Extrait du hors-série de SFX consacré à BtVS paru en décembre 2000 (et oui, c'est vieux). Légers spoilers sur les épisodes 7 des saisons 2 d'Angel et 5 de Buffy en fin de page dans la partie "Year 2: First Big Event!" (logique ^_^)
Angel's first year was a turbulent one. Producer Tim Minear reveals to Ed Gross in an episode by episode breakdown just how the show evolved.
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"You know," muses Angel producer Tim Minear, "I keep saying this to anyone who'll listen, but one of my favourite experiences so far on the show was writing the episode where Angel 'eats' his family. You don't see that on television every day."
Tim Minear has fast become one of the most important men behind the scenes on Angel. Which is no mean feat for a man who a) didn't initially want to move onto a fantasy series, and b) unlike many of the writing and producing staff on Angel had never worked on Buffy.
Although no one will ever be able to take away the fact that the character of Angel is the creation of series executive producers/creators Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, as supervising producer Tim Minear has played no small role in capturing the proper "voice" for the show. It's Minear more than anyone who has delved into Angel's past, exploring his origins, what his early life with Darla was like, and putting him on the road where we would ultimately meet him in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Minear was brought to Whedon's attention through the efforts of former consulting producer Howard Gordon. The two men had previously worked together on The X-Files and Strange World, and it was Gordon's opinion that Minear would be the perfect fit for Angel.
"I was resistant about going back and doing a genre show," says Minear, whose credits also include Lois & Clark. "But the notion of working with Joss Whedon was the thing that pushed me over the edge and I ended up taking it. Also, I had had experience before where I'd be on a show and the leading man was, let's say, only okay. What I learned was that if you had a star, a guy who could really carry the show, then you could probably have a success. And I thought David Boreanaz was just that guy. I think a lot of people weren't sure, based on his role on Buffy. He sort of played this one-note thing, but I thought he could do a whole lot more. And what I like about Angel is the concept of redemption. He's got stuff in his past that he's got to make up for. The lead character has not only got a past, but he's got a huge past and that's horrible. So the darkness appealed to me."
Angel's debut season began with "City of..." which quickly brings Angel together with the half-human/half-demon Doyle and aspiring actress Cordelia Chase. In the opener, the newly-formed team goes up against a vampire named Russell Winters, who is preying on wannabe actresses. Angel tries to protect one young woman, but, shockingly, he fails. "The thing that comes to mind about that episode," offers Minear, "and I know it was a seminal moment for both Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, was the fact that Angel does not save the girl. There's this big twist where she actually ends up dying like two-thirds of the way through the story. I think that set the tone for the show. Anything can happen on Angel.
Minear reveals that there was an intriguing moment written into the script that was actually filmed, but ultimately cut. "Angel goes in," he says, "finds her dead body, cradles her and sees her blood on his hand. He lifts his hand and, I think, he actually puts his fingers in his mouth. Originally, that was, for Joss and David, the point of the episode; that this guy is really on the edge. He's struggling. But that moment just didn't work, and we ended up cutting it. It was dark enough that he didn't save this girl. I don't think you needed him licking her dead body."
"Lonely Hearts" pits Angel against a slug like creature that is moving from human host to human host {je l'appelle "le Goa'uld" ^^;}, all set against the dating scene in LA. In terms of Angel, it was significant for the series because it brought its star together with Detective Kate Lockley, who would share something of a friend-enemy relationship throughout the rest of the year.
"David Fury, who wrote this episode, had written a script called 'Corrupt' in which Kate was a police officer working undercover as a prostitute who was actually becoming a prostitute and was addicted to crack. That was originally the introduction of Kate. Obviously we were still trying to figure out what the show was at that point. This was the first episode after the pilot, and it was written before the new staff arrived. They just went incredibly dark with this thing and decided at the end of the day that it was a little bit too hopeless, a little too grim. After that episode was written it was actually being prepped when the network, too, had some concerns about it."
"In the Dark" was the fist crossover episode between Buffy and Angel. Oz arrives with a mystical ring that renders vampires invulnerable, and he is unaware that Spike has followed him from Sunnydale to Los Angeles in pursuit of it. It all culminates in a battle between Angel and Spike, with Angel destroying the ring after spending a day in the sunlight. To many, it was a lunkhead move that seemed reminiscent of Gloria Stuart throwing the priceless diamond into the ocean at the end of Titanic. Minear, for his part, would like you to see the situation otherwise.
"That's not the problem I have with the ending of Titanic," he says. "My problem with the ending of Titanic is that she throws it in the water as if that means something about Jack [Leonardo DiCaprio]. It's got nothing to do with Jack. It was the other guy's diamond, and I have no idea why she's throwing it in the water. But in this episode, it makes perfect sense for him to destroy the ring. Can he be trusted? That is the point of the series. If he has the power to be invincible, what would happen if he spent eternity as Angelus? It's too dangerous. Is there any other vampire in the history of the Jossverse that has a soul? No, so the only person that could possibly wear that ring would be Angel, and Angel knows he can't be trusted. Think about Jenny Calendar. In that light, the ending makes perfect sense to me."
"I fall to pieces" is an episode that could have just as easily have slotted into The X-Files as it does on Angel, telling the story of a woman {voix française = celle de Jenny Calendar et Olivia} being stalked by a guy {voix française = celle du maire Wilkins dans la S3 de BtVS} who can temporarily separate his body parts and will them to move on their own.
"As an early episode," Minear explains, "you can see where we thought the show was originally going to go, which was in the direction of an anthology with the client of the week, and the emotional stakes would be with the guest character. Sort of like The Fugitive. Since then we've decided that the emotional action is with our people. You can have an interesting plot and an interesting client but it's difficult to create sympathy for someone you're introducing for one episode."
"Room w/a View" focuses on Cordelia's quest to get back some self-esteem, beginning with her signing a lease for a new apartment. What she, Angel and Doyle don't realise, however, is that the apartment is haunted and the former tenant will do whatever it takes to chase Cordelia away.
"The ever wonderful Jane Espenson wrote this episode," enthuses Tim Minear. "It was really all about Cordelia regaining her inner bitch. I remember that was what we were saying in the [writing] room. The funny thing about the episode, and this was completely unintentional, was that there was a scene where Angel goes to Kate for some police exposition. She makes fun of him for having only one name. She says, 'Popes and rock stars are the guys with one name, not private detectives.' And he says, 'You got me; I'm the Pope.' Later, in 'Somnambulist', the serial killer who has been killing people in the same way as Angelus used to has been dubbed 'The Pope'. That was completely unintentional."
"Sense and sensitivity" brings the law firm of Wolfram and Hart back to the centre stage, as the firm - in order to facilitate the release of one of their clients - uses a spell that brings everyone's emotions at the police precinct to the forefront. The episode was Minear's second script for the show, although "Somnambulist" would go into production later on. "'Sense and Sensitivity' was the first thing I actually pitched to Joss, my idea being that I wanted to deal with sensitivity and cops, and cops who become so sensitive that they can't do their jobs," remembers Minear. "He thought that was a bitchin' idea. It was interesting because we sort of came at it from politically different points of view and what you end up getting is something far more interesting than what I had originally pitched. Instead of just super sensitive cops, you have people whose emotions are completely on the surface, so it goes from anger to sensitivity. They're just hyper sensitive. The thing that was at the kernel of that idea was seeing Angel get sensitive. Just the idea of him feeling that Doyle and Cordelia judge him when he vamps - moments like those - was the reason that the script was written."
"The Bachelor Party" explores a bit more of Doyle's past, introducing the audience to his ex-wife as well as current fiancé, who is secretly from a family of demons. Given the fact that she still wants Doyle to be part of her life, he agrees to join the wedding party, unaware that the groom and his ushers plan on devouring his brains as part of a demonic marital ceremony.
"I love that episode," admits Minear. "I think it's wacky, but I love the spoof on the whole political correctness thing. I love the demonologist who is very PC, and I love the brain-eating. There was actually a lot of stuff cut from that episode because it ran very long. A lot of my favourite jokes had to be cut out of the second half. A pretty straight-forward show."
"I Will Remember You" serves as the first full-fledged crossover between Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, with Buffy coming to Los Angeles just as Angel, splattered with a demon's blood during a battle, suddenly finds himself human. The two lovers come together, believing that they've found true happiness with no chance of Angelus returning, but learn that Angel must become a vampire again to save the planet. All memories of his time as human will also be erased...
"A lot of people have issues with the resetting of the clock thing," Minear offers, "but I personally love it. For me it's all worth it because of the scene where Sarah is saying, 'I'll never forget! I'll never forget! I'll never forget!' And then, boom, she forgot. Oh, man, it just kills me. And then Angel and Buffy having sex - never a bad thing."
Doyle meets his end in "Hero", as the character sacrifices himself to save humans from a weapon launched by a group of Nazi-like demons. "I killed Doyle, and I'd do it again," laughs Minear. "Truthfully we killed Doyle because we thought it would be better for the show. It was something that was decided way before 'Bachelor Party'. All of those episodes that featured that character were there for this moment when he sacrifices himself. There were a lot of reasons, but I think mostly we were still figuring out the show early on; we were still figuring out what the dynamics should be. Again, you look at the pilot and the story and the story where Angel doesn't save the girl. You look at episode 9 of a 22-episode season, and the guy who is in the main titles, the sidekick dies. The reason for that is that it proves anything can happen. The reason for that is that it proves anything can happen. It was decided early on that that would be an interesting creative thing to do. And there was also some feeling, too, that David's and Glenn's characters were very similar: they were both half-human and half-demon; they both had a past; they were both brooding-type characters; they were both searching for redemption. So we decided we could do two things. We could shake up the universe of the show and we could give our characters an emotionally resonating event that would help infuse the show a little bit.
"For the first nine episodes, their shared history feels like it should be another series entirely. But Doyle's death is also an event that will affect things to come. I think you'll see that in later episodes. Look at the Exorcist episode, 'I've Got You Under My Skin'. If Doyle hadn't died, it wouldn't be as interesting."
"Parting Gifts" deals with the aftermath of "Hero," with Angel and Cordelia still mourning the loss of their friend, Angel wondering how in hell he's going to be able to do his "job" without a conduit to the Powers That Be (not realising, of course, that Doyle passed his gift on to Cordelia). Plus there's the two of them protecting a seemingly innocent demon called Barney from a "rogue demon hunter", that turns out to be former watcher Wesley, who is trying to carve out a new life for himself. It all culminates in the realisation that Cordelia has the gift, and now a group of demons are trying to auction off her eyes so that they can possess it.
"I really admire the structure of this show, and I love the idea of the auction," enthuses Minear. "Also, Alexis was fighting an uphill battle. People hated him because they loved Doyle. They were absolutely dead-set against him; they didn't like him in Buffy. He wasn't supposed to be likeable in Buffy. You could say the same thing about Cordelia. You know, 'This character in Buffy, I don't know how she's going to work in this show.' Well, you bring them into this show and suddenly you get to see more sides of them. By now, I think Alexis has won over a lot of the fans. Some of them begrudgingly, some of them whole-heartedly. And Wesley is not supposed to be a replacement for Doyle. Cordelia is the replacement for Doyle. I think that was another brilliant twist from Joss."
"Somnambulist" is truly one of the highlights of Angel's first season. Things start off mysteriously enough with Angel waking up from nightmares of having killed, and then discovering that those nightmares seem to be true. Only later does he learn that one of his protégés has come to town, and is killing in the way that Angelus taught him.
"When we first came in at the beginning of the season," Minear explains, "there was a board, and Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt had come up with several different ideas - just germs of ideas - and one of them was 'A vampire that Angel taught is killing is killing in Angel's old modus operandi'. I immediately took to that idea. What I brought to it was in the first act the idea that Angel thinks he's killing again and we don't reveal that it's this guy until the second act. Joss loved that twist. The way Joss works is that a lot of times he will have a moment in his head. He won't necessarily have the plot yet, but he knows that there is a certain moment that the thing is about. For this episode, when we were very early in the breaking stage, he knew that he wanted Kate to have to literally go through Angel [with a stake] to kill the other vampire, which to me was just the perfect moment. Because it's Angel opening himself up and actually sort of taking responsibility in a visceral movie kind of way for this horrible thing that he's done. It was really all about that moment."
In "Expecting", following a night of casual sex, Cordelia awakens apparently nine months pregnant and ready to give birth to a demon's child. Naturally, it's up to Angel and Wesley to stop Cordy and several other women from giving birth to those demon critters. "Oh, jeez, body horror!" laughs Minear. "I think that's what this episode is - it's about body horror. Originally, we weren't sure where to go with this. I know at one point there was a funny version of it where it was just ridiculous, and Joss came in and said, 'NO, we should play this straight,' and suddenly the thing broke that way. The other thing that it served to do was to show that Wesley was more than what he appeared to be on Buffy, by showing up at the end and being able to shoot straight. It was also the beginning of the idea that Cordelia is family and that they were forming a family there. It's just naturally fallen that way."
"She" involves a woman from another dimensional plane trying to free the enslaved women of their culture. Despite her resistance, Angel forces his way into her life so that he can help. "One of the best-directed episodes of the season. David Greenwalt - wonderful director," Minear enthuses. "The idea was that we were sort of bringing in those women in a number episodes to see if there was any spark between them and Angel, and I think that at the core of that was the big exposition scene. But really what the scene was about is that Angel was saying, 'I'm really, really attracted to you.' There are really a lot of bitching scenes in that episode. I love the scene where he follows her into the art gallery: Angel has to pretend that he's a tour guide and it's really cool that he knew the artist he starts talking about. I also liked - and I think this was from [Buffy producer] Marti Noxon - the scene where he can't work his cell phone. Angel's disease with modern technology is, I think, great." {Mouais... quand même dans le pilote, il neutralise sans problème une alarme à l'aide d'un petit boîtier électronique et navigue sans problème dans les banques de données de la bibliothèque.}
Angel does The Exorcist in "I've Got You Under My Skin", as the gang tries to help a family whose young son is possessed. What they don't understand is that the demon within the child is desperately trying to get out, but the evil within the youth is so horrible that it has trapped the creature there.
"This was one of the very early scripts that we wrote before Doyle was killed," details Minear. "Actually, we were going to that as episode 15, because I was going to write episode 14. That turned out to be 'The Prodigal', but we hadn't broken the story yet. I knew I wanted to do the scene where Angel is trying to be invited into a place to save somebody and the victim would not let him in. I'm thinking, 'Joss, I've got this moment in my head and to me it's all about this moment.' But there were only a few days to write that, so we pushed it to 15, and we pulled 'I've Got You Under My Skin' out of the bank of scripts we had. It wasn't quite right yet. I did some work on it, and the thing I pitched to Joss was the parallel between this family and our little family [Angel, Cordy and Wes]. My idea was that Angel should accidentally call Wesley 'Doyle', because it should be about these two men who lose a 'son'... sort of. These two men are desperately trying to keep their family together, and through no fault of their own, they can't.
"Joss," he adds, "came up with the brilliant twist that the demon was trying to get out of the kid the whole time. That was the genesis of the idea: here's a kid who is possessed by a demon, and what you discover at the end is that the kid is even more evil than the demon. Which is a far more frightening idea."
In "Prodigal", the present day story deals with possible corruption involving Kate's father, ultimately resulting in the man's death at the hands of vampires. In flashbacks, however, we are given insight into Angel's past, seeing him reborn as a vampire (thanks to Darla), after which he kills his family as his first vampiric act.
"I wanted to do the origin of Angel; I had a big hard-on for that," Minear admits with a laugh. "When I pitched it to Joss, I said, 'It's Angel clawing his way out of his grave and Darla standing there.' And he just said, 'It's so important.' To me, my favourite scene in that episode is when he comes back, confronts his father and then kills him. And also, if you pay close attention to the episode, you find out how Angel got his name. His father says, 'You can't come in here. A demon has to be invited in.' And Angel glances over to the door and says, 'I was invited,' and you see his little sister dead. He looks at his father and says, 'She thought I was an Angel returned to her.'"
Things move towards action-adventure in "The Ring", as Angel is captured and forced to participate in a new sport: a gladiator-like struggle involving demons and vampires who are fighting for their freedom and their lives. Describing the show as a "Spartacus-like", Minear also recognises one questionable moment: after Wolfram and Hart purchase Angel from the ringleaders but don't take a chance to get rid of the troublesome vampire for good.
"But do they want him dead?" Minear muses. "At the point Faith became involved, they wanted him dead, but not at this point. Look, it's easy to fall into the 'Why don't they ever kill Mulder?' trap. Every week, it seems like the Consortium is saying, 'We can't kill him.' Well, why not? And in the movie there was a scene where they said, 'We can't kill him,' and in the very next scene they shot him on the head! Again, you always run into this problem. But I think if you have a little patience, it will all make sense."
"Eternity" has a struggling movie actress coming to Angel in the hopes that he will turn her into a vampire so that she can live - and be a star - forever. Unfortunately, she slips him a drug called "bliss" which temporarily results in him being really happy. A moment later, Angelus is back for a time, attempting to torture and kill Cordelia and Wesley. "Possibly Joss' favourite episode," says Minear. "I know there was a lot of criticism on the Internet about the way he went bad, and did he really go bad? The idea of giving Angel a variation of ecstasy...? To me, that worked. I thought it was a really good way to bring Angelus into the series so that he could interact with our characters for a moment, without doing some big 'Angel has turned evil' arc. You sort of get to have your cake and eat it too in that episode."
In "Five By Five", Faith comes to LA and is hired by Wolfram and Hart to kill Angel, which she attempts to do after torturing Wesley.
"We knew we wanted to bring Faith back," says Minear, "and I think the episode works on all cylinders. Here's an interesting-behind-the scenes item: the writer, Jim Kouf, writes big feature films, and sometimes he writes scenes that are not producable for a TV show because he is used to working with much more money. So he wrote this big, huge fight at the end that you actually get to see because we shot it. But he wrote it to take place in the rain, and we decided that we can't afford the rain. It was going to be too much material to shoot and that's going to be one extra technical complication that's going to make it impossible. So we cut the rain from the script. If you notice, the big fight at the end, when Faith collapses in Angel's arms, it's in the rain. That's because it actually rained. It poured while we were shooting. It was the first night of a big torrential rain storm that we had for several days. It started that night, on the set of Angel, while Angel and Faith were fighting."
In "Sanctuary" Faith starts the rehabilitation process, not made easy by the arrival of Buffy and a militant group of Watchers determined to capture her. "Basically we had a terrible time breaking that story," Minear explains, "Because it was Faith as we never had seen her before. It was sort of easy when it was evil Faith, which was a lot of fun. The problem was trying to make her 'turning' realistic, and also we had all of those different characters to service."
"War Zone" brings Angel into contact with Charles Gunn, part of a street gang that spends its evenings hunting vampires. In the end, Gunn and Angel form an uneasy alliance. "The idea for Gunn came from Gary Campbell, a freelancer," says Minear, "who came in and pitched the idea of these street kids battling vampires and nobody notices. I know that Joss wanted to introduce another guy who would be very different from Wesley and also different from Angel. I think the defining moment in that is the ending when you expect Angel to be all big brotherly and say, 'I'm here to help,' but really what he's saying is, 'I may need your help.' I thought the action was cool too. In a way, it was one of the more comic-booky feeling episodes."
Although "Blind Date" and "To Shanshu in LA" each have their own issues, the continuing theme is a detailed exploration of Wolfram and Hart, establishing the groundwork for season two. Additionally, tensions between Angel and Kate heat up, and the year concludes with Darla being miraculously being restored to undead life.
"Bringing the tensions between Kate and Angel to a head is really good," he says. "I like the way Kate has turned out. I think it's interesting that she's not just this cop-lady. For a while it will stay adversarial, which is more interesting. I also love the Darla revelation, and I think it's nice we've been laying the groundwork for that all year without actually intending to. The flashbacks throughout the season were there to tell us more about Angel, but at the end of the day we've told you who Darla was. When she appears in that box we understand what it means. I think that gave us some fertile ground for interesting stories in year two." SFX
Angel producer Tim Minear makes his directing debut on "Darla", a Tarantino-esque Buffy/Angel crossover event for the 2000 season...
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The seventh episode of Angel's second season, "Darla" is the second part of a Buffy/Angel crossover event that goes a long way in detailing the "origin" of Spike, Drusilla, and of course Darla. The episode also marked Minear's directorial debut, and is a bit of a stylistic departure from previous crossovers.
"Basically," says Minear with a boyish grin, "I said, 'Can I direct one?' It fell as episode seven, so that's what I was scheduled to do. When we were trying to figure out what episode seven should be, it felt to me like it was time to get back to Darla. In deciding what that story should be, we had played the revelation that she was human, and my feeling was, 'What does that mean for her?' The best way to explore this would be to see what she was as a human 400 years ago before she was vamped, and possibly do kind of an origin piece for her.
"You can only do that so much, because it should really be her story with Angel throughout the 150 years that they were together. But I wanted to show her as a person - what that meant. Joss said, 'That's all well and good except that very night we're doing a Spike origin episode.' I said, 'Why be afraid of that? Let's do them both?'
"Then," he elaborates, "as we got to talking we realised that these four characters - Angel, Darla, Spike and Drusilla - naturally crossed paths at different times throughout their respective histories. These were going to be completely separate stories, but what we decided instead was that there would be natural instances when the characters would cross paths. So in Spike's story [in the Buffy episode] you'll see scenes that will actually repeat in the Angel episode but will be shown from a slightly different point of view. And there is actually one point in history when they all come together. In the Spike episode it has a particular meaning for Spike, but in the Angel episode we discover that it means something entirely different to him."
Minear half jokingly calls it the Angel production team's attempt at Quentin Tarantino/Pulp Fiction-style storytelling.
"Pulp Fiction starts off in that coffee shop with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer," he explains, "and at the end of the movie we're in this coffee shop with John Travolta and Sam Jackson, but we see Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in a booth across the way and they're having the same conversation they had at the beginning of the movie. So we realise this is the same time and place. It's a different story happening in the same universe."
In exploring what he brings to an episode as a director rather than just a writer, Minear reckons, "I think what I bring to it is an innate understanding of what the scenes are about, and I think that worked out well in terms of my interaction with the cast I didn't have to second-guess and figure out what the producers wanted since not only was I a producer but I wrote it.
"Juliet and David are amazingly good together. I wasn't a surprise to me, because I had seen episode five and when she says to him 'We were together for 150 years,' that was also part of how I got the idea for episode seven. I said, 'You know what? That's a big fucking romance is what that is.' 150 years of being with somebody, that's what I call having a history. At no time was I trying to play this as being his true love. It's more like the play Who's Affraid Of Virginia Woolf? This troubled old married couple with secrets. I wasn't trying to replace Buffy's place in his heart with Darla by any stretch of the imagination, but here's a guy who's been around for a couple of hundred years before he ever met Buffy and certainly he was shaped in some way. So we just tried to explore that a little bit." SFX