Article paru dans le numéro spécial du magazine britannique SFX sorti en décembre 2000.
A Power Rangers-meets-Clueless hybrid with a black Cordelia and a Beverly Hills 90210 babe-style Willlow? This could have been Buffy, unbelievably. Ed Gross is joined by the cast and crew of the show to look back at the early years of Buffy
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IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS THE MOVIE. AND THE movie sucked. It certainly wasn't what Joss Whedon intended, but, after all, he was only the film's writer, attempting to move from working on such television shows as Roseanne and the film-turned-TV-series Parenthood to the so-called wonderful world of feature films. His first effort - the aforementioned film that sucked - was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a tongue-in-cheek affair that cast Kristy Swanson as high school cheerleader Buffy Summers, who is recruited to battle the undead. Although he was satisfied with his script, he was severely disappointed with the final results.
"What I started with," recalls Whedon, "was a horror action-comedy. It had fright, it had camera movement, it had acting- all kinds of interesting things that weren't in the finished film. Apart from the jokes - and there had been a lot more of them... all of my favourites were cut! it was supposed to have a little edge to it. It was supposed to be a visceral entertainment rather than a glorified sitcom where everybody stands in front of the camera, says their joke and exits. I wasn't happy with anything about it, although there are people who are faithful to it. I had one advantage in that the direction was so bland that the jokes kind of stood out, because they were the only things to latch on to. But that was a big disappointment. It could have been a lot better."
By all Hollywood standards, that should have been the end of Buffy. It's not like the film went on to gain a cult following once it reached video or cable; or that there were a growing legion of fans out there demanding the further adventures of Ms Summers. Nope, we're talking death, destruction and box office poison.
Then came the phone call from The Warner Brothers Network, a fledgling television network that was attempting to stake out the young audience that had all but abandoned ABC, NBC and, especially, CBS in the States. The idea was to come up with programming that had an edge, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, despite its failure as a feature film, somehow seemed ideally suited to its needs.
George Snyder, who had worked for the producers of the Buffy feature, but who would ultimately segue over to being Whedon's assistant and, ultimately, Director Of Development at Mutant Enemy Productions (which makes Buffy and Angel), was introduced to Whedon by producer Gail Berman. Shortly thereafter, Whedon mentioned the fact that The Warner Network were talking about doing a pilot of Buffy for television and wanted to know whether or not Snyder had ever done a pilot.
"I told him, 'No'," says Snyder, picking up the scenario, "and he said, 'Neither have I. Let's do it.'"
It's admittedly unusual for a movie perceived as a box office flop to suddenly become a series, and that fact wasn't lost on anyone. "Gail Berman went around to the major networks and was literally laughed out of the room," says Snyder. "People said to us, 'Why did you go to this little network like Warners?' And Joss would say, 'Well, they were the only network that would take us.' Fox, who were producing it, said they already had their own vampire show, which was Kindred: The Embraced, but they would produce. It was Gail Berman who said, 'This has got legs,' and she's the one who asked Joss if he would be interested in pursuing it as a TV series. He thought it could be intriguing as long as he could do what he wanted to do with it. Then it was a matter of trying to sell it. The reason I think The Warner Network took on the show is that they're very smart people; it was a little network that had nothing to lose at that point. I think they just got the idea and a lot of people didn't. Hybrid shows, shows that play with genre... there was just something very different, but they got it. As Joss has said more than once, they were very nurturing. They were willing to take the risk, they could afford to take a risk, but it was a risk nonetheless."
So why was Buffy so lucky to be picked up by The Warner Network, instead of one of the major networks?
"They got the idea of the metaphor," explains Snyder. "When you go in to pitch a show, you pitch some ideas for possible episodes. The two he went in with were what were eventually to become The Pack and Invisible Girl. The pitch for Invisible Girl was that this is a girl who is so shy and so unpopular that she doesn't get noticed to the point where she becomes invisible. Well, everybody got that. It was one of the hardest episodes in the end to write, but that pitch was something they got. The high school metaphor, the idea of being lonely in a high school. Buffy's problem of, 'I can't be a part of this, because I'm a Slayer'. Which translates for all of us: 'I'm too tall,' 'I'm too short,' 'I'm too funny looking,' 'I'm not athletic.' Whatever teen issue I'm burdened with keeps me separate, and this is a story about that alienation. We were off and running."
Warner Network executive Suzanne Daniels said at the time of the show's premiere, "Every once in a while you meet a writer whose passion and vision just blow you away, and that's what happened when we met with Joss Whedon for the first time. In internal meetings, we liked to describe the show as Beverly Hills 90210 meets The X-Files. In fact, it's a show that we think appeals to the Goosebumps audience at the same time it captures X-Files viewers. Buffy, you should know, is much more than a vampire slayer. She is the Chosen One chosen to fight all the forces of evil she comes upon, and in this series evil ranges from powerful modern-day witches to a seven-foot praying mantis disguised as a teacher. As soon as we saw Joss' pilot script, we knew we had something unique."
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Between Buffy the movie and Buffy the series, Whedon had carved out an impressive niche for himself as a script doctor, working on such films as Speed and Waterworld (he did the best he could, really!) and co-writing the screenplay for Toy Story (which was nominated for an Academy Award). He was also signed on to write Alien Resurrection at about the same time the Buffy deal came together, and although the final results of the Alien film disappointed him, he was thrilled with the opportunity to take his original concept of Buffy and adapt it to television despite the doomsayers who decried his shifting mediums.
"It makes sense to me," he explains, "but it definitely surprises most people. But why are most of the best writers on TV? Because they can control their product; because they are given something resembling respect. Plus, it's steady work. That's my theory about why movies are usually so bad. Who in their right mind would want to write those? I love movies and I want to write more movies, but if the idea is to tell the story, then TV is the best way to do it. I also think that I've been helped by the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing. My ignorance works to my advantage. It's easy to break rules when you're not sure what they are. At the same time, I'm very traditional in telling a good story. I care about character and all that stuff. I'm actually a very conservative storyteller, and I think everyone on staff is completely dedicated. Our meetings are like, 'What is the emotional reality of being locked in a cage by the substitute teacher who turns into a giant praying mantis?' We're very curious about things like that, otherwise it becomes jokey. If you can't connect your story to some emotional reality, there's no reason to tell it."
In detailing his original concept for the premise, Whedon notes that in the mid-80s he had grown tired of slasher film cliches, most notably the dumb, oversexed blonde stumbling into a dark place to have sex with a boyfriend, where, preferably in an advanced state of undress, she's brutally murdered by Jason, Freddy or one of their countless imitators.
"I began thinking that I would love to see a scene where a ditsy blonde walks into a dark alley, a monster attacks her and she kicks his ass," Whedon laughs. "After all those times the poor girl had sex and got herself killed for it, I just wanted her to be able to take care of herself. So I had this character long before I had the idea of using vampires. I wanted to create a special person who desperately wants to fit in but who has a higher calling. I decided to use vampires because I've always thought vampires were cool."
He adds, "The movie is pretty different from what I originally intended. I like horror, but the movie ended up being more of a straight-on comedy. While it is an absurd story, I wanted to go for the thrills, the chills and the action. The movie wasn't as focused on that as I was. They lightened up the tone, and I always like things as dark as possible. In my original draft, there were severed heads and horrible stuff going on. Camp was never my intent. I can't really write camp, because it takes you away from the characters. I don't like laughing at people, I like laughing with them."
Whedon's feeling is that the TV version of Buffy is a more evolved character than the theatrical one. "The idea of the movie," he says, "is that Buffy is someone who is completely ignorant of the world; who was never expected to be anything except pretty - she's nice but self-centred and vacuous. Ultimately, she has to learn about vampires and such, and becomes more mature as a result. This Buffy is dealing with the same stuff, but she's already a Slayer and has been one for a while. She's instinctively a hero, but at the same time she's going to be dealing with the pain of adolescence. So her journey isn't quite the same. She's already empowered, she's just trying to deal with how that empowerment affects her. She accepts what she is. It's just a question of balancing her life as a Slayer and as a teenager."
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Whedon's real problem at the beginning was that the network was originally looking for a new take on the popular feature film Clueless, and had hoped that Buffy would fit the bill. "Actually," he clarifies, "the first thing that the studio talked to me about was a Power Rangers-like afternoon show for kids, and it evolved from there. And the more I got into it, the more adult-oriented the show became. The studio understood what we wanted to do and that it should appeal to grown-ups."
To do this, he created a situation where the characters would have double lives as normal kids and saviours of humanity. "I think what's really fun about Buffy is that our characters are constantly dealing with that particular balance," Whedon says. "The humour in this comes from Buffy thinking, 'I have a math test coming up and I have a giant insect attacking me, and I have to deal with both of those realities.' They are also the only ones who know what's really going on. There are terrible things happening all the time - kids are dropping like flies at Sunnydale High - but everyone else is oblivious to what's going on."
Whedon's original set-up for the TV show was that Buffy Summers is a teenager who has moved with her mother to Sunnydale, California, following strange events that occurred at her previous school (implying a bit of continuity between events of the film and the series). Unfortunately, Sunnydale High is located right over a Hellmouth, which is the source of vampires, demons and other ghoulies. In her battle as the Chosen One of her generation, Buffy is aided by her Watcher, Rupert Giles, and friends Willow and Xander. Her enemy is the Master Vampire and his minions, among other supernatural threats.
"I decided that in the series Buffy was already a Slayer," he says, "and she's moved to a new town, Sunnydale, after being kicked out of her old school because of starting fights with vampires. I came up with this idea that her new high school was built on an area called Boca Del Inferno, which roughly translates into Hellmouth. So every mystical occurrence and monster could happen and we wouldn't be just restricted to vampires. If it would have just been vampires, I'm not sure we could have carried it off. But when you added zombies and demons, I began to believe we'd have a series here. If you look at movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, you'll see this combination of teen angst and horror has been going on for a long time. We did not want to get terribly issue-oriented. We wanted to deal with teen subjects, because that is where all the interesting stories come ftom. The horror and the stories have to come from the characters, their relationships and their fears. Otherwise, it wouldn't be interesting. We broadened the premise with different monsters, different problems, new characters and stuff like that. There's an idea in the high school horror show that could sustain an entire television show that goes for years. People need the big bad wolf. They need something to project their fears on to. There hasn't been that on television for a long time."
While many critics in the beginning accused Buffy of being just another in a long line of X-Files rip-offs, Whedon and company chose, instead, to offer a unique perspective that effortlessly manages to combine humour, action and horror, while somehow addressing the overall high school - and later, college - experience.
"Buffy is the most manic-depressive show on television," points out Whedon. "It ping-pongs from, 'Oh, it's light'n'fluffy' to 'It's Medea'. The show's appeal is that it speaks so plainly to the high school experience, which is something you just don't really ever get over. Everything's bigger than life. In high school, my internal life was so huge and so dark and strange and overblown and dramatic, that this show seems kind of realistic in comparison. And we tried to talk with teenagers, not to them. Teen shows seemed to have fallen into two categories. Actually, a show like Beverly Hills 90210 fell into both of them, which were 'We're obsessed with sex' and 'We're obsessed with issues'. It's like, 'Today, Donna has sex and Brandon learns that racism is bad.' What's funny about the show is we never know from scene to scene which way it's going to go. A scene that starts out very dramatic could end up quite funny or something truly horrible could happen. It's not sort of, 'Oh, here's the funny part, here's the scary part.' We really never know what's going to be highlighted. The show inclines more toward the horror than the humour. It owes more to The X-Files than it does to Sabrina. I think the best stuff happens when we remember the sort of human relationships that people have that are really twisted and scary and sort of extend is the most those in to horror stories, rather than have a monster show up.
"That's where the stuff really disturbs me," he elaborates, "when it's somebody's parents or somebody's friend who is turning into something horrible, and it brings up issues that are real and therefore is actually very scary. Then there's also death and maiming and all that good stuff at high school, generally. Everything is so turgid when you're in high school, everything is so powerful, so dramatic. I don't think there is a time in life when you really feel that way except in high school. I've said, and I will say it until I'm in my grave, that high school is a horror movie and a soap opera, and I was trying to capture that in the show. A lot of the stories are supposed to work as funhouse-mirror reflections of normal life, so that the werewolf story we came up with was basically a puberty nightmare. We faced a sort of almost absurdly huge and horrific extension of our own normal, everyday experience."
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To bring this off, Whedon would have to find the proper cast to bring his characters to flesh-and-blood life.
[] The first role to be filled was that of Watcher Rupert Giles. Pretty quickly after the casting audition process began, the role was filled by British actor Anthony Stewart Head.
"With Giles," says Snyder, "Joss knew exactly what he wanted. Tony just so nailed the part. What's amazing to me, is that the English got Ally McBeal before they got Buffy in England and they said, 'You can see that Buffy comes out of the Ally McBeal mold. Woah, woah, woah, quite the reverse, and that's no reflection on David Kelley..."
At the time, Head was probably best known from a series of enormously popular coffee commercials though he had also guest starred roles in such shows as Highlander: The Series and NYPD Blue as well as having roles in movies like A Prayer For The Dying, Devil's Hill and Lady Chatterly's Lover. On the London stage he had also appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Julius Caesar,The Heiress, Chess and Rope. To telefantasy fans, however, he was best known for his co- an starring role in VR.5, in which he more or less watched over that show's star, Lori Singer. "The difference", says Head, "is that in VR.5 my character worked for an organisation and he basically knew what he was doing. In Buffy, I'm on my own and I have not the faintest idea what I'm doing. I just know it is my duty and my life's mission to find this girl. And to teach her how to deal with vampires. She is The One. The One who possesses all of the talents. I'm the Watcher, so the fact that she had no interest in getting on board in the beginning was infinitely annoying to me. And the fact that she was this young, American high school girl and I'm very English means that there was a lot of fun to be had.
"The way it works is you get a script and they ask you if you would like to read for it," he says of the audition process. "Well, I read the Buffy script and it was really exceptional. I'm usually a very good judge of scripts. You never know what will happen, of course, but I had never seen anything like it on TV before. I've said this before, but I chose to take the script with me when I popped out for something to eat. I sat there eating with my script and found myself laughing out loud, which is a bit embarrassing when you're sitting on your own. But it is something that is strangely accepted in LA, people sitting at tables reading scripts and trying desperately not to look obvious that they're reading a script. I couldn't stop turning the pages to find out what happened, but at the same time I couldn't help but crack up. This was amazingly new stuff, so I couldn't wait to meet them. I met Gail Berman, Joss and a few others. Had no idea who Joss was. He's so young, anyway, that I probably thought he was an intern or something. I didn't pay him much attention the first time around, but then again when you're greeted by a bunch of faces in a room, you don't really know who's who. Joss has apparently said that I picked up the part and walked away with it under my arm at that moment."
Head was cast even before Sarah Michelle Gellar. "The first test I did was for Fox," he reflects, "and just before I went my agent said, 'Have you seen the movie?' I said, 'A long time ago.' He suggested I see it and I was saddened because it wasn't at all what I had read. I thought, 'This is bizarre, this is not what I envisioned at all.' Later, I saw Joss in the hallway - by that point I had worked out that it was him - and said, 'I saw the movie!' and his face fell. He said, 'Well, we're not doing that!' I'm a great believer in instincts and intuition, and I knew then when I saw and talked to him, I just felt it would come together.
"So I had to audition in front of a bunch of Fox executives, which is bizarre because it's a room of about 20 people. Its very crammed, like a small Equity Waiver Theatre. You go in and do it. Some of them laugh excessively because they're working very hard to make you feel at home, and some people are completely blank and you have absolutely no idea how you're going down. It's rather like being a bad stand-up comic. Added to that, you sit in the corridor before you go in and they give you a contract to sign, so flashing through your I mind is, 'Okay, I've got to be away from my family for five to seven years. Do I know what I'm doing? What's going to happen?' At the same time, they're bringing pages of the contract that have been faxed from the agent with points that have been renegotiated or changed. You're flipping through this contract trying to figure out what you're saying that you'll do instead of being able to concentrate on a ac s er acting. It's bizarre."
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[] The role of Xander Harris went to Nicholas Brendon, who began his career as a production assistant on the sitcom Dave's World before securing a recurring role on the soap opera Another World, and made the leap to the big-screen in such films as Children Of The Corn III: Urban Harvest, and on stage in The Further Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, My Own Private Hollywood and Out Of Gas On Lovers Leap. Buffy represented his first big break.
"I was Joss Whedon in high school," he says of the early days. "I think what Joss wanted is a situation where he can now completely manipulate and write the situation the way he sees fit. He plays God now. If he wants that girl, by golly, by going through me he's going to get that girl. He can say all the funny lines and have all the retorts quickly, very witty and wry. I like that. I think he went to high school in Europe at an all boys school, so it wasn't a typical high school situation. I think it made him even more insecure when he went out to the real world. We had that conversation where he told me that Xander was him in high school. In terms of the show itself, I think The X-Files originally opened the doors for this kind of show and after a while we started thinking, 'When are the great scripts going to stop coming?' But they don't. I feel so fortunate to be doing such good material."
"A couple of guys came in to read for Xander," adds Snyder, "but Nicky just hit it out of the park. He, like many of the characters, begs the question, Which is more Joss? Willow or Xander? In a way, probably Xander, in another way Willow. There is some part of Joss in all of the characters."
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[] Although Charisma Carpenter had originally intended to become an English teacher, acting sidetracked her. Her first television acting role was a guest shot on an episode of Baywatch, which led to a co-starring position in Aaron Spelling's short-lived Malibu Shores, which in turn landed her in Buffy as the vacuous Cordelia Chase, (or "Beauty and the Beast" as she has been called). Originally an adversarial character, Cordelia eventually became a key member of The Scooby Gang, before ultimately leaving the show for its spin-off series, Angel.
"I was auditioning for Buffy while I was doing Malibu Shores," she explains. "I guess they knew it was going to get cancelled soon. So I auditioned wearing overalls, a leather jacket and flip-flops. It was really a bizarre day. I was actually reading for Buffy. Then they wanted me to read for Cordelia five minutes later. I did, and I guess they really liked it."
Snyder remembers that Whedon had originally been looking for a black actress for the role of Cordelia. But one of the stumbling blocks there, he says, "was the way we knew loss anticipated the relationships shifting and changing... There was some concern at the network at the time that interracial relationships would be problematic. At that point Warner was a different kind of network. I know that came up and Joss said I can't have restraints on how I mix and match the dynamics. That's part of the fun of the show, that Willow is in love with Xander, Xander is in love with Buffy, Cordelia can't stand any of them, yet finds herself drawn to Xander.' Joss decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight at that particular time, but he didn't want to be hindered in the dynamics of the shifting triangles. "
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[] Before landing the role of Willow Rosenberg on Buffy, Alyson Hannigan began her career in Atlanta, where she started shooting commercials, moving on to such national spots as McDonalds, Six Flags Amusement Parks and Oreo cookies. At age 11 she moved to LA with the hopes of breaking into film and television. Her break-through role was as Dan Ackroyd's daughter in My Stepmother Is An Alien, followed by guest-starring roles on Picket Fences, Roseanne and Touched By An Angel. A recurring role on Almost Home came next before she became a series regular on Free Spirit. "By far," she says, " Buffy is the best thing I've done. I did some movies of the week that were horrible, but they weren't the same thing as a horror series. I'm a fan of the genre, but such a wimp when I watch the movies because I will basically jump into the lap of the person next to me."
George Snyder remembers some casting difficulties with this role, Warner Brothers having in mind a specific type of actress they wanted to use.
"The casting of Willow was a problem," he explains, "because the network said, 'Why don't we just get an [Aaron] Spelling girl and put glasses on her? The notion of casting a not classically beautiful girl- 'beautiful' in the television sense or Spelling sense of the word - was something Joss was absolutely committed to. He had somebody in mind that didn't work out, then there was somebody else who didn't work out. There was a lot of shuffling of actresses to the network and the studio, and finally in the midst of it all there came Alyson. And that's when he said, 'You know, this is the one!' Fox got it, I think. Warners were a little reluctant at first, and her look as you watch through the first season - changed a bit. Finally they began to realise that she had a look that was equally important. Joss basically said, 'Trust me,' and the beauty of it was that if this was a big network, we possibly might not have had someone hearing him when he said, 'Trust me.' But The Warner Network did. And she got all the prisoner mail the first season. Actually, in the first season her mail was second only to Sarah's."
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[] Aspiring actor David Boreanaz - who was making a living parking cars, painting houses and handing out towels at a sports club - was discovered by an agent while he was walking his dog. This led to guest appearances on Married With Children, the TV movie Men Don't Lie, the stage shows Hatful Of Rain,Fool For Love and Cowboy Mouth, as well as the feature films Aspen Extreme, Best of The Best 2 and Eyes Of The World. Whedon cast him as Angel, an early protector of Buffy who quickly become her love interest, and eventually revealed himself to be a vampire. Needless to say, Angel struck a chord with people and was eventually spun-off to his own series.
"I've always liked horror films," says Boreanaz. "When I was a kid, Frankenstein, the original movie, scared the hell out of me. I've always been fascinated with the film Nosferatu, and when I saw the film the first time it was eerie. You have no choice but to get into the genre when you're on this show because you're surrounded by all these vampires and it's amazing when you have all these extras in vampire makeup, or you're in the graveyard shooting and you look around to see vampires hanging out. It's pretty wild. The show itself is really well written and it just goes to show you that if you have the writing and the right chemistry between the cast, things really do work out for the best."
Adds Snyder, "Angel was not designed as an ongoing character. What would you do with Buffy and Angel? If we had frozen them in time, if we had stayed in high school forever, maybe we could have kept it going. Anybody else would have been tempted to stay in high school and stay with that unrequited love. What is more boring than that? It's Sam and Diane from Cheers. No, you don't let them go to bed, and we all know that when Sam finally did get into bed with Diane, it was the end of an era. So your gut reaction is, 'Let's just keep him a dark, mysterious, brooding guy who's tortured and helps out Buffy.' Joss said, 'No, at some point you've got to go to the next step. Up the tension and go for the dark.' What's the last thing you want to have happen? A Slayer in love with a vampire! So you do it. But having done it, oh my God, now he's bad. Of course the mail came in: 'Turn him back, turn him back.' Even the network came in with, 'He gets cured next week, right?' Joss is like, 'Oh, no, not next week. First of all, he's never going to be cured. Second of all, he's not going to turn back and he has to go to Hell.' They said, 'He's a very popular character and we're a little concerned.' But again it was the narrative driving the show. Then, of course, we did turn him back and he was redeemed. Then the question was, 'Now what?' Of course that led to him being spun off into his own show."
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[] The producers couldn't have hoped for better casting when Sarah Michelle Gellar entered the process as Buffy. Already a veteran, having appeared in many television commercials, in 1980 Gellar moved over to the daytime soap opera Guiding Light, and guest-starred on William Tell, Love Sidney and Spenser: For Hire. In 1989 she cohosted the syndicated teen show Girl Talk, before co-starring in the teen soap opera Swan's Crossing. A fairly big break came in the form of the TV movie A Woman Named Jackie, in which she played the young Jackie Bouvier. Small roles in several films were next, followed by Neil Simon's Broadway play Jake's Women. This was followed by a two-year stint on the soap opera All My Children, for which she was awarded an Emmy.
As her tenure on the soap was coming to an end, Gellar went to the Buffy offices to audition for the role of Cordelia, and walked out with the lead. "We had seen a lot of actresses for the role of Buffy," says Snyder. "She read for Cordelia, but then they had her read for Buffy and they knew she was right. The other actresses couldn't get the balance. Somebody said to me, 'It's very interesting that for a girl as beautiful as Sarah is, she nevertheless has been able to sell the idea of being an outcast.' That's no small feat. There's a vulnerability there. Your initial reaction is [Snyder says in a deeply sarcastic tone], 'Yeah, right, she's not the most popular girl in school?' Yet when you're watching, you get it. She sells it. She is the outsider; the kids in that school don't really see her and we are persuaded that she could be on the sidelines. That's very interesting."
"My manager spoke to the Warner Bros network and they mentioned they had this Buffy show," says Gellar. "He thought it would be a great opportunity to use my Tae Kwan Do and do comedy and drama. I probably had 11 auditions and four tests. It was the most awful experience of my life, but I was so driven. I had read the script and heard about Joss Whedon and how wonderful he was. I went to the audition the week he was Oscar nominated for his Toy Story screenplay. I thought, 'I'm going to have this role.' He tells me I nailed it, but I still went through 11 auditions."
Adds Whedon, "There was no second place. We read tons of people and several were staggeringly untalented. Buffy is a tough part. It is a character actress in the part of a leading lady. This girl has to look the part of the blonde bimbo who dies in reel two, and yet she's not that. Buffy is a very loopy, very funny, very strange person - kind of eccentric. Sarah has all those qualities and you don't find them in a beautiful young girl very often. She gave us a reading that was letter perfect and then said, 'By the way it doesn't say this on my resume, but I did take Tae Kwon Do for four years and I'm a brown belt. Is that good?' No, perfect!
"Finding Buffy was the biggest challenge, and I think if we hadn't found Sarah, the series might not have happened or lasted. What Sarah brings to the part is her intelligence. At the same time, she's got the hormonal idiosyncratic goofiness that makes Buffy not just the Terminator. She approaches the vampires with total irreverence, which drives them crazy. I call her Jimmy Stewart because she suffers so well."
At the same time, Gellar has given Whedon anxiety attacks on more than one occasion, particularly in terms of her zealousness in handling many of her own stunts. "My attitude," he says, "is that the show isn't so good that it's worth anybody getting hurt for it. Sarah is always covered with bruises and I'm saying, 'Sarah, don't do this stuff. We'll get the close-up of you saying the funny thing after.' 'No, no, I can do it,' she says, and then she gets this giant black-and-blue mark on her arm. 'Sarah, stop, please!'"
In explaining the early appeal of the character and the show, Gellar says, "When I was growing up - and not to knock these shows - I watched Mallory worry about her dates and her boyfriends on Family Ties. I watched Blair on Facts of Life. There were no strong characters. I'm sorry, Tootie was not a role model, y'know? But with Buffy, we're showing real situations. Buffy is not the prettiest girl in her school, she's not the most popular, she's not the smartest. She makes mistakes, she makes good decisions and bad decisions. She's dealing with real situations that we can put on a fantasy level. As an actor, you can always bring parts of yourself to characters, but hopefully it's only a small portion of it, and the rest is a new character that you developed. My junior high school was like Buffy's. I was kind of a nerd. I didn't have many friends and I was an outcast. But I think Buffy is an amazing role model because the one thing that I was able to do at my high school was be an individual. The problem with most high schools is they don't stress individuality. Buffy shows girls it's okay to be different."
And at the same time, Buffy the series would be different from other high school-based shows in that it would allow its characters to move through their grades naturally and ultimately graduate.
"They've all gotten to grow up," says Snyder. " A decision Joss made early on was I do not want 40 year olds in high school. So the decision was made that they would be sophomores, juniors, seniors and go to college. Actually we weren't sure what she was going to do, but we knew that she was going to graduate from high school in three years. This attitude allowed us to change the looks and to let them evolve as actors and in their characters."
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Gellar's first efforts as Buffy were showcased in a half-hour presentation of the series that preceded the show's pilot and was written and directed by executive producer Joss Whedon. The primary purpose of this presentation was to interest the executives of The Warner Network in the idea of Buffy as a series.
"That was Joss' first directing experience and he didn't have a very good support team behind him," says Gellar. "We didn't know what we were doing with the show. It was like all these ideas in your head and they're not working out right on paper. We had a whole summer to fix it by the time we did the real pilot, and I think we did a pretty good job. What made everything work is we needed to find Alyson Hannigan. She was the best and what allowed Nicholas Brendon and myself to become a threesome. Once she came aboard, everything clicked."
Reflecting on that presentation, Anthony Head recalls, "I think it was pretty ropey. I don't think anyone would disagree with the notion that it left a lot to be desired. There were elements in that script that were strong, though. There was one really cool moment with me and Buffy in the library. We had a library set that was two tiers. There was a mezzanine balcony with a spiral staircase coming down from it. In the middle of a conversation Buffy is on top and I'm down below. While she's talking, she does a handstand on the banister rail and flips twice and lands on her feet. At that time we had two stunt doubles as we do now- one to do acrobatics and one to do fight scenes. The acrobat was just astonishing, she did this great flip.
"Basically, though, this pilot or presentation represented Joss' first time as director with a not very sympathetic crew. Generally you hope when you pull a crew together and it's your directorial debut, there will be some give and take and some leeway. But they were very odd. I'm being very general here because some people were great and some people were off, but they weren't very generous, which was all rather surprising, really. By the time we got the unit together for the series, it was a very different matter."
Amazingly, this presentation featured a different actress in the role of Willow, who didn't make it to series.
"She was totally different from Alyson," says Head. "She was the opposite end of the scale. Basically she was a very different concept of Willow. I must admit that when I first saw her, she wasn't how I envisioned Willow. Alyson is exactly the way I envisioned the character. The girl who played her was lovely, really gorgeous, we had great fun, but she didn't feel comfortable in the part. She just didn't feel comfortable in the gawkiness of it, which was hard to play. It just didn't fit right, and I think she would be the first to admit that.
"The first thing we had to film was the last scene when we say, 'Well done,' and pat ourselves on the back and go on to the next thing," he continues. "I was playing it as I thought they wanted me to. When you've tested three times and each time you're thinking, 'Christ, what was it I did last time that they really liked? What was it that got me this job?' It does make you self-conscious and you are desperately searching for whatever it was that got you the gig. But in that last scene, I was appalling, seriously appalling. And luckily, as fate would have it, my dressing room was next to the room they were using to show dailies. I heard my voice coming from next door so I puttered in and had a look, and was appalled at what I saw myself doing. I was then able to pull back from that. I was play acting the man instead of being the man. So then the scene that Sarah Michelle Gellar and I had in the library was the one that made all the sense and the one that felt completely right. It was night and day. Very different. Thankfully there were a couple of good scenes like that, and that offset this very dreadful scene. "
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Interestingly, once Buffy was given the greenlight for series production, the show was designed for a midseason debut [in other words, it was ready to slot into the schedules if another show proved so unpopular in the ratings it would have to be axed]. That meant that Joss Whedon and his cast and crew would be producing the first 12 episodes without any feedback whatsoever from either the critics or the audience... which may have had its advantages.
"We finished the entire first season before we went on the air, so we were able to do it in a bubble without having anybody on the outside interfering," Gellar notes. "When I was in North Carolina [shooting I Know What You Did Last Summer], we didn't get to see it because it was on a cable channel we couldn't get in the town we were in. I was able to avoid the craziness, although Alyson called me every week going, 'You don't understand, every time you go past a grocery store there's a Buffy billboard.
"The network wasn't exactly sure what we were doing in the beginning," she says." After the praying mantis episode, they said, 'We're just not sure if we're sending the right message.' We're like, 'What message? You have sex with her and she bites your head off.' These are situations that children can relate to. The themes throughout the show are common: loving a friend, being at an age when you're having problems with Mom and wanting to be an adult and wanting to be a child at the same time. The scariest horror exists in reality. It's feeling so invisible, date rape... these are situations teenagers understand and can relate to because its happening to them. This is very different from the movie. What we did was take the concept of the movie of this 16year-old girl who is popular and has a perfect life, but there is something missing and she feels the kind of 16-year-old aching that everyone felt in their adolescence: am I an adult? Am I a child? And, suddenly, she has to save the world. Now she's an outcast. She doesn't fit in. She doesn't know if she wants to be a cheerleader or fight vampires, and that is what makes her interesting and believable. Buffy is a person who is lost, who doesn't know where she belongs, and you can feel for her. Junior High was my time to feel that I didn't know where I fit. I tried to be a jock. I tried to be cool. And I couldn't find my place. I think that is what Willow, Xander and Buffy are all going through. That's what makes them such wonderful friends - they are helping each other get through this time."
Looking back at the development of the direction of the show through season one, it's no wonder that Whedon basically dismissed The Warner Network's classification of the show as Clueless meets The X-Files.
"Clueless was a bit of a misleading comparison to the show," he says, "because that was really a camp TV show that laughed at people - everybody was sort of a joke. Buffy is an actual hour-long drama where, although it's got a huge amount of humour, it takes itself seriously. It's not one of those post-modern things where everything is a big joke. I also don't think that Buffy is visually as dark as The X-Files. The show is very plot-driven, dealing with what the characters are facing and how they deal with it. When The Warner Network originally said, 'Do you want to do the show?' I went a little more toward the horror because that's more my bent. But, truthfully, comedy and horror are more compatible than action and horror because both are about not being in control of your environment.
"A lot of great comedy," Whedon enthusiastically elaborates on his theory, "comes from a character's lack of control: not knowing what's coming out of the frame. Not just in terms of slapstick, but in the case of something like Groundhog Day - the guy.is out of control of his environment and is just completely confused by what the hell is going on. A horror movie is sort of the same thing. What the hell is going on? Except that the guy has a really big axe or it's a slimy monster. In a horror movie it's very much about 'I don't understand the space that I'm in and I don't have control of the situation.'
"An action movie is 'I have control of the situation and I understand the space I'm in.' The thing about the action in a film by someone like James Cameron is that he tells you exactly what the space is, what the problem is, where the people are, what you need to do, and what's going to happen, and then uses that space. So you know exactly where everybody is. What's exciting is seeing your person control the space that they're in. That, to me, is textbook great action.
"Horror is the opposite. I go on about this because it's the hardest thing about writing a successful episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. You have to put a hero and character and her friends into peril, and at some point she has to take control and become an action hero. So we have to achieve both things. One of the things we're always saying is, 'We need a space that's small and dark enough for her to be scared in, but big and bad enough for her to kick ass in' and for us to get that epic sense that she's an action hero. But I do think you can do both, and that's what we're doing on this show."
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Season one of Buffy kicked off with the two-part Welcome To The Hellmouth and The Harvest. Those episodes basically set up the series premise and introduced Brian Thompson - the Alien Bounty Hunter from The X-Files and one of the vampire clan members on the short-lived Kindred - as Luke, lieutenant to the Master Vampire.
Things quickly moved away from being purely about the undead. Episode three was The Witch, which took the notion of parents reliving the glory days of their past through their offspring and gave it a supernatural twist. In this scenario, a mother uses witchcraft to change bodies with her daughter so that she can excel at cheerleading at high school and steal her offspring's youth. This was followed by Teacher's Pet, in which a substitute teacher's seeming infatuation with Xander ultimately leads to the revelation that she's a giant praying mantis who decapitates those she gets close to. Although Never Kill A Boy On The First Date went back to vampire territory, it dealt more with how Buffy was trying to balance her life as a Slayer with that of a student.
The Pack is a pretty frightening tale in which hyenas from Africa possess the minds of a group of high school students - including Xander - and they begin attacking other students. Again, a parable of school cliques and gangs that is taken to horrific extremes. Angel, on the other hand, reveals the fact that Buffy's growing love interest is actually a vampire, but one with a soul. This particular episode - especially its revelation about Angel's curse - has resonance that is still being felt four seasons later.
I Robot, You Jane deals with a demon who attempts to take over the Internet while The Puppet Show explores a high school talent show that takes a darker slant when one of the participants is a ventriloquist whose dummy has a mind of its own. Nightmares peels back the layers of the characters a bit by exploring some of their deepest fears while Invisible Girl deals with a female student who has been so completely ignored by everyone - from her peers to her teachers - that she literally turns invisible.
It all comes to a head in Prophecy Girl, which chronicles Buffy's final battle with the Master; a battle in which Buffy is actually killed for a moment, but is resurrected more powerful than before and swiftly destroys this particular vampiric threat. Again, one just has to look at the seeds being sown: although Buffy was only killed for a moment, it was long enough for another Slayer to be created in the form of season two's Kendra, whose subsequent death would lead to Faith, which would take the series itself in wild new directions.
Prophecy Girl also brought the series to an interesting place. Because Buffy had not aired during the production of its first 12 episodes, no one was sure how the audience was going to respond to it. If the show had tanked in the ratings and was cancelled after the initial 12 shows, there was, thanks to Whedon's careful planning, an ending of sorts to the series. Thankfully, it wasn't necessary.
Although that first season was more episodic in nature than the later seasons would be, and it often felt like a modern version of the old Kolchak series, it nonetheless demonstrated Whedon's belief in allowing the characters and the overall story arc to evolve.
"We've been able to develop storylines that we had no idea in the beginning we were going to do," says Snyder. "The narrative, as Joss has said many times, is what drives the show. Joss has said you have to go for the dark, you have to go for the pain. The funny is funnier in the contrast. He tells the writers, 'Go to the darkest place you can and then find the humour.' The contrast is what lends power to both humour and sadness. You know, a lot of writers want to protect their characters. The most common feature of young writers is, 'I created these characters, I love them. I don't want them to be hurt. They must always be good, they must never be bad.' Well, truth be told, that's just not interesting. But, boy oh boy, when Angel went bad in season two, we were inundated with mail: 'Turn him back, make him good.' Fans were furious, which was a testament to the strength of the show. Put people you care about in jeopardy and you'll care. When he killed Jenny Calendar... unbelievable! That was a tough one. We had to find who is Angel? He had to do something bad. At the same time, we created that story for Jenny. She was a gypsy, she was involved, there was a storyline that forwarded it and it played out. But Angel had to do something really, really bad, because the ultimate redemption would be that much more powerful."
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For Snyder, there was a moment in the first season that encapsulated for him the strength of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and drove home just how different it was from other shows on the air.
"Joss went down to the set to check out the shooting of a scene from The Pack," he remembers. "We went down to the set and the director said, 'Okay, we have this simple tracking shot. We move past the fat kid and the Pack kids say something mean to him and we track over to Buffy and she's like, 'That was really mean,' and we're out. They found a fat kid extra. Joss looked at the set up and said, 'No, the kid is sitting there with a pile of candy wrappers in front of him, eating a candy bar by himself. This is wrong. Give the guy some friends and give him a piece of fruit. Lose the junk food.' Well, that changes the whole tone. Then he turned to me and said, 'See, this is what happens when I'm not on the set. You have to pay attention to all of this.' What it did was transform the scene from a cheap joke, picking on the fat kid eating junk food by himself, to a kid who can't help it; he's got friends, he's doing the best he can, it's not his fault. Then we get to Buffy who says, 'That was really mean,' and then it means something about her. If the kid was sitting there scarfing up junk food and Buffy says that was really mean, well, Duh! It's in those kinds of moments where you care and you get it. It was just a moment, but it added resonance."
Snyder believes that the way the scripts are handled by directors are just as important as Joss' words, using the example of the original movie to prove his point. "Joss has said that we know vampires don't exist, but if they did, how would our characters behave? To them, they are real. That's the one big difference between the show and the film, which had a camp quality where it was so self-conscious. You knew you couldn't take those vampires seriously. It was all a joke. Whereas in the show we take these vampires seriously. So seriously, in fact, that when we first started putting actors in vampire make-up, they started acting like Bela Lugosi. Joss is like, 'No, you look very scary right now. Just act normal.'"
Achieving that reality - where all of the characters come across as flesh and blood human beings (even if they're vampires... er, if you get what we mean) - has never been an easy task. Indeed, the necessary attention to detail has probably become even more difficult as time has gone on and the show has grown more complex. Still, right from the beginning Joss Whedon had the attitude of not allowing the pressures of quality to get to him.
"We do have fun with the show and I honestly believe we have a good vibe on the set," he says. "I couldn't take the pressure of episodic television if the environment wasn't right. Is art worth pain? Yes, it is. Is it worth me feeling pain? Yes, it is. Is it worth me causing pain? No. That doesn't mean I'm always nice to everybody. I just try not to be a dick. Some days there is so much to do that I want to crawl into a womb. Everybody wants answers from me about a thousand different things. So sometimes someone will ask, 'So what prop should we use?' and I'll freak out: 'Why do we have to have props? What ever happened to mime? Mime is a great art!' During those times everybody's like, 'Whoa, PMS on the Joss-man.' But I get over it.
"Fortunately," he adds, "the writing staff that I've got is the best you could want. Great stories, never cheap, never bullshit, never, 'how can we vamp until the end?' In the end, if it comes down to my talking to the prop guy, we know there's a reason for it; I'm not just being picky. When I directed the season finale of season one and the first episode of season two, it was such an extraordinary atmosphere. Every grip in there was busting his ass - I think because they feel they're working on something worthwhile. It's because they care about it. That applies to us and everyone involved. If we don't love what we're putting on the screen, it ain't worth doing."
Five years ago - in the beginning - Joss Whedon and an incredible cast and crew began a creative love affair that has continued to re-invent itself and blossom perennially. Even today, after all this time and the sheer number of episodes produced, Buffy The Vampire Slayer continues to raise the creative bar to new levels, offering a goal that other shows and not just other telefantasy shows - should be attempting to reach and surpass.
Few have and few will. Though we hear there's this rather good series called Angel... SFX