah, that year that Marlee won her Academy Award. I was 7 I think, and that was the first time that I saw myself represented on screen, which was pretty impactful for my life because I do have deaf family members, but every time I envisioned myself in film or in TV shows, I always still saw myself as a hearing person because I didn’t realize that I’d never seen a deaf person in those roles before. So when she won, that was a huge deal to me. I was so thrilled and I decided to audition for some sort of choir team or music team. It was at my school and I ended up winning a couple of events and then I went to Chicago, and it was the same year that Marlee won. I went to ICODA (International Center on Deafness and the Arts) in Chicago, it’s mentioned in our film. You see Marlee, she’s signing on stage. That’s ICODA.

So I went there, and it was the first time that I was away from my family. I flew by myself and I was very, very young, probably the youngest contestant there, and was feeling a little lost. Out of nowhere—I mean, I feel like I saw this angel, this person with this light cast around them. This woman just came right up to me. She took me under her wing, and it was Libby, Marlee’s mom. I have a picture of the two of us together. I had always felt like that’s when Marlee and I had met, but I didn’t meet Marlee at the time. I met her mom. But I feel like I still knew Marlee. And I do have a picture of me and Libby and then Marlee’s Oscar, which I don’t know how your mom had the Oscar. Maybe she took it from you when you weren’t looking.

MATLIN: Maybe. Probably.

STERN: And then once I moved to Los Angeles, I started acting on screen, and the first year, I was lucky enough to be a guest star on a TV show, and it was with Marlee. That’s when we met.

This documentary kind of concludes in 2022, the year that CODA was up for three Oscars and won. When did the idea, though, for the documentary come to be?

STERN: When did you meet with American Masters, Marlee?

MATLIN: I met American Masters in 2023, I think. We happened to meet over lunch, and they asked if I was interested in being the subject of a documentary, my story. It was American Masters, nothing more detailed than that. It was just one part of their series of shows. I thought, well, yeah. We’re all sitting around having lunch, casually talking. I said, sure, it sounds great, except on one condition: it has to be directed by a Deaf woman. And they said, ok, well who would that be? And I said, Shoshannah Stern. It was a no-brainer for me because clearly to direct my life story as a Deaf woman, who we both are and have similar journeys and have similar experiences. The rest is history. It turned out bigger than than we both anticipated because of Shoshannah. It’s because of Shoshannah, that’s why.

STERN: Well, because of Marlee’s story. It could have been anywhere from a 10-minute piece to a 90-minute piece. I know that American Masters is usually pretty flexible with their form. And I thought I have this really great opportunity to understand the scope of Marlee’s life and not just everything that she’s accomplished, because there was so much. So how would we even condense that? But I just thought it’d be great for people to understand Marlee’s perspective and to be able to connect with her story in a new way. And so I knew that I wanted to try for a 90-minute piece. Instinctually, that’s what I wanted. But I don’t think that any of us expected it to be as big as it was.

Wow.

MATLIN: I’m not complaining by any means.

STERN: No, I’m not mad, either.

MATLIN: Yeah, I’m not mad either, yes.

This documentary marked your directorial debut, Shoshannah, and seeing American Sign Language as the primary language of the documentary was so cool to watch. I was curious what conversations were like in terms of editing and behind the scenes, trying to spotlight the language as the documentary’s primary language, which is very unique in terms of the documentary landscape. What were those conversations like? How did you go about making these editing choices?

STERN: I have to thank Marlee for a lot of this because when I found out that I was lucky enough to get this job, I did start researching a little bit. It didn’t really strike me until I had started doing research that the form of documentaries as we know it has been really rooted and based in sound. Because for so long, documentaries have been about hearing people, for hearing people. I kept thinking, how will I manage to reframe the form? There weren’t any comps at the time, and I kept thinking, how are we going to go about this? I knew that it was something that I was going to have to do, but I wasn’t sure how.

Then Marlee achieved another first. She became the first deaf person to get into the DGA, the Director’s Guild of America. So she was the first deaf person to direct an episode of network TV. So we were sent off right away to Toronto to go and film Marlee for a couple of weeks, right after I had gotten the job. I remember on the plane ride there thinking, how will I explain to my team? How am I going to explain these things to the editors? And then I don’t know, captions were kind of appearing in my mind, which I usually do think in captions, thanks to Marlee. So the captions kind of said, this film will show you who she needs to be. So once we landed, we filmed Marlee. That’s in the film, too. You see that in the Accused part of the film. So the film had kind of showed me what we needed to do. It was so nice that I was able to have that footage when we went to Toronto and to have Marlee and I talking. I was able to show that to the editors, and my editor understood right away what we needed to do.

We had talked about adding split-screen in there a little bit, and we were trying to figure out the format and the measurements, like how much black needed to be on the top and the bottom, how the screen would slide, what the speed of it [would be]. But honestly, the film gave us a lot of visual examples just from being able to be with Marlee while we were on set and just being who Marlee and I are. Like she said, we have a shared communication. We both communicate in American Sign Language. We had a deaf DP for our first shoot, and so he knew how to follow Sign Language and he knew how to frame the takes. So all of that was really nice.

With the scene that you mentioned of Marlee directing Lauren Ridloff in a scene of Accused, I thought that was a beautiful scene showing how you were able to communicate such a deep note to her that hearing directors haven’t been able to communicate to her in the past. Both now having directing credits under your belt, do you see yourselves taking on more director roles in the future or for upcoming projects? Do you still want to stay on screen? How do you feel after this experience?

MATLIN: I want to stay acting I think, for sure. Obviously that’s my first love. It’s always been my first love. But being in the position that I’m in, as well as Shoshannah—I don’t want to necessarily speak for her—but it’s pretty commonplace in terms of a path that we as deaf artists, whether we’re directors or authors or writers or actors or whatever, we have to sort of work two or three or four times harder to get work. To be accepted for our work. Whereas other people outside of our culture or outside of our community are still, I wouldn’t say necessarily afraid, but they’re hesitant to give u the job. It doesn’t happen that way. So I don’t have the luxury of being choosy about what I do and what I don’t do. I don’t necessarily take everything that I’m offered just for the hell of it. But I don’t have the flexibility that other people who are hearing in this industry, who have the luxury of being able to say no or yes. They have it easier than we do, or at least I do. So that being said, I mean, I’d love to direct again. To be honest, I have to follow my instinct if I’m directing again just because I want to direct and take a job. That’s not necessarily how it works. It’s something I want to make sure that I can do rather than just grab it. But, at the same time, yes, I want [Stern] to direct something I’m in on television because I’ll take her any time. The way that we work together, our working relationship is amazing, and I hope she agrees.

STERN: Oh yeah… Amazing isn’t even the right word. I don’t think that there’s a word for it, but I learned so much about myself as a director just watching how Marlee was. That was my first shoot when we went to Toronto, and it just happened to be Marlee directing for the first time, too. I mean, it was mind-blowing. So she really followed her instinct and her intuition, because I work mostly in TV as an actor, and I don’t usually get acting notes because a lot of times there’s no time. We’re hurrying, we’re getting through the scene. But then to be able to see Marlee direct, she knew what she needed to do because she was following her intuition, and she was able to give actors what she had always hoped to get. To be able to see Marlee working with Lauren Ridloff, or to be working with other Deaf actors on set, to have those one-on-one interactions. To see those, it was so emotional for me, and triggering too, because I was like wow, I’ve never been directed that way, the way that I saw Marlee direct on set. She really inspired me to make sure that I also follow my intuition. Even though we didn’t have that similar experience, but we have similar lived experiences. And yes, I would love to continue to direct. I would direct Marlee any day, and really anyone. Any Deaf actors. We need more of that. Deaf actors deserve that direct communication.

Marlee, you mentioned in the documentary that you didn’t “think Hollywood was ready for deaf actors” following Children of a Lesser God, and a conversation that kind of emerges in the documentary is why this film and play, after so many years, is kind of the sole story spotlighting the Deaf community, and that there haven’t been other stories told since then and you two really want these stories to be told. What kind of progress are you hoping for? Why do you think this is the case, that there haven’t been any other stories that have been put out there, and how do you think these stories can get told and can get made?

MATLIN: You know, it’s a very fair question. To the point where I’ve mentioned to people who are still hesitant to hear our stories, to hear our journeys, to learn about the experiences that would make great films, great television series, great plays. We’re talking about all different mediums, and I’ve mentioned that we need to use us to develop these ideas with people, not just from their hearing-based perspective having to do with Deaf stories. Those stories aren’t authentic. Children of a Lesser God continues to be the stage production, the premier one, that they only one. They’re just not open-minded enough to develop other stories. That’s basically it. Shoshannah, do you have any response to that?

STERN: I think one thing that I often talk about, especially during the making of this film, is a TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” What Marlee’s experience has been is like the danger of being the only one and the danger of our society focusing on being the first. Like I said in the film, being the first means being alone, and there is a lot of weight that that person is having to carry. Marlee has changed a lot. She’s grown a lot. I think that’s very clear in the documentary. She was so young. She was practically a baby when she first acted. And then to be able to carry that responsibility of being a spokesperson for the whole Deaf community, she carried that so well, of course with some pain. But stories don’t have the opportunity to grow. Stories reflect who’s telling them. I think this film, you can tell it’s told by a Deaf person. Stories can also reflect the time at which they were told.

But stories don’t have that opportunity to grow like people do. And so I think with Children of a Lesser God being the only story for almost 50 years now, really, there are a lot of values and perceptions that are still deeply rooted in that story, and I didn’t realize how harmful that those can be until Marlee and I had this conversation, which is in the film. We had these realizations, like a lot of conversations that I had with other people who were financers or other people giving perspective. There’s just not enough stories being told by Deaf people. The assumption is that if the story isn’t told by the majority or for the majority, then it won’t be accessible.

And the words “subjective” versus “objective.” Sometimes I feel like subjective means minority and objective means majority, and that’s not true. I keep telling people, one thing that deaf people always think about is accessibility. Always. It’s not like just because deaf people are telling a story about another Deaf person, then it’s not going to be accessible to the majority. That’s not the case. It’s going to be even more accessible than anyone would realize, and it’s acceptable from a different perspective than we’re used to seeing. Every story deserves to be told from several different perspectives. And so my hope now that we have this documentary, it can prove just how exciting accessibility can be. It doesn’t just have to be about the form itself, which is why I get so excited about art.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore will make its broadcast premiere at 9pm ET on October 14, 2025 on your local PBS channel.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.