Maxance Vincent
Marvel’s Echo broke new ground by being the first MCU title to be headlined by a deaf and Native American actor in Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez. It also tells her story through the lens of Indigenous filmmakers and writers, including director Sydney Freeland, who is best known for her work in helping 2014’s Drunktown’s Finest and episodes of Reservation Dogs.
Awards Radar recently recently spoke to Freeland, who directed most of Echo‘s five episodes. During our interview, we talked about the show’s stylistic approach, how its TV-MA rating came about, changing Maya Lopez’s (Alaqua Cox) ancestral roots from Cheyenne to Choctaw, and collaborating with Vincent D’Onofrio and Charlie Cox on bringing Kingpin and Daredevil to Maya’s story.
Read the full conversation below:
Thematically and stylistically, this is a different, more grounded, and darker series we’ve seen from Marvel Studios. I guess the first question I have for you is, how did you want to set the visual approach for the series so it would stand apart from anything else in the MCU before?
Much of it was leaning into the character’s aspects and background. If you look at the Hawkeye series, it’s a little bit lighter in tone and more tongue-in-cheek, but the actual character of Maya Lopez, AKA Echo, is much darker. She’s a lieutenant in Kingpin’s underground army. To me, that’s the part that was the most interesting. In talking with Marvel early on, it was always the fact that she was a villain, which was the most interesting part about her, and I wanted to lean into that. Their response was, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s lean into it. Let’s go down that rabbit hole, let’s see how far we can push things.”
Was it always the intention to make it TV-MA? How did that come about?
I will say we didn’t know it was going to be TV-MA. We wanted it to be grounded, gritty, and violent, but the central question was always how far can we push that? I’d be lying if I said I knew it would be TV-MA. It came from us trying to push things as far as we can go, and we landed on TV-MA, which is pretty fun to me.
Some changes were made to Maya’s powers and origins from the comics to the show. Can you talk about why those changes were made and in Maya’s connection with the Choctaw nation?
Of course. I think it was interesting because if you look at the first Daredevil run with her in the comic books, the character is introduced as Cheyenne or Blackfeet. Being Native, I look at the initial Daredevil run, and it’s beautifully illustrated. There’s a lot of beautiful imagery, but it’s all just there, it’s kind of arbitrary.
As an Indigenous and reading the Daredevil comic books, you can see the imagery inspired by the Six Nations in New York or the Ancestral Pueblo in the Southwest US, but there are not a lot of specifics. By the time I came on board, we had Choctaw writers in the writers’ room, and the character evolved to become Choctaw because we had that specificity and lived experience. Once we knew she was Choctaw, that dictated everything. Then, it was all about leaning into the specificities of the language, the culture, the traditions, and all of that. The character was already Choctaw when I came on board, and one of the first things we did was go to the Choctaw Nation and present the project to them in its very early stages.
This is not typical with Indigenous stories. It’s usually an afterthought. People come in and say, “Oh, I wrote this story about a Lakota person, you seem Lakota, will you read it, sign off, and give it a thumbs up?” But when we went to the Choctaw Nation, we immediately said that we had a Choctaw character as lead, and we wanted to embrace the language, culture, and tradition and create a dialogue with them instead of telling them what we would do.
Alaqua Cox is absolutely incredible in this show. Can you discuss how the two of you wanted to shape the journey she was going through in this series? Because she’s definitely not the same from the end of Hawkeye to this show.
Alaqua Cox is a phenomenal force of nature. I’m a huge fan. It was about getting over the acting learning curve early because her total acting experience coming into Echo was a few days on Hawkeye. To go from that to number one on the call sheet and being the lead of an entire Marvel series that shoots for over 90 days is a huge ask of even the most experienced actor. We first tried to make her feel comfortable and then allowed her to invent, explore, and create within her character. We tried to provide some guidance on that. But once she realized what it was all about, you lean into your instincts and intuition with the story we’re trying to tell. The proof is in the pudding, and she absolutely rose to the challenge for the show in an amazing way. I felt very fortunate I got to be there in the front row. There were tapes where I’d be there watching – we’d be in the monitor, going, “Are you guys f—king seeing this? She’s amazing!”
I really like the opening scene of episode two, set in 1200 AD, where Lowak plays stickball. There’s a specific stylistic choice that, I think, adds a lot of scale to that whole sequence, which is when the aspect ratio changes before the game begins. Can you talk about crafting that particular scene as a whole?
I don’t know if I’ve ever discussed this, but that was a happy accident. We had obviously planned for something with scope and scale to shoot in a specific way. We were working with a variety of lens packages. Many of them had a wide-angle, fisheye look to them, similar to what they had in The Revenant. We were going to use it for very specific purposes throughout that scene. On the day of the shoot, we did one shot that was with our planned lens package. It was like longer lenses and everything. My DP, Kira Kelly, approached me and said, “Why don’t we shoot the scene with a wide-angle lens? We still get all the same coverage.”
I was like, “Yeah, that’s genius. Let’s do it.” The blocking is still the same, but it allowed for a very different visual style and aesthetic from the rest of the show. We wanted that storyline to be separated from the ancestor storyline. It was an 11th-hour judgment call to go through with everything. Once we got the footage, we saw it and were so happy with it. We then reversed the aspect ratio change from 2.39:1 to 16:9.
As a massive fan of the Netflix Daredevil series, it was great seeing Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio in the show. Of course, it makes sense since they are part of Maya’s story in the comics, but I’m specifically wondering how you want to integrate both characters in the show so they support the character of Maya Lopez rather than detracting from the fact that it’s Maya’s show first and foremost?
That’s a great question. Obviously, we knew from the beginning that Kingpin would be in it. Kingpin and Maya’s relationship would be at the heart of this entire series. Vincent is a phenomenal actor and knows this character inside and out. He was an invaluable resource once we knew we would be skewing more toward Daredevil’s look, feel, and tone. We could have all these conversations in the writing phase, where he can share a lot of things with us that we can incorporate into the scripts.
We also had all these conversations six, nine months before we even shot a frame of film. That’s not a luxury you always have an actor. By the time we got to shooting, we already had all these conversations and could slip right into things. And as far as Daredevil was concerned, it was not a guarantee. We didn’t want him to be a gimmick or using him for the sake of using him. If he’s going to have an appearance, it has to be in service of Maya Lopez’s story, looking at her emotional storyline and how we can best use him to support her storyline.
Is there something that you would say you’re the proudest of as a director in adapting the story of Maya Lopez to the screen?
I’m just so unbelievably amazed, speechless, and inspired by Alaqua’s work. Beyond that, it was fantastic to showcase a large Indigenous cast and give them this Marvel platform to be seen and heard. People like Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal are on my Mount Rushmore of Indigenous actors and people I grew up with, like in Dances with Wolves, but some people might not be as familiar with them. To introduce or reintroduce these actors to a new generation was something I felt incredibly honored to be a part of, alongside having the chance to bring a powwow in the MCU was something that was personally very meaningful for myself.
All episodes of Echo are available to stream on Disney+.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
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