Echo used deaf creative team to 'inject authenticity' into new Marvel show
Echo director Sydney Freeland speaks to Yahoo UK about the forthcoming Disney+ series, which follows deaf anti-hero Maya Lopez after the events of Hawkeye.
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00:00 Compared to Hawkeye, we get to see, you know, Maya communicate a lot more.
00:04 There's a lot more deaf representation and her, like, friends in her hometown all use sign language as well.
00:09 And I wanted to ask, you know, what was it like for you to make a narrative that was more inclusive,
00:14 but also how did the cast kind of prepare for the roles?
00:18 I think one of the first things that I did and my department heads did,
00:23 and our crew really, when I first started prep, is that we all started taking American Sign Language classes.
00:28 And there were so many great positive consequences that came out of that.
00:32 You know, it actually ended up influencing our entire visual style.
00:35 We're speaking and I'm vocalizing and the words coming out of my mouth are the text.
00:41 But the way that I'm kind of talking to you is a subtext, right?
00:44 Like, if you ask me, "How are you?" and I said, "I'm fine."
00:48 That's the text, right?
00:50 But if I said, "I'm fine," the subtext is, "I'm not."
00:54 You know, and so one of the things that we all learned is that in sign language, signing and the signing, that's the text.
01:02 And then the face is the subtext, right?
01:07 It's the expression, it's the emotion, it's how much emotion you see in your face.
01:11 But you need this and this to be able to get the full emotional context of what's being communicated, right?
01:17 We had deaf writers, we had deaf consultants behind the scenes, we had deaf actors.
01:22 And the other thing that we tried to incorporate was ASL proficiency, right?
01:28 So among the family members, you see a wide variety of basically fluency.
01:33 Bonnie is just signing and she's not speaking, right?
01:37 But you have somebody like the elders, you have like Graham Green and Chula.
01:45 I don't know if Chula signs by episode three, but they kind of sign a little bit slower and they do what's called simcomming.
01:51 So they sign and they speak at the same time, but it's a little bit slower, it's a little bit stilted.
01:58 But that was something that we tried to sort of build into our narrative.
02:02 You know, as what we found out, again, with our deaf writers, deaf consultants and people behind the scenes.
02:08 And we tried to inject authenticity into the film art.
02:11 We tried to inject authenticity into the series wherever we could.
02:14 [silence]