Peter Hoffman Kimball On His All-Signed ASL Films

by Chris Stewart 06.2025

In his student years, along with studying film, Peter Hoffman Kimbball earned a degree in German studies. This intersection of disciplines makes it less surprising that his first feature length film as a writer-director, I'll Sleep When You're Dead, an ASL-language dark comedy about a mild-mannered accountant calmly auditing his own plan to commit murder, opens with a Goethe quote.

“I really like that quote, ‘All guilt is avenged on earth,’” Peter tells me. “If you think of a framework of mercy and forgiveness, there's this sort of sense in that quote that there's time for justice and mercy in the life to come, but if you're gonna get vengeance you need to get it now.” 

Kimball, like many independent filmmakers, knows that where you are matters. He likes to think of Robert Rodriguez coming up in Austin in the 1990s. When I mention having heard that Rodriguez sold his blood to finance early projects like From Dusk Till Dawn, Kimball smiles. He doesn't happen to be that particular brand of driven. His wife, children, and teaching screenwriting at George Mason university fill up time and then some. But he admires directors who can work to scale and turn constraints into benefits. And who can operate where they are.

For Kimball, that means Washington, D.C. “You know, there are a lot of documentaries and social issue films here, which is great, and they tend to do well.” But Kimball also sees an opportunity for other projects that may incorporate equally meaningful ideas into genres sometimes overlooked by awards bodies. “Me, I'm interested in dark fiction, speculative fiction,” Kimball says. For many talented deaf actors, ready for the rare role whose characterization gives them more to chew on than reductively representing deafness as an inherent struggle, this resonates. The DC area, not often labeled a hub of independent film, is a keen resource for Kimball.

Home to Gallaudet University, the world's oldest and largest bilingual English and ASL higher learning institution, DC has a flourishing Deaf theater scene. I ask Kimball about how that's shaped the casting pipeline.

“There's theater, definitely. Commercials. You can do a casting call or you can reach out. With casting, it's an interesting dance, but at the end of the day I know that people want to work on something that's not a chore, something where the director has real enthusiasm and interest for the project.”

Father to a deaf son, Kimball's networking world can bring happy surprises. Learning ASL with his wife and engaging with the Deaf community, he met Gary Brooks, a Deaf producer, whose partnership has been critical on projects including I'll Sleep When You're Dead, and Kimball's award-winning short film Millstone, which I watched play to a thrilled reception at the James River Short Film Showcase at the VMFA in January. It took the evening's top prize. 

Millstone, a taut psychological short, was a chance for Kimball to explore dark themes, and speculative, Charlie Kaufman-esque narrative playfulness. All while presenting an ASL-language film that would neither sacrifice story for authenticity, nor authenticity for story.

“I wanted these to be films for a general audience that show deaf people having complicated lives,” Kimball says. 

Millstone takes the audience into knotty, untidy moral territory, with the deafness of the characters taken as a given. With limited scale and efficient plotting in mind, his references were not Hollywood's handful of films centered on Deaf characters, but taut thrillers that make use of limitations to tell good stories. “There's a film called Coherence that I just think is such a great example of science fiction and big twists but it's just a bunch of friends in a house. It's a movie that does such a great job working with its constraints.”

Additionally, there are considerations unique to making ASL-language films. Kimball brought in Gary Books as his on-set ASL consultant. The structure, choice of shots, and directorial grammar were all part of the approach to telling this story in a way that would suit Deaf and hearing audiences. Some of this process makes simple intuitive sense: keep a score in for the hearing audiences but ensure that the plot's structure and performances build and cue sympathy, tension, and resolutions equally impactfully without it. 

Other considerations got more into the nitty-gritty. “The dialogue takes a little longer in sign than in spoken English. We intentionally had a fixed camera. The shots are pretty static which was an intentional choice so that the signing would always be visible.” Planning has to begin at a script level. “Spoken dialogue in a film, well that's not very visual, so its important for the camera or the editing to be doing something interesting. But here, because there's this visual representation of what they're saying, we could simplify the shots. That helped keep the length of production down.”

Kimball has now completed projects that have run the range of production experiences: from his sports documentary Deaf Giants to several shorts including Millstone, to a feature-length revenge comedy, I'll Sleep When You're Dead. Previous shorts My Brother is Deaf and Shenanigans have played – and picked up nominations and prizes - at dozens of film festivals in the US, Canada, and abroad. By the time he was working on Millstone, he was able to reach out to Gallaudet alumni Daniel Durant, who starred in 2021's Best Picture winner“CODA.

Still, Kimball derives a lot from working to scale. For him, the demands of working on a small budget project begin with writing. You can't wait until you're scouting locations, decorating sets, or considering a score to realize that your material doesn't suit your resources. You've either written something that can accomplish what it needs to with what the resources at hand, or you haven't. What needs to be done, needs to be done in the here and now. Goethe would be proud.