A Collaborative Voice: Director Amber Sealey on Helping 'Out of My Mind’s Nonverbal Protagonist Be Heard

Twelve-year-old Melody Brooks loves sparkly dresses, the TV show Friends, her pet goldfish, and lots of minutiae about history and geography.

She’d impress so many people with her quick wit and recall if they bothered to listen.

The protagonist of the new Disney+ film Out of My Mind, Melody has cerebral palsy (CP), a group of neurological disorders that affect muscle coordination, movement, and often the ability to speak. Played by newcomer Phoebe-Rae Taylor, who also has CP, Melody uses a motorized wheelchair and communicates with the help of a board depicting pictures and common words. She yearns to say so much more, especially when people tend to talk around her.

Debuting this month, the film adapts Sharon M. Draper’s 2012 best-selling book about the often-underestimated Melody, who expands her horizons through a mainstream sixth-grade classroom and a text-to-speech device called a Medi-Talker. The beloved middle-grade novel spawned two popular sequels, Out of My Heart and Out of My Dreams, released this year.

While her disability presents challenges, Melody’s story is a universal one about finding one’s voice. Here, director Amber Sealey shares how she and screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman used voiceover, action, and editing to develop her voice and empathize with her.

“Other people … they hang on you with their eyes,” the character says in the film, also noting, “I’m not fragile. …. Yeah, I need a push sometimes, but I won’t be pushed around.”

Research and Brainstorming for an Authentic Experience

An award-winning filmmaker and a fellow of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women, Sealey (No Man of God) said she at first hesitated to take on the project. “My first thought was, I don’t have lived experience with CP, so I don’t know that I should be the director for this. And then I realized that what I did relate to was the plight of Chuck and Diane, the parents in the story, and having to fight for and advocate for their children. I do have that experience of having to fight schools and teachers and administrations for my children to get things that they are legally supposed to be getting for, you know, learning differences and things like that. I know how painful and expensive that process is. And so that was my sort of inroad.”

Out of My Mind co-stars Rosemarie DeWitt (The Boys) and Luke Kirby (Dr. Death) as Melody’s parents. Michael Chernus (Severance) plays the biased teacher of Melody’s mainstream classroom. Courtney Taylor (Abbott Elementary) plays a compassionate advocate, and Tony- and Emmy-winner Judith Light (Shining Vale) appears as an adoring yet no-nonsense neighbor.

Research and talking to other people with CP bolstered Sealey’s interest and commitment to tell Melody’s story accurately. The production and development teams included multiple people with experience with CP and augmentative and alternative communication devices (AACs).

Sealey also worked closely with Stiepleman (On the Basis of Sex), brainstorming ideas throughout development, filming, and post-production about how Melody might express herself. Melody is a first-person narrator in the novels, but the two shied away from relying solely on voiceover narration. Taylor’s expressive face and eyes skillfully convey the girl’s joys and frustrations, but the filmmakers also wanted to give viewers a sense of Melody’s mindset.

One way to accomplish this is through close-ups of the image and word panels from the communication board when Melody is upset, intercut with her slapping her wheelchair table for attention: “No. Don’t. Hear. Me. Need. Say/Talk.”

Sealey thought of this during editing. “I just felt like she’s grown up with this communication board,” she said. “Those images are like second nature to her, so when she wants to say, ‘Stop,’ that image is probably just blaring in her mind.”

Melody in the book often muses about how her voice might sound, though, so they couldn’t avoid narration altogether. They discussed Melody “borrowing” her mom’s or dad’s voice, or voices from TV, such as Oprah Winfrey or Dolly Parton, before learning that Taylor adores Friends. She even had the iconic purple door with its empty yellow frame in her bedroom.

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Amusingly, although Taylor was named after Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe, the young performer’s favorite “Friend” is Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel, Sealey said. So, the filmmakers pitched Aniston the idea of being Melody’s inner voice. She happily agreed. As Melody explains in the opening moments, “I have no idea what my voice would sound like, so I can sound like whoever I want.”

Much of the voiceover came together in post-production, with additional input from Sealey’s daughter (who also voices the Medi-Talker). Her daughter at Melody’s age loved to list various likes and dislikes, so Melody’s narration does, too, sandwiching the poignant among the sweet. She likes the sound her chair makes when it goes fast, wants to put on mascara without poking herself in the eye, hates pity, and loves learning about outer space.

“It was a really playful, fun process of getting to figure out, What is her voice? What does it sound like? And what is she saying in her mind?” Sealey said.

Finding Characters’ Voices Through Listening

Whether through the voiceover or the Medi-Talker, by the film’s end, Melody’s voice rings true. Her character has a confidence and agency all her own.

So does every character. “One of the great things that I learned early on in my research or this film was that one person with a disability is just that: One person with a disability. There’s no way to speak for all disabilities or all people with CP. And it was really important to me that we were never trying to do that,” Sealey said.

“This film is speaking for my particular vision of who Melody is, not even necessarily for whom Sharon Draper, the book’s author, thought Melody was or whom Daniel Stiepleman thought Melody was. These are each their own mediums. All we can do is make the version of Melody that we think she is, and hopefully, it’s authentic and compelling enough that people will be drawn in.”

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That said, Sealey feels honored that Out of My Mind can inspire more empathy and understanding about disabilities and advocacy, thanks to the care and research from various sources.

She emphasized that the most important way for other writers and directors to add their voices and visions to a project is to start by listening. “Take the time to listen to the voices in the room that were there already. Don’t necessarily think that that you know better, that you can make it better. Take the time to appreciate what was already in the space before you got there.”

Out of My Mind is now available exclusively on Disney+.