The History of Sound follows Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor) as their relationship moves through cities and memories—from Boston and Maine to Rome, Oxford and the English Lake District. Director Oliver Hermanus framed the film around music and small sounds, and that focus influenced where the production shot each sequence.
Budget and tax incentives shaped many location choices. Though the story is set across Kentucky, Maine, Italy, England and Boston, roughly 75 percent of the film was shot in New Jersey. Hermanus says locations are often chosen for financial reasons as much as for look; states like Georgia or New Jersey offer tax incentives and a wide variety of landscapes that let a crew create multiple worlds without constant travel.
New Jersey doubled for a surprising range of places. The team scouted the real settings first—Boston, coastal Maine, even Malaga Island—then found or built NJ sites that matched the desired textures. Hoboken streets and bars stood in for Boston; Maine train stations, Boston interiors and apartments were recreated there. For the Kentucky farmhouse, production built a ramshackle house on farmland and used camera coverage to hide a nearby highway. A particularly convenient discovery was a Tudor-style stone house in New Jersey that had been shipped and rebuilt more than a century earlier by an industrialist—its architecture and gardens made a convincing exterior for an Oxford parents’ home.
Some locations could not be faked and required travel. The Lake District and Italy were shot on location. A sequence originally written for the Alps became a Lake District scene after budget considerations; both the director and writer Ben Shattuck had lived briefly in the Lakes, so it felt authentic. Production used Google Earth to locate a remote stone cottage high above a lake. Reaching it meant ferrying crew and gear in 4x4s up a rough ravine; the day of shooting was intense but essential for the film’s visual finish. The shoot ended with a modest wrap party on a narrow jetty—where, by accident, someone dropped a JBL speaker into the water.
In Europe, the crew spent a week in Tarquinia, just outside Rome, taking over the town square and dressing it to evoke 1920s Italy. The location was familiar to Josh O’Connor, who had filmed La Chimera there, demonstrating how the same place can serve different cinematic worlds.
Location scouts played a crucial creative role. They drove regionally in search of places the production could shape. For a scene in which Lionel returns home and observes neighbors singing on a porch, scouts found an abandoned resort with wooden cottages that already looked like they could be from Kentucky. The production restored and repainted one of the houses to fit the film’s color palette—an example of how location work and production design combine to create a convincing place.
Malaga Island appears in the story because its history resonated thematically. When expanding the Maine episode, Hermanus and Shattuck wanted to trace musical influences that traveled north from the American South. Malaga Island was a multi‑generational community that was displaced when the state sold the land and removed its residents; that narrative paralleled Hermanus’s own background in South Africa, where forced removals and land seizures affected his family. The island’s story added historical weight and personal resonance to the film.
Music and sound drive the film’s emotional logic. Hermanus and Shattuck researched songs tied to each setting, treating folk songs and oral traditions as narrative elements that anchor memory and place. Beyond music, the production treated ambient and microscopic sounds as meaningful: foley ASMR became part of the aesthetic. Clothing rustle, footsteps, a match strike or the breath of a character were carefully re‑recorded and mixed so small noises could carry emotional weight—sometimes a match was mixed louder than it would be in real life to draw attention.
Sound was also used to suggest time and authenticity. The sound team researched which birds might have been heard in Kentucky in a given season, historical weather patterns, and even the way older houses whistle when wind moves through gaps in slats. Italian background layers included cicadas and the distant thuds of people beating carpets on balconies. These tiny, often subconscious elements help orient viewers in place and period.
Ultimately, The History of Sound creates its world through a mix of careful location work, production design and meticulous soundcraft. Many settings were imagined in New Jersey, while essential moments required travel to England and Italy. The film’s attention to music and small sounds underlines its central idea: our lives are scored by the songs and noises that carry memory, meaning and comfort.
The History of Sound is now streaming on Mubi.