Echo Director Says ASL “Dictated Our Entire Visual Style”

The post Echo Director Says ASL “Dictated Our Entire Visual Style” appeared first on Consequence.

The Disney+ series Echo is groundbreaking in a lot of respects — it’s the first Marvel Disney+ series to be rated TV-MA, the first series to be released under the “Marvel Spotlight” banner, and the first show to star an actor like Alaqua Cox, a Native woman who happens to be an incredible fighter, as well as deaf. It’s that latter thing which had a direct impact on how director/executive producer Sydney Freeland (Reservation Dogs, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Grey’s Anatomy) approached her episodes of Echo. To be specific, it changed Freeland’s definition of a close-up.

In Echo, Cox reprises the role of Maya Lopez, a character first introduced in Hawkeye: In the previous Disney+ series, Maya served as the leader of a gang called the Tracksuit Mafia, who had a longstanding connection with the notorious Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). However, following the death of her father (Zahn McClarnon), she returns home to reconnect with family and face her demons, discovering something new about herself along the way.

When Freeland got involved with Echo, she started taking American Sign Language (ASL) classes because she “wanted to have a basic foundation of being able to communicate with Alaqua,” she tells Consequence. In the process of learning the language, though, she came to understand that the words being signed by a person’s hands “are only half of what’s being communicated. The other part of what’s being communicated lies in your facial expressions, your body language, all of those things. You need both the signing and the facial expressions to get the full emotional intent of what’s being communicated.”

This meant that when the camera was on Cox for a close-up, those shots had to be wide enough to include both her facial expressions as well as her hands. “That became a close-up. And because that was a close-up for Alaqua Cox, that meant that was a close-up for everybody else. It actually ended up dictating our entire visual style.”

Freeland credits revelations like that to the level of representation Echo had both in front of and behind the camera. “Our character is Indigenous, but she’s also deaf. And so for myself, I’m Indigenous, but I’m not deaf. So that meant that we needed to have deaf writers in the writer’s room, and deaf consultants behind the scenes.” This included ASL master Doug Ridloff, who translated the scripts from English to ASL — “because as I came to learn, the two languages are not one-to-one, there’s actually an incredible amount of difference between the two.”

The series features a full opening credits sequence set to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Burning,” a theme song choice that Freeland tracks back to her original pitch for directing the series. “I included a playlist, and one of the songs was Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It wasn’t that specific song, but it initially was part of the creation and the prep of the project, and then organically presented itself later down the line in post.”

Freeland acknowledges music supervisor Dave Jordan and his team for their work on the show, but adds that “I think that song actually came from a direct relationship between Dave Porter, our composer — I believe he knows Karen O and presented the project to her, and then they came on board that way. So it definitely was a very exciting moment when we secured the song.”

Echo also stands out for its level of representation when it comes to Native actors, some of whom Freeland already knew from working on Reservation Dogs. “The Native filmmaking community has a tremendous amount of talent, but it is a relatively small community. For myself, growing up, seeing an Indigenous person on camera was like an event — you had the Mount Rushmore of Graham Green, Tantoo Cardinal, Irene Bedard and Wes Studi, and we very fortunately got to get half of those actors in our show,” Freeland says. “So I got to meet some childhood heroes, but at the same time, I also got to bring some personal friends onto the production as well, like Devery Jacobs and Cody Lightning. It was kind of the best of both worlds.”

Another creative choice inspired by Maya’s deafness is that the sound design occasionally drops out most of the audio you’d expect to see in a scene, creating what Freeland calls Maya’s “deaf POV” — because as Freeland explains, “one of the things that we tried to actively do was put the audience in the literal shoes of Maya Lopez, whenever possible.”

This is just one facet of the first episode’s standout fight sequence, a one-take six-minute battle that features an appearance by Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil. The focus, though, is on a pivotal moment of Maya’s backstory: “What I really loved about that scene on this page and in the script was that Maya Lopez came into that scene as a teenage girl, but then she left as a cold-blooded killer. So I really wanted the audience to be able to experience that transformation in real time, and see the change in her demeanor. That lent itself to us shooting it as a one-er, and then we were also able to incorporate her perspective as well.”

Getting to work with Cox was a pleasure, Freeland says, because she “absolutely adores” the Daredevil series originally produced for Netflix, and was impressed by how both he and D’Onofrio are “incredibly thoughtful actors that put a lot of time, care, and effort into the work that they do. A great example of that is actually the first time I met Charlie — they were doing reshoots for Daredevil and we popped over to meet him in between setups.”

Continues Freeland, “He said, ‘I have a question: If Daredevil is blind and Maya is deaf, how do they communicate?’ And myself, my producers, I think my A.D. was there — we all just sort of stopped. We were all kind of dumbfounded. And I was like, ‘We’re going to figure that out and we’ll come back to you,’ and we peeled off that conversation. That’s just a perfect illustration of how thoughtful Charlie Cox is. We had many conversations about that.”

To see how that question got answered on screen, you’ll have to watch Echo. All five episodes of the limited series premiere the evening of Tuesday, January 9th on Disney+.

Echo Director Says ASL “Dictated Our Entire Visual Style”
Liz Shannon Miller

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