Article paru dans le "Vampire Special" (février 2002) du magazine britannique SFX.
Voici les encadrés accompagnant l'article :
He loved her, then he hated her and now he loves her more than ever. Joss Whedon may have set his sight on a movie career, but Buffy became an unlikely small screen sensation that changed his life irrevocably. Ed Gross looks back over eight years of his own interviews with the Buffster's creator.
* * * * * * * *
CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS MAN? "I'M STILL 'JOSS "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Whedon', which is really depressing." The thing is, this isn't the small screen's greatest living writer grumbling about his lot today. This was eight years ago, before he even knew he was going to be asked to create a television version of a film which, sure, he wrote, but which he also, at the time, would rather have forgotten all about.
Today being "Joss 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' Whedon" is anything but something to get depressed about. The show has reshaped his life, his ambitions and his reputation in ways he couldn't have believed possible. He is currently presiding over the show's second TV spin-off (After Angel he's now working on a Buffy animated series) as well as books and comics based on the series. But Buffy has also, he would be the first to admit, enabled him to finally create a life-long dream - a TV space opera. Firefly, a show set on a ship with a crew of five, is in preproduction now. It could be on the US screens as early as this autumn. His opportunities to create a splash on the big screen also seem to have opened up.
It's intriguing to look back over eight years of Whedon interviews to see how his attitudes and enthusiasm have changed, though certain themes remain constant: his assertion that Hollywood doesn't treat writers with the regard they deserve ("ultimately, the industry's attitude towards writers is pretty much the same as it's always been: 'How can you facilitate our blockbuster and how can we push you around?'"); an absolute passion for writing ("I still get the same way about telling the stories that I did when we first started"); and a charming inability ever to become big-headed ("Five years from now you may have forgotten all about Buffy").
A year or so before Buffy made the transition from failed feature film to cult and then across-the-board TV hit, Whedon had been making a living as a script doctor on such efforts as Speed and Waterworld; he had even nabbed an Academy Award nomination as co-writer of Toy Story and had just been assigned what would ultimately become Alien Resurrection. At the time his future seemed to be tied in with the big screen, yet already he seemed wary of Hollywood's attitudes towards writers.
"Although I've been treated well by good people a lot of the time," he reflected, "I have the usual bitter, 'They're jealous of us - they need us and they hate us because they need us' writer thing. Which is probably true. I think that on the totem pole [of film production], writers are still pretty much the part of the pole that's stuck in the ground so that it will stay up. I think the compensation and the high profile certain writers and scripts have gotten has to do with the whole media being more 'insider' than it used to be, with people knowing more about directors and the industty. But, in a way, I find that the more success I get as a writer, the less power I have."
It's a typically oxymoronic statement from Whedon. He was quick to clarify it. "What I mean is that once you start making the big money and working on the big projects, then all of a sudden there are movie stars, a giant budget and a bazillion people who are trying very hard to make this work their way. And there's really no place for the writer. No one's ever really going to listen to the writer. As a writer you may get to play in the big leagues, but we never get the ball because they've got this big guy, the big director, and there's suddenly a committee. Now if I had a string of hits or classics, that might be very different, but solely in terms of being a normal Joe working on big projects, my say is less than if I was working on a smaller project."
Whedon is a third generation writer who was encouraged to give the television medium a try by his father, "so I could make enough money to move out of his house." Although he was actually a film major at college and had always counted on a career in directing, his break came writing for the sitcom Roseanne. It was, he reckons, a great learning experience. Even back in 1996 when he considered this brief sojourn into the world of the cathode tube a mere utilitarian step on his way to a movie career, he spoke to SFX fondly of his time writing scripts by the week.
"Roseanne was quite a carousel ride," he said. "I liked the speed at which you had to turn the stuff out. Television teaches you a good discipline. I would never have written anything if I hadn't spent a couple of years on TV. In TV, it's all about the process. If you're turning out a quality show where it's consistently good, then you do have to go through hell," It could have been a prophetic statement about Buffy. Working on somebody else's show, though, did have its downsides.
"There are certain times when it's only about the process. Then it's about this guy's power and this guy's vanity and all of a sudden all you're turning out is work. Towards the end of the year I was on Roseanne that started to happen, which is why I quit. There were a lot of different factors, but basically the show started to suffer and it was all about, 'Who's angry at whom?' and none of it was about, 'What's happening this week on Roseanne?'"
He spent a year on the ill-fated TV version of Parenthood, and then wrote the screenplay for the less than-well-received Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie, which, surprisingly, became almost an albatross hanging around his creative neck. This was when he told us that he hated the idea he'd always be the guy who wrote Buffy. It may seem ironic now, but back then his experiences with the teenage slayer left him bitter, but with a new vigour to make his mark.
"I've gotten into this stage where basically I'm looking to develop something that I'm going to direct," he told us empathically. "That's all about trying to make a movie that's made by me. Something that I can look at and say, 'That's good.' Everything that's happened before has sort of fed into this kind of attitude of, 'Nobody cares about the writer.'"
This desire would remain with him until... Well, it's still unfulfilled. But again and again through the years, Whedon keeps on promising himself that his next film will be the one where he takes control; the one he would direct. But even he has to admit he keeps getting offered projects which make him break his resolution. When we last spoke to him about X-Men, for which he was asked to write a script which was ultimately never used, he ruefully admitted, "It's like, 'How many signs do I need?' Every time I do the same thing. Alien Resurrection happens and I go, 'Never again, I'll stay in TV where I'm happy.' Then the X-Men thing comes up and I say, 'That could be so cool.' So I dive in and they don't give a flying fuck what I think is cool. It's like I forget what a writer is in the movies, which is nothing. It's entirely true. My whole movie career has been a cautionary tale."
After the Buffy movie debacle Whedon began carving a niche for himself as a much respected script doctor (see the accompanying box-out on page 43). After polishing up the script for Speed he decided to have another crack at writing his own script rather than "adding the jokes to other people's" and came up with Suspension (which he unashamedly described as "Die Hard on a Bridge"). But even while he tinkered about with such formulaic action fodder, in interviews it was never long before he would reveal his true passion...
"Not only is science fiction way too cool but the people out there are so hungry for it. I was flipping through a magazine, and there were Star Wars figures, Alien figures and Star Trek figures, and ads for the Franklin Mint and this and that. I sat there realising, 'God, there's such a market out there for that.'
Pumpkinhead has his comic book, for God's sake! And I don't think the studios are getting that exactly, which is too bad. But I'm hoping that there will be a resurgence. Everything that I love keeps happening before I'm ready. Comic books were the other half of my entire life and, of course, they started making movies based on comics when I was too little to work on them. Sorry, I'm just so disappointed that all of the comic book movies have been so bad. My big dream for Batman 3 was that they would do Dark Knight, and Superman would come down and be a government stooge, and be played by Christopher Reeve. That was my dream."
His next project, ironically, was not a film, and it would eventually inspire a comic. Flash forward several months, and Warner Brothers announced their new television network, the WB, and one of the shows they wanted to kick it off with was a television version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Whedon, who had been making big bucks in feature films, seemed as gobsmacked as anyone that he shifted gears the way that he did.
"I'm a little surprised, but it all feels so natural," he explained. "'Do you want to do a show based on Buffy?' I thought about what the show could be and I said, 'Yes, I do.' As soon as I said that, I thought the show would sell; we'd make the show and it would all work. I never thought that it would happen any other way. You have to be convinced that that's the way things will go. Now I don't know what people in Hollywood are thinking. Truthfully, I can spot the similarities between Buffy and my other scripts. It's not that different. Our approach on Buffy is to make little movies. The good thing is that I have no idea what I'm doing, so a lot of that works to my advantage. We shoot a little higher than we should and it's easy to break rules when you'e not sure what they are. At the same time, I'm very traditional. I try to tell a good story, I care about my characters and all that stuff. It's not like Twin Peaks where it's completely out there. I'm actually a very conservative storyteller. We're always so dedicated to, 'What is the emotional reality of being locked in a cage by the substitute teacher who then turns into a giant praying mantis?' And we're very serious about it, otherwise it becomes jokey. If you can't connect your story to some emotional reality to your characters, then there's no reason to tell that story."
Just as the Buffy television series was going into production Alien Resurrection was literally shooting several soundstages away. At the time, Whedon still believed that it could be the project that really made his name on the big screen. Even in those early days, though, if you listened hard, you could hear the warning signs coming from Whedon.
"I am excited about Alien Resurrection," he noted, "but it's a totally different experience from doing Buffy. The director does whatever he wants and I see a lot of my stuff and say, 'Oh, but it would have been better like this'. At the same time a lot of it is realised so beautifully. But, ultimately, my heart is with Buffy because my body is here."
He was also beginning to relish the control he had on Buffy as opposed to the lack of control he had over his movie scripts. "I worked on Alien Resurrection for a long, long time, but [with Buffy] it's like making little movies quick and on the sly. You have an idea and three weeks later you're prepping instead of being subject to the whims of others. I'm not ashamed to say that I like this feeling. If I feel like something needs to be done, then it's done. I'm finally telling stories, which is what I've always wanted to do. There's nothing on my [movie] resume I can look at and say, 'That's pure me.' Now if the show bombs and everybody hates it, well so much for pure me."
The show didn't bomb. Of course. It did the opposite of bombing. It anti-bombed, as Xander might say. Production began on year two while, simultaneously, the fourth Alien continued through its filming. When he talked to SFX again just before season two of Buffy was aired, Whedon's continued lack of faith in the movie industry and his newfound zeal for television was at its height.
"It makes perfect sense to me [to work in TV as opposed to films] but it definitely surprises most people," he said adamantly. "Why are the best writers in TV? Because they can control their product, they're given something resembling respect and they see what they create come up on the screen not only the way they want it, but also within a few months as opposed to like - four years. Plus it's steady work. That's my theory, because most movies are so bad that you have to wonder who in their right mind would want to write them. I love movies and want to make more movies, but if the idea is to tell the story, then this is the best way to do that. Another nice thing is that the WB really lets me get away with murder. They get what the show is, how strange it is, how it's all over the place, how edgy it sometimes is, and so there's never really been a problem. We've never had a story thrown out or a real disaster. We've had standards and practices issues, which you have on every show, but they get what we're doing and they don't interfere. I've seen networks that do it the other way and this is the ideal."
Prior to the debut of Buffy's third season - and following on the heels of the amazingly well-realised Angelus storyline of season two - Whedon was on a high from the show's popularity, but depressed at the release of Alien Resurrection.
"I liked the script for Alien Resurrection," he explained at the time. "But the movie? I fucking hated it. I thought it was as badly directed as a movie could be and I thought it was bad in ways that I didn't know movies could be bad. I learned more from that movie than anything I've ever been involved in. I thought it was badly cast and badly shot. I didn't like the production design. Everything that was wrong in the script was incredibly highlighted by it, and everything that was right about the script was squashed with one or two very minor exceptions. I just couldn't believe how much I hated it. I wasn't really involved in production. I went to the set once because I was busy doing Buffy. I went to dailies once and thought, 'This doesn't seem right, but I'm sure it's fine.' I saw the director's cut with the studio brass and I actually began to cry. Then I started to put on a brave face and tried to be a team player because Fox is my home. But I feel enough time has passed; it's out on vid and I can say with impunity that I was just shattered by how crappy it was.
"I really had high hopes for it," he added. "I worked really hard on it for a really long time. But you know what? It was an epiphany; a wake-up call. After that I said, 'The next person who ruins one of my scripts is going to be me.' ,I have always wanted to direct. I'm not just a bitter writer, trying to protect his shit. I think they're two very different talents, but there is an element of 'Enough already!' It really drives home the argument of why television is so much more satisfying. It was the final crappy humiliation of my crappy film career. Buffy is the most fulfilling thing I've ever gotten to do, and I'll be hard pressed to find something to top it even when I have more control."
All of which may make Whedon sound like a bit of a big-headed temperamental artiste, but he wasn't kidding himself that even his beloved Buffy was perfect. He admitted in the same interview that despite his "control" the show wasn't meeting his expectations.
"It never will," he said matter of factly. "Nothing ever does, Actually, last year it exceeded them and this year has been a struggle, because I was so happy last year that I'm like, 'Can we do it again? Is the magic gone? Did we peak?' Which is good, because you keep working really hard. Last year it got so personal and so strange and it got heavier than I expected it could have. We really got to go there emotionally, mostly because we have actors who can do fucking anything. We didn't know that when we started."
It was also around this time that the spin-off series Angel was announced. In typically Whedon fashion, he went out of his way to make sure that though this series wasn't simply going to be Buffy Mark 2, it was going to be DIFFERENT! "I see Angel as the second half, somewhat more adult version of the same metaphor," he described the spin-off at the time, "which is personal demons as actual demons with horns kind of thing. But it's not a high school humiliation, alienation kind of thing. It's more of an adult, 'I'm walking in a grown up world,' twentysomething or thirtysomething setting. We deal a lot with addiction as a metaphor, because that's Angel. He's sort of a reformed drunk, so he's sort of fighting his way back to something resembling humanity, and helping others to do the same. We refer to the show as Touched By An Equalizer. It will be a little darker, but it won't be one of those relentlessly all blue-collared, angst, 'I track a serial killer every week' kind of shows. It will have some good, quirky humour. Every episode can really be different. We can go anywhere, be more like an anthology with standalone stories than Buffy does, and less of a soap opera."
The best-laid plans, eh?
Buffy had been the recipient of tremendous critical acclaim at this point, and justifiably so. The show's ratio of good episodes to bad (or even average) was substantial.
"I think we've done pretty well," Whedon understated after season three had aired. "Even the weakest shows have things in them that I love. There's not one episode where we gave up. Looking back at last season, there were a run of a few episodes that I'm wicked proud of. I feel pretty good and nervous about whether or not I can still do this. That's a genuine terror. Everything just clicked."
After three years of a successful formula, many thought it crazy that season four would not only see the departure of Angel and a relocation from High School to College. Whedon was torn between the innate need to develop the show and keep it fresh, and upsetting audiences. He was never in any doubt that change was the way forward, but there were nerves. "We're making some changes next year and you're like, 'What if it doesn't work? What if people don't buy it?' There's nothing worse than when you watch a show that you love and then all of a sudden you're like, 'Wait a minute, this is bullshit.' But it happens. I look at every episode and say, 'Oh, we could have done this,' and I'm dissatisfied with everything, but I still feel that people are getting it and that's a good thing. "
It was at this point Whedon decided to take on X-Men. Foolish boy, going back on his promise. He should have known.
"It wasn't a meeting of minds, apparently," Whedon later told us when we met him in London. He was called in to do a rewrite which was then almost entirely rejected.
"I just felt there was some weak characterisation," he said of the script he saw. "Long stretches with no forward momentum in the plot. And more importantly there was no Danger Room [a staple of the X-Men comics]. So put in a big Danger Room. I tried to keep it, you know, cheap. But they threw all that out. I was so excited writing it. It was so much fun. I felt very passionate about it, which was probably a terrible mistake. And who knows? It may come out and be absolutely wonderful. But do you believe that I believe that?"
Even at that time, however, Whedon had heard rumours that "some bits of my script had crept back in" even though he claims that he saw "the draft after mine that almost had nothing of mine in it." As it turns out, a few of lines of dialogue did make the cut. He proudly lays claim to the "you're a dick" gag, but also has to take the blame for "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's hit by lightning? The same as anything else." He argues, though, that it just wasn't delivered right! You can sympathise with him after watching the rest of Halle Berry's performance...
Yet again after his experience we heard the familiar refrain, "After X-Men, and Alien Resurrection I feel like doing something that 14 other people don't already have a piece of already..."
We'll see.
The next time SFX met Whedon he was in the midst of season four of Buffy and season one of Angel and, in truth, a bit burned out physically, though not creatively. "I do see an end in sight for me," he half-joked. "It's called a massive coronary in professional circles."
Creatively, neither show seemed to be hurting, with Entertainment Weekly magazine heralding Buffy The Vampire Slayer as the best drama on television. Indeed, both series have flourished and there's even more on the horizon: Whedon has created and written the Fray miniseries for Dark Horse Comics, and is serving as creator/executive producer of the forthcoming Buffy animated series, the potential BBC Giles spin-off currently known as The Watcher and a new sci-fi series for Fox in America called Firefly. And every single one of these creations is eagerly awaited. But Whedon remains as level headed as ever.
"I can almost never experience total, naked surprise," he told us recently. "I can never see it with perspective. I've said this before: I always intended for Buffy to be a cultural phenomenon. That's how I wrote it. In the back of your mind, you're picking up your Oscar and your Saturn and everyone is playing with their Buffy dolls. You go through so much rejection and so much negativity - believe me, I did - you sort of have to develop this shell of incredible hubris, this arrogance, where you say, 'This is going to be huge.' Because if you don't believe that, you have so many people you're going to fail or it doesn't work, you sort of just crumble. So you sort of take it for granted and when it happens, when it goes the way you hoped that it would, then you're sort of striding along, and every now and then you'll take a moment of total perspective where you forget about all your arrogance, you forget about everything you've been through, and you just see it in perspective for the first time and it's boggling. It's so intense. But it doesn't happen very often. You just have to believe that it's going to so strongly that when it does, you don't get the fun of going, 'I can't believe it.'" SFX
Voici les encadrés accompagnant l'article :
"I had intended it to be more of a anthology, more like, Angel getting into people lives, and us getting to know them. But it became clear early on that the people that the audience were interested in were the regular characters. Which makes my job harder. An anthology show, you know, is a little simpler, because they're all standalone, whereas the mythology of a continuing story, and working your characters in, and making it matter to them every week, and keeping that story arc going on - what we do on Buffy is a lot harder. And now that I realise we have to do that on Angel too, I am really pissed." SFX
:: retour ::
"What I started with was a horror action comedy. It had fright, it had camera movement, it had acting - all kind of intersting things that weren't in the final film. Apart from the jokes - and there were a lot more of them [in my script] and all of my favourite ones got cut - it was supposed to have a little more edge to it. It was supposed to have a little more fun and be a visceral entertainment rather than a glorified sitcom where prtty much everyone stands in front of the camera, says their joke and exits. I wasn't happy about anything. I had one advantage from it: the direction was so bland that the jokes kind of stood out, because they were the only things to latch on to. In a way, that kind of worked for me because it got people to notice it. But that was a big disappointment to me.
"Where did the idea come from? There's actually an incredibly specific answer to that question. It came from watching a horror movie and seeing the typical ditzy blonde walk into a dark alley and getting kiled. I just thought that I would love to see a scene where the ditzy blonde walks into a dark alley, a monster attacks her and she kicks its ass. And then I actually thought of the trailer for the move where that actually happens. The trailer was the first thing that I thought of. I had the whole thing worked out; I even wrote the scene in the screenplay for the trailer based on that idea. So the concept was real simple.
"The vampire aspect took a while to figure out. I wanted to do this girl who was different and had powers. Plus I love vampires because they're so cool. But it started with Buffy. Before the vampires became part of it, I knew that I wanted to make her this special person; someone who wanted desperately to fit in, but had a higher calling. That's how the idea of her being a vampire slayer first came to me.
"The movie is, obviously, different from what I originally intended. I like horror and the movie was more straight-on comedy. While in a certain situation I wanted to go for the thrills, the chills and the action, that's not really what the movie was. The filmmakers lightened the things up and I always like to make things as dark as possible. My original draft is severed heads and horrible stuff going on. Camp was never my intent, because it takes you away of the characters somewhat. I don't like laughing at people, I prefer to laugh with them. Actually, when I was shooting the presentation [for the series], someone said to me, 'You're shooting the movie script, aren't you? You're shooting the thing you made fun of.' But I was able to shoot it the way I imagined it. But, yeah, the series is closer to my original concept." SFX
:: retour ::
"My film Suspension unashamedly is 'Die Hard on a bridge.' I love that script and I think it has its own integrity and its own personality, but when I thought it up, I said, 'Hey, Die Hard on a bridge,' and the studio said, 'Cool.' The appeal for me was creating a situation that is immediate, in your face and exciting, and then playing every variation possible. With the building in Die Hard, they thought of everything they could - the elevator shaft, the roof, the twists and all of that stuff. For me, the fun thing in Suspension was the bridge. I was like, 'How many unbelievable things can happen on a bridge?'
"In Suspension terrorists take over the George Washington Bridge. Interistingly enough, I wrote it thinking, 'Okay, I've got the George Washington Bridge and it's like Die Hard, so maybe I can sell it.' But by the time I finished it, what had appealed to me about the movie was the lead character and his whole situation. So that when some people talked about bying it as a possible Die Hard film, I was like, 'No, I don't want to do that. If you rewrite the script for John MacClane, this character gets lost.' What I love about Suspension is that the lead character, Harry Monk, has just come out of prison. He's from New York and has been imprisoned in New Jersey for 15 years and just wants to get to New York. That, right away, felt like the perfect thing for somebody who did not want to be on this bridge; somebody who just desperately wants to get back to New York. He's been confined for 15 years in a horror show, so the irony of that, I thought, was kind of fun. Then it's the whole redemption thing, because he was in jail for shooting a cop, so that when he hooks up with other policemen, they hate him; they don't trust him and he has to earn their trust. It's a redemption through violence story, which I like a lot.
"The nice men who bought it decided to make Waterworld first, so they'll be making that for the next si years. They swera they're going to make Suspension afertwards and they've basically said that after making Waterworld, Suspension will be like a drawing room comedy in comparison." Indeed. SFX
:: retour ::
"Sarah Michelle Gellar embodies Buffy extraordinarily, and she brings an intelligence and depth to the character that I certainly wouldn't write. She makes Buffy an emotionally very-connected character. It's never, 'Oh, look at her, she's a dork,' even though she's kind of an excentric. You're completely sucked in her story because Sarah is so gifted. We have scenes where we've shot her reaction and she makes the entire scene aven if she doesn't have a line to go with the reaction. I'm the luckiest man in showbusiness. That goes for my whole cast, who are all very funny and profesional.
"Poor Anthony Head has a lot of exposition, because we want everyone to understand what's going on. He's got such extraordinary range, yet at the same time he's extremely funny and plays the person who is so hapless and confused by this young American so perfectly.
"I was very careful to make sure that my leads are really specifically drawn out so that they're not so generic: 'I'll be pretty this week; I'll be snotty next week.' I hate that shit. Nick Brendan is extraordinarily likable. He's real good looking and can bring a humbling quality to the character, which is extremely charming. He can also play a range of emotions - God, I'm going to get so boring if I keep saying good things about everyone. Then, there's Alyson Hannigan. She plays the shy, bookish one and what's great about her is that she is also someone you just respond to emotionally. Whether she's in jeopardy or being hurt, you're just completely open to her in the same way that you're open to Sarah. She is also sort of a temptress. She brings a real life to the character and makes her very much a part of the group. It should be a really interesting mix." SFX
:: retour ::
"Basically when they're making a movie already and they shouldn't be, they call me in. It varies, it can be, 'Gosh, this one scene doesn't work,' or 'Wow, this script sucks.' What it is, for me, is connecting whatever dots they already have; it's taking whatever they're wed to and then trying to work something good in between the cracks of it. In the case of something like Speed, there were a lot of opportunities to do that. They had the entire premise and I couldn't change a single stunt, but I could change every word.
"Apart from rewriting about 90% of the dialogue on Speed, the best stuff was work that nobody would ever notice: just trying to make the whole thing track logically and emotionally so that all of those insane over-the-top stunts - one after the other - would make sense. That's the biggest part of script doctoring that's actually interesting to me. When somebody says, 'We've got a guy and he's falling off a cliff, and later he's hanging from a helicopter and we need you to tell us why. We need you to make the audience believe he's doing it.' That's what Speed was about, apart from writing the jokes. I think that's really fascinating, because a lot of scripts, even when they're well-wrought, people will throw something in and they won't track it emotionally. They'll say, 'This would be cool, this would be cool, this would be cool,' but then you have to go in and say, 'How on earth did that happen?' Even if it's to just throw in some jokes, throw in some action, it's all about making my contribution fit with what they already have.
"On Waterworld, I lost the patient. By the time I got there, there was too much going on for me to make a real difference. They were too far into it. With Speed, I had leeway to kind of really work on it. With Waterworld there were only tiny cracks I could get in between. I will tell you that Waterworld is one of the projects that proved to me that the higher you climb, the worse the view." SFX
:: retour ::
"There was a shut-down of production after we shot the first episode. Since we had not shot a pilot, after we shot the first episode and had put a bunch of stories in front of the WB, They put the brakes on and said, 'You know, there's something you said we were going to have that we don't feel we're getting.' So we sort of flew into meetings and we broke some stories and solved it.
"They were very into the idea of the mythos of twentysomethings. One of the things that we had pitched them was the idea of creating a mythos of the twentysomethings, because there is none. You know, adolescence is very charged. Middle-age is very charged in American mythos. Twentysomethings? Nobody cares. So we thought it would be interesting to investigate the fears and things that happen in that decade, which is just as important as any other decade in human life, but doesn't really exists, mythically speaking in American fiction. We had sort of gone away from that. We were very interested in the addiction metaphor and our stories were extremely gritty, and we really didn't have that youth thing that the WB cares about.
"They said, 'We want to get that metaphor; we want the Buffy thing where everything is a metaphor for the adolescent experience.' It's not that quite specific on Angel, but they want to hit that. We basically said, 'Well, we're kind of right.'
"It really didn't mean anything except that we took a little more time to break the second story, because the second episode is very important in terms of the show's mission statement. It tells you where the thing is really going to be going. You throw everything you can into a pilot and hopefully that tells you what the show is, but the second one shows where the writers are really going; this is what they took from the pilot. It wasn't like, 'Oh my God, it's the end of the world.' It was the network telling us that we needed to make an adjustment, and David Greenwalt and I saying, 'We wish we disagreed with you, but we don't.' It helped us focus a lot, which is great. I'll always take a note as if it's a good one.
"What is a twentysomething mythology? It's just that there is this passage in your life where you create the person that you're going to be. When you're in your teens, you're in a structured environment where they're telling you what to do. When you're in your 30s, you're dealing with the choices that you made. It's when you're in your 20s that you made a lot of really important life decisions. It's how you first learned how to be a grown up. And even if that's not the most torturous thing that's ever happened to you, there's a lot of interesting stories there and a lot of opportunities for fear and things to explore. The way you look at Buffy and her boyfriend dumps her, only he turns into an evil vampire and you go, 'Oh yeah, that happened to me.' On Angel, it's someone getting married early on, or looking for their first appartment and things like that that we blow out of proportion..." SFX
:: retour ::
"I've heard Buffy referred to as Clueless meets The Night Stalker and 90210 meets The X-Files. It's a great way of selling the show. Clueless is a bit of a mislead, because that's really a camp show where everyone is laughing at the characters and Buffy is actually an hour drama where, although it's got a huge amount of humour, it takes itself seriously. It's not one of these postmodern things where everything is referential and everything is a big joke. Visually, I don't think the show is quite as dark as The X-Files. It has a lighter side and all of the actors aren't Canadian. But that's definitely the closest forbear, because we're not just about vampires. We're dealing with all kinds of monsters and demons. It's very plot-driven, very 'What are we facing this week?' We're not intersted in doing variations of the same thing every week.
"Hopefully the high school situation is not totally unrealistic. It's not, 'Oh, there's a nerd, there's a jock.' Not that we don't have any characters who are fairly broadly drawn. But we try to create a little more of the reality of high school, because of, course, that's where the horror is really coming from. A lot of these stories are supposed to work as fun-house mirror reflections of normal life, so that the werewolf story would be a puberty nightmare, basically. Then we do a story about a girl that is so unpopular that she becomes invisible. Everything is supposed to come from high school. It's not like we completely leave high school behind so we can face the horror. We're facing a sort of absurdly huge and horrific extension of our own normal every day high school experience.
"That's why I wanted to do the show. I wanted to do the movie because I liked the character and I liked the premise, but that won't carry a show. What carries the show is that it's about high school. It's not just being in high school, it's about the human relations that are going on in there. Those things are just blown so out of proportion so that instead of having a sensitive heart to heart, we have to deal with a terrible, horrible beast But it's the same issue. I've said it before and I'll say it to my grave: high school was a horror movie. And a soap opera. And a ridiculous comedy." SFX
:: retour ::
"You know, it's hard to make garlic that interesting. It's like, 'I have a clove! A CLOVE!' It's not really gonna work dramatically. But it's not like their fond of garlic. I never really got the opportunity."
NB: Since this comment, you may have noticed that Buffy tries to keep Spike out of her room by using garlic. Was it something we said, Joss?
"I've been dreaming of something like Alien my whole life. When I first got involved, I had to write a treatment without the Ripley character. Then Fox said they wanted to get her in it and my first response was 'Bullshit, she's dead.' But now, I've gotten so into it. Basically we figured out how to bring her back through cloning. I realise that there are a lot o interesting changes that I can wring out of that character. I think that I can make people buy it from frame one. Ripley did die, but if people will buy the idea of cloned dinosaurs, we can certainly clone a thirtysomething actress. And when Ripley comes back, she has a few hitches. That's how we bring her back, and she's not happy about it. I will say that it's not the same Ripley that we saw in the last film, but we're dealing with her resurrection responsibly.
"We're not just saying, 'We've brought her back, let's make the movie.' It's the central issue of the movie, the fact that we bring her back. We know that once you do that, everything must be different. When somebody comes back from the dead, especially in a movie where death is the ultimate threat, you can't just say, 'It's okay, anybody can die and come back because we can do this now.' It's very important to me that it's a very tortuous, grotesque process so that people will viscerally feel what it's like to be horribly reborn in a lab. And then the whole question of what is she is raised. Is she human? Has she changed? There is the factor that she was pregnant with an alien. Is she all woman? Is there a little something wrong there? There are a lot of issues.
"I enjoyed the bleakness of the third film, but it played to its logical conclusion. Originally my whole pitch was that she wakes up and she's got to be pretty angry, and she's got a lot of shit to work through. What's interesting about this for me is that she can be running a whole gamut of emotions. She can be amused when it's not funny, she can be all kinds of different people at this point rather than just play that same note again.
"I saw Alien when I was 14 and there's not another movie that had as big an impact viscerally and aesthetically on me. Alien changed the face of science fiction, even more than Star Wars, by turning it into a working man's universe. It was a submarine movie. It's like that thing in Star Wars where Luke looks at the Millenium Falcon, which is the coolest thing I've ever seen, and says, 'What a piece of junk.' All of a sudden, you're not watching peoples in robes proclaiming, 'Mars will explode!' You're in a science fiction universe inhabited by us.
"My fear for Alien 4 is that they'll end up getting some action hack who can make it sort of exciting, but not have any real vision to it. I think they feel, 'Well, we went with "vision" last time, now let's go with competence.' The last movie was beautiful but it was neither exciting nor scary, which is a travesty. It needs those things.
"I think the fans were robbed in the third one. You know what they did in the third one that just upset me beyond imagining? They actually had a scene where people we didn't know were killed by the alien. That's Jason, that's bullshit, because nothing is more boring that people you don't know being killed. I just want every scene to contain something amazing. I want to do Evil Dead where it's menacing and then about 20 minutes into it the action starts and never stops." SFX
:: retour ::
:: vers le haut de la page ::
:: retour à l'index des interviews ::