‘Code of Silence’ Writer Catherine Moulton: Lip Readers Are Detectives

When you watch the crime drama Code of Silence, which premiered on ITV and streamer ITVX  in the U.K. on May 18 and will hit streaming service BritBox in the U.S. and Canada in July, you quickly realize that lip reading is even harder, and much less of a science, than you may have believed. One big reason for this reality check embedded throughout the detective thriller series is the experience of partially deaf creator and writer Catherine Moulton (Baptiste, Hijack) and the show’s deaf star Rose Ayling-Ellis who portrays the protagonist Alison, a deaf police canteen worker who gets tasked with a role in a sting operation due to her lip-reading skills.

“People are always looking for new ways into crime shows,” Moulton tells THR. “And it just sort of made sense to me that lip readers are detectives. So to have a crime show with a lip reader at the heart was just something that felt very personal to me.”

The show, executive produced by Bryony Arnold and Damien Timmer for ITV Studios’ Mammoth Screen, alongside Robert Schildhouse and Stephen Nye for BritBox, as well as Ayling-Ellis and Moulton, also features Kieron Moore (Vampire Academy, Masters of the Air, The Corps), Charlotte Ritchie (You, Ghosts), and Andrew Buchan (Black Doves, The Honourable Woman, Broadchurch).

Moulton talked to THR about the inspiration for the series, the origin of its title, and her hopes for addressing misconceptions about lip-reading.

Could you share a little bit about what inspired you to create and write Code of Silence?

I’m partially deaf, and I have been since childhood. Kind of like Alison, I I just picked up lip-reading. I just taught myself naturally, and it came quite instinctively. I didn’t really know how I was doing it. Then, a few years ago, I wanted to understand more about it and get better at it. So I had lip-reading lessons, and I learned more about the theory. The statistic is that between 30 and 40 percent of speech is visible on the lips, and that’s the best case scenario, when we’re sitting looking at each other, and I can see you clearly. The rest of it is just very informed guesswork. You’re looking at people’s body language, you’re taking things from the context of what you know about them, the situation that you’re in, and even the rhythm of speech. And you’re putting all those clues together to work out what the sentence is. So there’s a lot going on.

If I have to spend a whole day relying on lip-reading, I get very, very tired. It’s really a lot of work. People are always looking for new ways into crime shows, and it just sort of made sense to me that lip readers are detectives. So to have a crime show with a lip reader at the heart just felt right, and it was something that was very personal to me.

How did you come up with the title Code of Silence. I love that it has a couple of layers and meanings…

It came very early on. I always find with titles, either you get them straight away, or you’re forever changing it. This just felt thriller-y and tells you that you’re getting a thriller. But it’s also [a reference] to lip-reading. Lip-reading is a silent code, so that’s what the show is about.

As a viewer, you learn a lot about lip-reading and its challenges. For example, Alison asks in one scene if the police can zoom in on someone’s face in a video. Or in another scene, she asks someone to turn to her while speaking. How did you approach integrating these issues into the script?

The trickiest thing was marrying the kind of the information we needed to get in for the thriller and mystery story with the reality of lip-reading. [Lead director] Diarmuid [Goggins] has done such a brilliant job, because there was a version that could have looked really bad where either you definitely can’t see the lip shapes, or they are weirdly always looking at the camera really conveniently. But Diarmuid has done it so brilliantly that it really works.

You draw viewers into that idea of lip-reading as detective work that you have mentioned in scenes where Alison pieces together lip movements and we see letters appearing and moving around on screen until they end up forming a sentence or phrase. I felt so frustrated following these puzzles and gained additional respect for lip-reading because I often couldn’t figure out what was being said until the words were shown on screen. I assume you wanted us to feel this stress…

Yeah, I wanted to put the audience in the position of a lip reader, and for them to understand how difficult it is, and how tiring. I think there’s this misconception that lip-reading is just like reading a book – you just magically see all the words. And I don’t think people really understand quite how much work lip readers are doing. So, I’m glad you felt stressed.

Catherine Moulton

How did you think about balancing this educational aspect and the entertainment focus of your show?

It was really important to me that the show was entertaining and that you could just watch it and be entertained. It’s hopefully a really good crime story. I love detective shows. I’ve grown up watching them, and I really love mainstream crime drama. With Code of Silence, what I wanted to do was just think about how to put someone with some of my experience and some of Rose’s experience in a crime show. Obviously, there are elements that we’ve seen before, like surveillance shows and heist shows. But if you put a very different character, like Alison, at the heart of it, what does that do to the story? How does that change it? Hopefully, that makes it feel fresher.

What was the biggest challenge as a writer on the show?

The biggest challenge was definitely making the lip-reading realistic and difficult, but also making sure that we were getting enough of the right beats of the crime story at the right point. so that people could understand what was going on and wanted to know more. And the lip-reading subtitles kind of evolved even in post-production.

Obviously, it was quite an unusual script in a way, because there was the scene you’re seeing on camera, Rose with the police, and what she’s able to see, but then we had to also write the scene that was happening in the background – the scene of the crime gang and what they’re saying to each other. So there was a lot of trying to balance what they would really be saying and what we wanted to reveal. So it was different from any other crime show that I’ve worked on.

What feedback did Rose give on her experience that led you to adjust the script?

Rose, I think, was brilliant when we got to finalizing the lip-reading subtitles in that she was very, very focused on the authenticity of the moment and what we can actually see on screen. What lit patterns are there? What can we work with? Whereas I was kind of juggling that with what the audience needs to know. So, she really kept me honest in that respect. Sometimes it was just really great to have someone else who is a brilliant lip reader on the show. A lot of the time it was us just going: Oh, can I actually see that on screen? Or do I just know that I wrote that line?

Did you always know Alison would be someone who gets a chance to work with the police?

It started from that thing about lip readers being detectives, and then the idea that lip readers have to watch all the time. You have to watch very closely, so that suggested a surveillance show. And because she’s deaf, it feels unlikely that she would be a police officer, and I didn’t think she should be a criminal. So she was obviously going to be a civilian [who ends up working with the police.]

I caught myself rooting for Alison early on because everyone seems to doubt her but she is ambitious, and you want to see her succeed. What can you share about why you chose to make her so driven and not, as you could have done, a more passive character who gets dragged into a big role?

I didn’t want that character to feel like a victim. That’s not how Rose is. That’s not how I am. We don’t see ourselves as victims,. We’re kind of happy with who we are and being deaf, so I never wanted to make Alison any kind of victim. She had to be an active character.

I did want you to both be rooting for her to succeed and to worry. At the start, she’s not where she wants to be in her life. And she’s running between two jobs, and when she gets this opportunity with the police to use her skill that often goes unrecognized, she grabs onto it with both hands. But I wanted you to worry a little bit about how far she would push that, because you see that she’s got something to prove.