Echo: “In our Marvel series, people can bleed and get killed!”

Director and producer, Sydney Freeland explains to us why Echo, the Hawkeye spin-off dedicated to Maya Lopez and which has just been launched on Disney Plus, is not quite a Marvel series like the others.

FIRST: Echo doesn’t feel like a typical Marvel series. It’s almost a thriller set in the depths of Oklahoma, within a Native American community. Is that what you tried to do?
Sydney Freeland : We tried to have the most authentic approach possible. By that I mean Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) is a hearing-impaired Native American woman. So we made sure to have Native Americans and hard of hearing people in front of and behind the camera. There were deaf native people in the writing room to work on the scripts, we used Native American consultants on set, and also Native American actors. Authenticity already started from there.

But the tone of the series is different from ordinary Marvel series. There is something harsher in Echo…
Maya Lopez was a villain in Hawkeye. And that’s the thing that particularly interested me. This is the aspect that I wanted to explore. And at Marvel, I was told to go all out, to push the boundaries of the saga. So I didn’t hesitate to scratch this darker aspect. As a result, the series is a little more visceral, a little more violent as well, than the other Marvel series. And that was the goal. In Echo, the characters are not immortal or from another universe. They can bleed, get killed. When they die, they just die. There are real consequences.

Maya is a deaf heroine. What does this bring to the series?
This brings so much! It influenced our entire visual aesthetic to begin with. With my teams, we first took sign language lessons, to familiarize ourselves with the hearing-impaired culture and the hearing-impaired community. We learned the importance of the face. Because in the voice, when we speak, there are the words and the tone we give them. Sign language reveals the words. And it’s the face that sets the tone. The entire production was therefore oriented in this direction. So that we film both the hands signing, but also the faces, in close-up. All the visual style ofEcho comes from there.

Echo, in 5 episodes, to watch on Disney Plus since January 10, 2024.