This is a TL;DR from a press event where Freeland premiered the trailer at and answered a few questions.
First, Freeland said she and the creative team — including head writer Marion Dayre — have re-imagined the character’s Indigeneity, making her a member of the Choctaw tribe from Oklahoma. In the comics, Maya is from the Blackfeet tribe, but Freeland said that the accompanying visuals amounted to a “hodgepodge” of imagery that made for a “muddied” and ultimately inauthentic backstory for the character. (Cox, meanwhile, is a citizen of the Menominee Nation and of Mohican descent.)
The director also insisted on meeting with the Choctaw Nation to get their input and develop a partnership.
“I had a pitch deck and I pitched them the project,’” Freeland said of her meeting with the tribal nation. “‘It’s not going to be earnest, it’s going to be a little more violent, but we feel like there’s a great story behind it.’”
The reaction, according to Freeland: crickets from tribal leaders. At which point, Freeland intuited their concern.
“Basically I said, ‘No, no, we’re not here to tell you what we’re going to do,’” the filmmaker explained. “‘We’re here to create a dialogue so that we can get your input and create a more authentic portrayal of the Choctaw people and culture.’”
The series largely takes place after the events of “Hawkeye,” but Freeland said it will also track how a “seismic event” in Lopez’s family, and the ensuing trauma, leads the character known as Echo on her path toward Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin, played by Vincent D’Onofrio) and villainy.
“Maya is in a very vulnerable, emotional place after this,” Freeland said. “She’s got all this bottled-up emotion and rage and feeling inside of her, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. And there’s going to be somebody there to give her a little nudge.”
While Freeland described the show as “an exploration of trauma — how we deal with it, how we cope with it, how it affects us, how we affect it, how it affects those around us,” she was also quick to note that the consequences here are “street-level” rather than cosmic, unlike so many other Marvel properties like “Avengers” or “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
“It’s not the fate of the universe at stake,” she said. “This is the fate of family.”
“We're going to delve further into the drama of this family and how they've all dealt with [situations] over the past 20 years,” Freeland continues, but that’s not the only focal point for the series. “We have this sort of two-pronged approach, there's this family drama sort of driving everything. But then there's this undercurrent of this fantastical side, which is that we are going to be visiting Maya's matrilineal ancestors, going quite a bit backward in time. Those two things, this family drama and these ancestral stories that we're going to see, are going to come head-to-head.”
There’s one other family member who’s looming large for Maya, literally, and who’s not related by blood. D’Onofrio returns as Wilson Fisk — aka Kingpin — for the series, even though in the final episode of Hawkeye the two had a close-quarters confrontation. Maya might have thought she saw the last of Kingpin, but he’s still got unfinished business with her.
“It's one of the core relationships in the entire series, the relationship between Kingpin and Maya, and we'll come to sort of find out that he’s become a kind of surrogate father to her,” Freeland explains. But even though he might be a father figure, he’s still the same Fisk viewers have come to know, and fear, over the years. Don’t expect any of his ways to have changed. “[The creative team] always talks about in the room how Kingpin's superpower isn't a strength. It's his intellect, and it's his ability to psychologically manipulate people.”
According to Brad Winderbaum (Head of Marvel Studios TV), how those consequences play out puts “Echo” on the “grittier side” for the studio, leading to the TV-MA rating.
“It is kind of a new direction for the brand, especially on Disney+,” Winderbaum said. Marvel and Disney decided to simultaneously release the series on Hulu.
During the press event, Freeland previewed a fight sequence from the show that dramatized Lopez’s so-called birth as a villain, in which she battles a barrage of enemies while also encountering Kingpin’s main enemy, Daredevil (Charlie Cox).
"I dunno if I can say this, but I love the Netflix Daredevil, it's great," Freeland shared when asked if the intent of Echo was to follow the Defenderverse. "And so we certainly took, obviously the Daredevil fight, it was a little bit of a nod to that series ... But then also we wanted very adamantly to show that these are people in our show. They bleed, they die, they get killed, and there are real-world consequences. And again, talking, it's not the fate of the universe at stake because I think once you go that broad, you can sort of lose sight a little bit. And so that kind of dictated the tone a little bit. So I guess to answer your question, it was a conversation, but it wasn't that reason."
Although this approach is rather new for the MCU, Freeland said Marvel supported those creative choices and others.
“They protect the shit out of their creatives,” she said. “I felt absolutely protected and empowered.”
Another critical choice was how to portray a lead character who speaks almost exclusively through American Sign Language (ASL). Representation again, Freeland said, played a significant role — the crew took ASL classes and Freeland ensured that close-ups included the actors signing.
“ASL was something that was extremely important to everybody there and having the deaf perspective represented,” she said. “We want to embrace ASL.”
Freeland was tight-lipped about other Marvel characters who might appear in the series. She was only slightly more forthcoming when it came to Lopez’s actual superpowers, at least what have been envisioned in this series versus the comics themselves.
“Her power in the comic books is that she can copy anything, any movement, any whatever. It’s kind of lame,” Freeland said. “I will say, that is not her power. I’ll just kind of leave it at that.”
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