Jasper Martin: making comedy out of AI customer-service hell

Jasper Martin is a writer‑director who has turned a familiar modern annoyance — the AI customer‑service hotline — into Listen Then Repeat, a short that starts as comedy and slides into something darker. The film follows a woman locked out of her email as she wrestles with an automated helpline; Martin wrote the first draft in 2022 and took about three years to bring it to screen, he told Directors Notes.

Working with a tight kit, Martin leaned into constraints. The piece plays out almost entirely in one room, with a single on‑screen performer, Ruby Blinkhorn, and the disembodied AI voice. Martin told Directors Notes the production made the exchange feel live: production assistant Cameron Greenlees manned cueing software in another room so the AI could be improvised in response to Ruby in real time.

Martin also edited the film himself and leaned on collaborators named in the interview: Julian Pertout shaped a two‑part visual plan (handheld, claustrophobic day scenes; steadier night scenes shot through a mirror) and composer James Tate supplied a percussive, anxiety‑tinged score that Martin says became the film’s "momentum engine." Casting came from familiarity — Martin had seen Blinkhorn perform live and wanted her to improvise and "dirty up" the dialogue for authentic stammering and mistakes.

"Stammering and struggling to find the right word and string a sentence together is what ultimately makes us human," Martin told Directors Notes.

He frames the short as a warning about fragile infrastructure: "This film is a cautionary tale about placing your trust in amorphous infrastructure," he said. Martin also mentioned a new short, No River Runs Here, and feature projects in development.

Read the full Directors Notes interview for a behind‑the‑scenes look at how Martin, Blinkhorn, Pertout and Tate built a funny, claustrophobic film out of an all‑too‑modern frustration.