The writers and producers of “Echo” seem to have gone to great lengths to keep the show authentic in both overall tone and when it came to specifics. Maya Lopez is of Native American Choctaw descent, and it sounds as if the producers made sure to represent that culture as authentically as possible. The same is true of the ASL scenes, which will see Lopez communicating using real sign language.
That, in and of itself, presented a unique challenge for series director Sydney Freeland, who told Collider that the ASL element was the thing she was “both excited and terrified to shoot.” She continued:
“Going into the process, you ask yourself the question, like, ‘How can we sustain a 3/4/5/6-minute conversation between a character or multiple characters who don’t speak?’ And so that was a big question for myself going in. And then with my cinematographer, we’re figuring out, ‘How do we do this? Can we even do this?’ And the answer is yes. And I’ll say, one of, if not my favorite scenes in the entire series, without spoiling it, is a scene between two characters where not a single word is spoken for multiple minutes, and it brings me to tears every time I see it.”
It might sound like removing spoken dialogue could be a major drawback, but “Echo” is far from the first show or movie to have to navigate this problem. In fact, some of the best moments in TV history don’t involve any speaking…