In the latest series to premiere on Netflix’s 2025 schedule, Black Rabbit, Oscar winner Troy Kotsur plays Joe, the head of a crime family and one of the biggest bads. His performance is epic and intimidating, and it serves as a great opportunity to show American Sign Language. So, when I interviewed the director of Episodes 5 and 6 of this series, we discussed learning how to film ASL, how it impacted shots, and what he learned from working with this legendary actor.
According to director Ben Semanoff, there were meetings before they started filming about how to direct and work with deaf actors and ASL, and he noted that the process was “terrific” and “easy.” He then went into detail about how he worked with Kotsur and the translators on the set of this new streaming series. There were two of them, and the director told me what each of them did, starting off with:
One was an on-set translator. That was Troy's translator, and he would be there [to be the] bridge between my direction and Troy and vice versa.
So, the first translator worked directly with the CODA star and the director, so they could easily communicate. Meanwhile, the second translator sat with Semanoff by the monitors to make sure the sign language was being filmed effectively and thoughtfully. The director explained:
The other would sit at the monitors and watch what I was doing as a director, in terms of how I was filming scenes and making sure that the signing was being captured. Because obviously, we get into a close-up on somebody that might be signing here in front of their chest, and now you can't see what they're saying. And ultimately, you sort of steal their power and their capacity to communicate by doing that.
Obviously, if you don’t show someone’s hands while they’re signing, you won’t know what they’re saying. So, it’s important to make sure their hands can be in frame. However, Semanoff also told me about another framing situation they ran into that involved wanting to show someone’s reaction to what Kotsur’s Joe was communicating while he was in the midst of signing. He said:
So there was a really fine line. It was interesting. There was a back-and-forth discussion that we engaged in, because ultimately, sometimes, when you're filming two people that have the ability to speak and hear and communicate that way, the camera can look in a direction that doesn't have to see anybody and hear what is being communicated. That doesn't work, obviously, with ASL, but at the same time, you want to try to hold on to some conventions of filmmaking.
Semanoff used a scene involving Forrest Weber’s Junior and Kotsur’s Joe to illustrate that “fine line” between knowing what they could and couldn’t show without taking anything away from the performers. He said:
So Troy is berating Junior, and he's doing it, not even looking in his direction, over here on a different side of the room. And I want to see what Junior is feeling and how he's reacting. Well, that poses an interesting problem, and there can be some clever ways from a filmmaking standpoint to try to connect the two and be able to see the reaction at the same time, see the ASL. But other times, not.
Throughout the crime thriller Black Rabbit, there are scenes where there is both someone verbally translating what Joe is signing and others where he’s signing, and it’s captioned on the screen. Typically, that is done based on if the other characters in the scene are fluent in ASL or not.
During Episode 6, which you can stream with a Netflix subscription, Joe berates his son Junior, and there is a moment where we watch him sign, and then he turns around, and the camera turns to Junior while the captions say, “What an embarrassment you turned out to be.” That way, we’re able to see both the reaction of Junior and what was said by Joe. However, the majority of the sequence does show Kotsur signing.
To that point, Semanoff said no one was “rigid” when it came to figuring out how to film the show and incorporate ASL. He also complimented Kotsur’s intelligence, and said that there would be times on set where they perfectly got each other without translators, he said:
Troy is so smart, and he's such a great performer. And I am so expressive, as you probably can already tell, that there were times that Troy and I could sort of communicate almost without the translators. He would see me step on set and start to be animated in the way I was discussing something with a translator, and he would just wave at me and just say, ‘Got it,’ you know? Like, ‘Great.’
Overall, the Black Rabbit director said that watching Kotsur perform was “breathtaking,” and he noted the “power” the actor has, and to me, that’s what makes him such an effective villain in this show, and another excellent deaf character who is played by a deaf actor in mainstream media.
Now, if you’d like to see how Black Rabbit incorporates sign language into the show and showcases Troy Kotsur’s amazing talents, you can stream it right now on Netflix.
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