Everyone Was Listening: The Cast And Crew Who Summoned A Film’s Disturbing Voice

There was a moment, as the police car was being demolished, when it dawned on the crew: capturing sound was going to be a major problem. Gabby Thomas — the actress playing Taylor, an enigmatic con artist moonlighting as a model — was tasked with breaking all the windows with a baseball bat. But an unseasonably intense blizzard forced them into a single take. And with the sound crew having already fled home to safety, they were left with only in-camera audio.

“Too soft and the windows won’t break. Too hard and the bat might bounce back and hit you. You said you played softball in high school, right?” Tim Shea yelled to Gabby over the howling snowstorm wind, adjusting Gabby’s safety goggles. “Not technically, no”, she replied deadpan. They paused for a beat, then improvised: “Just dial into Taylor’s frequency. Lean in to how she’d handle this situation, and then just go.”

Tim Shea — writer and director of the sleeper indie hit Pieces of Amy — returns often to this idea of frequency. “On one hand, you’re asking a group of strangers to tune into this headspace you wrote — the characters, the beats, the tone. But at the same time, there’s this other frequency, this almost supernatural disturbance that descends on a production. Weird things start happening, like how wild animals sense an earthquake before it hits. The real trick is staying tuned into both: the story and the chaos. That’s how you make it through in one piece. And luckily for us, everyone was listening.”

Everyone Was Listening

The process of creation is often described by artists as a form of tuning into invisible frequencies — signals, feelings, or ideas that exist beyond the surface of everyday life. “Part of the work as an artist is honing your radar to figure out which signals are important and which are noise,” says Shea, reflecting on the process. That idea extended beyond just the actors and camera — it shaped the work of the sound team at Squeak E. Clean Studios, who transformed Pieces of Amy from a rough cut with no temp sound into the sumptuous soundscape and musical score that pulses through it today.

“It becomes a game of: how do you visualize a sound?” says sound mixer Chris Nungary. “At first, we’re just watching the movement on screen — before we put a first coat of paint on it — we’re seeing movement on screen and putting on a first layer of sound. But it’s totally different once you see the actors perform. Suddenly, you’re dialed into the little things they do. An actor might drop their shoulders just as they lean into the scariest part of a story - and that’s my cue to drop out all the background sound, so the audience gets fully pulled in.”

The idea of tuning into another dimension becomes fully realized in Shelby Parks’ staggering performance as Amy, the haunted protagonist at the center of the film. A young woman who becomes possessed by her own demons, Amy is on the run from herself, and from a mysterious black silhouette that stalks her infinitely nested dreams. For Parks, the challenge was pulling audiences into the fractured inner world of a woman battling her inner demons while becoming convinced she’s being followed.

“Acting for me is like following a single thread of string in a dark forest,” Parks says. “It could branch off in a million places, in a million ways. You just have to sense it. I’m channeling something that’s from someplace else when I find it. With the character of Amy, I felt an instant grip on that thread. It felt more like a rope — like reconnecting with a past life even. It was easy for me to tap into her and bring her voice to the surface. And once I’m tapped in and surrounded by incredible scene partners I trust, by the time the takes start, I’m just listening and living in her mind. And if the magic of the world is there (and it was) you get totally lost in it.”

While Amy’s descent pulls us into a surreal, internal world, the emotional anchor of the film is her older brother, Brian, played with quiet intensity by K.C. Wolf. He’s the last person trying to keep her tethered to reality, but the more he tries to protect her, the more it drives a wedge between them. With their mother mysteriously kidnapped, Brian steps up as the family’s reluctant caretaker - until his patience finally cracks. Striking the right chord between tough love and overbearing jerk was a delicate balancing act.

“I like to stay open,” he says of crafting the sibling relationship that forms the film’s emotional core — a dynamic that deftly walks the line between comedic, tender, and quietly devastating. “It’s a discovery. You sort of find these things. If you’re paying attention, you’ll find it.”

“I loved everyone’s commitment to locking in,” says Shea. “When you’re writing, you lose the scent a lot, so I’ve got these ambient drone playlists on repeat, trying to keep all layers of the script together in my head. And then you fast forward, you’re on set trying to convince people like ‘we don’t want the audience to know whether they’re watching a horror or a thriller, until the last scene when they realize it’s a documentary’ and people are just staring at you like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But everyone would just dial it in and we’d go. The actors would come back with these crazy stories about how they prepared for the scene, and I’d think, ‘Yes. They get it!’”

Katherine Smith-Rodden — who plays Erin, the lonely mountain-town sweetheart convinced she’s being followed by something — describes one of her own preparation rituals: “I get very self-conscious going for walks. So I’ll act like I’m on the phone. I’ll put in my headphones and I’ll have a conversation with whoever I think Erin would be talking to. It’s an effective way to prepare because you vocalize it.”

Despite the chaos, the cast and crew were locked into the film’s dual frequencies: the internal one (the emotional truth of the characters) and the external one, the strange disturbance that hovered over the production like a fog. Instead of fighting it, they embraced it. Freak snowstorms shut down the mountain town, car wrecks disrupted the schedule, and wild animals emerged from the woods like omens. “It was literally like one of those stories where animals start scrambling before an earthquake,” Shea says. Even the weather refused to cooperate. Two feet of snow fell overnight, only to melt two days later, leaving continuity in ruins. But somehow, the instability fed the psychological horror, as if nature itself were conspiring to fracture reality.

And then there was the nosebleed. On the day they shot a fight between two girls, Gabby Thomas bled spontaneously in the final take. “I was just so tapped into the moment,” she says. “My heart was pumping so hard, my nose just started bleeding like crazy.” Shea remembers yelling cut, unsure if someone had been actually injured. “I thought maybe there was a puncture wound or something. Everyone was so locked in: Gabby, the stunt team, the camera guys. We were focused on the choreography, on the emotional reality. And when I saw the blood, I thought I might have to rush her to the hospital. But it was just... the signal. She was completely tapped in.”

It was clear: everyone was listening.

To read more about Pieces of Amy, including interviews with cast and crew, click the link below:

https://www.ninesevenentertainment.com/pieces-of-amy-nylon-everyone-was-listening

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.