“A Slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.”
In the beginning, there was the movie. And the movie kinda sucked. It certainly wasn’t what its writer, Joss Whedon, had intended. Not entirely surprising considering that he was “only” the film’s writer, attempting to move from working on such television shows as Roseanne and NBC’s first attempt at bringing the movie Parenthood to TV into features—which was long before he ever contemplated putting Iron Man, Captain America, and the rest of the Avengers through their cinematic paces.
Whedon, who would go on to become one of the most successful and highly paid script doctors in the go-go ’90s, when it wasn’t uncommon for a scribe to get a million dollars for a week’s worth of rewriting on a big-budget action film, grew up on the tony West Side of Manhattan, in a family for whom the performing arts were nothing new, seemingly right out of a Noah Baumbach movie like The Squid and the Whale.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator/executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
My parents were theater geeks in a big way and also just film lovers. They would just take us to things that were wildly inappropriate or strange. I saw The Exorcist in the theater when I was like nine. It didn’t damage me. And my mom was head of the history department and every year she would abuse her power to rent a bunch of 16 mm movies and throw them up on our living room wall before she showed them to her students. Every year for like ten years we watched The General, Steamboat Bill, Nosferatu, Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, and a couple of others. Not only did I get to see movies a lot with my parents, but I got to see the same ones over and over and over and over, which is really the key. That’s the thing that makes you go, oh, wait a minute, now I want to know how that’s done. I’m not saying Star Wars didn’t help. That also.
The big moment, it feels so stupid because I was so old, I was like sixteen, the moment of like “Oh, somebody directed this” was the Big Wheel shot in The Shining. That’s when I went, “Hold on a second, somebody decided to do this.” And that set everything sort of in motion. Right after that I got Truffaut/Hitchcock which was just the bible and the best comic book I’d ever read at the same time.
I went to Winchester in Southern England. The year I graduated we celebrated our six hundredth anniversary. The queen came, and I got to sing for her, which was pretty exciting. Then we had a big opening for our new theater and I had a little solo in the number. We watched the news that night and there was my little solo on the news. I was just like, can anybody imagine how drunk I’m about to get?
There’s no way that Stan Lee and those guys weren’t influenced by Shakespeare. He invented a lot of the structures and rhythms that we understand and that we’ve built off of. I feel like Shakespeare was absolutely about let’s take this grand spectacle of theatre about kings and queens and gods and fairies and absolutely bring it down to earth. That was his genius. Let’s humanize this. Let’s tell stories about ourselves and pretend that they’re kings and queens. I’m always doing something large and dire in my scripts and in my ideas. There’s always genre, there’s always some big sort of concept I can build off of. The world is often threatened or the lives of the people, it’s not very Sundance-y, I don’t have a Sundance-y vibe. Nobody is going to go on a road trip and reconcile with their family. Unless they take an evil road trip.
It wasn’t long after graduating that Whedon decided he wanted to pursue a career in writing. He quickly discovered how much he liked it and that he had an aptitude for the craft.
JOSS WHEDON
I knew I wanted to be an artist and by that I mean not really work. Not do actual human work. I didn’t actually study writing, it was just something I did for fun. When I got out of college, I was like, I want to make movies and I just sort of assumed I’d write them, but I didn’t really think it through. I didn’t have a plan. I was like, “I’m going to make movies! Writing is perfect joy.” The moment I started writing a script I was like, “This is my true love, this is why I’m on the planet if there’s any reason at all.” And that’s still the case. Even after things sometimes don’t go the way you wish they would.
I’ve always been working since I started writing, and that’s good. It’s required a lot of work and there were many times when it was heartbreaking and awful, but just in terms of day-to-day life, as long as I’ve been able to write, I’ve been able to make money at it. Hopefully I’ll move up and forward every time I try to do something and get to that next level. But that’s all about the writing; that’s all about doing the best job that you can.
I really needed money. My dad wrote for television and my grandfather also wrote, so my father suggested I try my hand at an episode of a TV show so that I could make enough money to move out of his house. So I did, but it was strange. I was a film major; I was supposed to make movies and I never thought about writing, but I just assumed I would without ever thinking about writing. I did a bunch of TV-episode spec scripts. First I tried to get an agent and then I tried to get a job. I ended up on Roseanne.
Roseanne was a groundbreaking sitcom and a huge hit for ABC. Starring comedian Roseanne Barr and John Goodman, Roseanne was the story of a working-class family of five in which its outspoken matriarch struggles with the never-ending problems of marriage, children, and work.
SARAH LEMELMAN
(author, “It’s About Power”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Stab at Establishing the Strength of Girls on American Television)
Roseanne is another situational comedy that starred its namesake, Roseanne Barr. Roseanne is different than its predecessors, in that it not only features a strong and independent woman but also shows that she is far from the ideal image of what a woman is supposed to be. Although she is a married woman who deeply loves her husband and children, she still desires time to herself and to be free of traditional wifely duties. Roseanne changed the tide for women, showing to its audience that every body type is beautiful and feminine and that a woman who enjoys her independence and strength could still embrace the family around her.
Roseanne seemed to be a huge victory for feminists. It was an instant smash hit and had one of the most successful runs of programming during its time, as it reached the top of Nielsen ratings for most of its stretch while it aired on television.
JOSS WHEDON
Roseanne was quite a carousel ride. It was an extraordinary year. I liked the speed at which you had to turn the stuff out. It teaches you a good discipline. I would never have written anything if I hadn’t spent a couple of years on TV. We actually got so behind at one point that the plot of the next episode was listed in TV Guide before we’d written it. It all depends on the show. 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, but there are certain times when it becomes 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. Toward 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?” I can’t help but learn a lot every time I do something. Just once I would like not to learn something.
Shortly after leaving Roseanne, Joss began writing what would become the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer feature film, 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 original script, the final result was disappointing, creatively and financially. In addition, Whedon butted heads frequently with Swanson’s costar Donald Sutherland, a longtime genre fan himself and notorious pain in the ass.
JOSS WHEDON
I started writing the Buffy movie right after, but I spent a year on Parenthood [the 1990 series], that ill-fated show. Then I was working on a pilot for a while and that didn’t go anywhere. At that point I had had enough of that and pretty much wanted to do movies. [The script for] Buffy had gone out and had been pretty much ignored and then the woman who eventually directed it got a hold of it—Fran Kuzui.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
(editor in chief, Cinefantastique)
Outside of Paul Reubens’s death scene, I have a hard time remembering the feature film. I do think that the movie took a bit more of a silly comedic approach to the material, assuming that the very notion of a blonde high school Vampire Slayer would be automatically entertaining. The series wanted us to laugh at the character’s jokes, not at the premise of the show itself.
JOSS WHEDON
What I started with 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 final film. Apart from the jokes, and there were a lot more of them—and all of my favorite 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 everyone pretty much stands in front of the camera, says their joke, and exits.
I wasn’t happy about anything—although there are some people who are faithful to it. 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, no, that was a big disappointment to me. It could have been a lot more than it was.
FRAN RUBEL KUZUI
(director, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1992])
Joss Whedon had written the original script, which, in all honesty, had been rejected by almost every studio in the United States. When somebody showed me the script, I saw an enormous potential in it. I optioned it, and then paid Joss to rewrite it accordingly to my concept and idea. Joss’s screenplay had Buffy just romancing around, sticking stakes through vampires’ hearts. There was no humor, and absolutely none of the martial arts that you saw in the final film. I think Joss envisioned his story as being a De Palma–type movie, something like Carrie. Also, he had written the character of Buffy as being so stupid and empty; she was totally unbelievable.
JOSS WHEDON
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 interest. 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.
ANTHONY C. FERRANTE
(journalist, Fangoria magazine)
There’s a lot of 1980s influence in Whedon’s Buffy work. Less so with vampire films, but horror movies that successfully mixed horror and humor—where the humor was organic and not forced. An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, and Return of the Living Dead come to mind.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
In my opinion, eighties horror films became almost comical in a sense. It was almost funny. It was the “babe” running in the woods; it was decapitation and gore and guts and blood. Truthfully, after a while it’s not scary; it’s funny.
FRAN RUBEL KUZUI
I was a very big fan of John Woo and his original Hong Kong marital arts movies. I especially admired Woo’s use of humor; he could have you watching a bloody fight yet have you chuckling at the same time. I showed the films to Joss and suggested that we use the elements of martial artist and humor in Buffy. That’s how all the tongue-in-cheek fighting got in the movie. I saw the whole concept of Buffy as very much about girls in high school who don’t want to acknowledge that they’re different. They’re encouraged to marry the brightest, smartest, best-looking guy who is going to take care of them, but then they find out that they’re not destined to just be somebody’s wife. I emphasized that detail in the story, because I wanted girls to know that it was OK to be different, it was OK to kick serious butt. I also wanted them to know that even with acknowledging their power, they might be able to get a hold of that bright, smart hunk anyway.
KRISTY SWANSON
(actress, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1992])
So many people have gotten confused. They say to me, “You’re Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, aren’t you? You’re the girl on the TV show?” I tell them, “No, I was the original Buffy—the one in the movie.” Then they ask, “Did they ever ask you to play the part in the show?” When I tell them no, they ask, “Doesn’t that bother you?” And I go, “No, not at all. Why would it?” I was too old to play a high school girl. Secondly, I’ve already played Buffy, already made my mark in a film that’s something of a classic. People get the wrong idea. They think I’m sensitive about talking about the TV show, whereas I’m actually proud to discuss it. The series is very different than the movie. Other than the fact that some of the characters are basically the same, it had nothing to do with the film whatsoever. First of all, the show was shot differently; it’s darker, more Nancy Drew-ish. And also the TV show is much more serious. The film was a lot lighter, fluffier, with more satire.
It wouldn’t be long after the original Buffy movie came and promptly left theaters that Whedon began work as a highly paid script doctor on a succession of major Hollywood films following his critically acclaimed work rewriting 1994’s Speed, which became a huge hit for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.
JOSS WHEDON
Once you start making the big money or working on the big projects, then all of a sudden there are movie stars, a giant budget, and there are suddenly 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.
Basically, when they are making a movie already and they should not be, they called me in. That 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 percent of the dialogue, the best work was stuff 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 just 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 that he’s doing it”—that’s what Speed was about, apart from writing the jokes.
What I like about that is taking a scene and saying, “OK, she’s married to him, but he’s shooting at her, so wouldn’t he feel this? What if we do it like this instead?”—all without changing who gets shot. 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 just throw in some jokes, throw in some action, it’s all about making my contribution fit with what they already have.
The success of Speed, which is the best of the Die Hard knockoffs (“Die Hard on a bus”), which included movies like Under Siege (“Die Hard on a boat”) and Cliffhanger (“Die Hard on a cliff”) led to work on a succession of other films including Titan A.E., Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and 1996’s Twister, also directed by Speed’s Jan de Bont, about a team of storm chasers who pursue a deadly tornado. But no film had a bigger cinematic impact than Toy Story, the Oscar-nominated film in which Whedon collaborated with seven other writers, including the film’s director, John Lasseter.
GLEN C. OLIVER
(journalist/pop culture commentator)
Despite some stumbles during its production, Toy Story is, as far as I’m concerned, the most well-balanced, artfully conceived, and skillfully executed project Whedon has been involved with to date. I believe every creator/artist has one shining moment that stands far above the rest of his or her work. In regards to his writing involvement, I strongly suspect history will show that Toy Story is such a title for Whedon.
On a side note: since seeing Toy Story, it has been a great deal harder for me to throw away, or donate, toys or potentially precious items. Someone should conduct a broad psychological study to determine if there was an uptick in hoarding proclivities throughout the world after the release of this movie. Fuck you, Joss.
DAVID GREENWALT
(co–executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Toy Story comes out and I know I’m going to take my kid to the Crest Theatre in Westwood and I know I can have a nice nap in the theater and take him to a kids’ movie, right? We go, we sit down, this movie comes on. I had the same feeling when I read the Buffy the Vampire Slayer script. It’s one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s like when I saw Pulp Fiction not knowing anything about it, or Silence of the Lambs at the premier and you’re like, “Somebody got it right, somebody cared.” It really worked and it makes it worthwhile. I had that experience watching Toy Story.
GLEN C. OLIVER
Twister made quite of bit of money—nearly half a billion dollars in theaters alone—so it can’t really be called a failure in that sense. But as a piece of filmmaking, it’s a bit of a tepid mess. Whedon has himself indicated that a number of elements in Twister were not realized in the way he’d intended, so it’s not entirely clear whom to blame for this wreck.
Early teasers for the film, featuring a terrified family—presented largely in complete blackness, lit only by the briefest flashes of lightning—cowering in a storm cellar as a tornado hammers the crap out of their home above. A hugely impactful promo. Yet not one single moment in the actual film lived up to the power of that short teaser.
A few years earlier, Whedon had previously worked with Twister director Jan de Bont on Speed—a film that very much nailed the energy it was going for with investment-worthy characters and a great atmosphere in a hugely entertaining and smooth way. Clearly, the de Bont/Whedon reteaming may not be entirely to blame for what happened with poor Twister—but it does further beg the question, Where and how did such a seemingly sure thing go so very wrong?
One of the highest profile films Whedon would become involved with was the assignment of writing Alien: Resurrection for 20th Century Fox. He would be charged with the challenging task of resurrecting the Alien franchise after the box-office implosion of 1992’s Alien 3, a responsibility that came on the heels of his own enormous success as a highly sought-after script doctor along with the high-priced sale of his original spec script, Suspension, which was lauded at the time as “Die Hard on a Bridge.”
JOSS WHEDON
Quite frankly, I don’t know what makes a big spec sale. I think certain things will sell, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what they want and why they think they should pay a lot of money. I know they don’t revere writers. Although I’ve been treated well by good people a lot of the time, 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, writers are still pretty much the part of the totem pole that’s stuck in the ground so that it will stay up.
I think the compensation and the high profile has to do with the whole media being more insider than it used to be, with people knowing more about directors and the industry. Everything is becoming sort of more high profile. But I think that, ultimately, the industry’s attitude toward writers is pretty much the same: “How can you facilitate our blockbuster and how can we push you around?” The fact that they’re paying them a lot of money doesn’t really have anything to do with that. In a way, I found that the more successful I got as a writer, the less power I had.
Alien: Resurrection, released in 1997, would eventually be helmed by French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the brilliant director who was part of the critically acclaimed duo behind the masterful The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. It was an odd pairing with Whedon’s distinctly American sensibilities and colloquialism, and the film would please few, including Whedon himself.
JOSS WHEDON
I got the gig for Alien: Resurrection by writing a treatment that did not involve Sigourney [Weaver]. Then they said they wanted to get her in it. At first my response was, “Bullshit, she’s dead.” I had to figure out how to bring her back. We didn’t just say, “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 knew that once you do that, everything must be different. Somebody comes back from the dead, especially in a movie where death is the ultimate threat, you can’t just say, “It’s OK, anybody can die and come back because we can do this now.” It was very important to me that it’s a very torturous, grotesque process so that people will viscerally feel what it’s like to be horribly reborn in a lab.
I enjoyed the bleakness of the third film, but it played that and it played it 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 was she could be all kinds of different people at this point rather than just play that same note again.
GLEN C. OLIVER
I’d argue that much of what Whedon chiefly intended throughout his screenplay drafts made it to screen—more or less at times, in other instances exactingly. I can see Whedon trademarks stamped throughout the film—both on paper, and on screen. One example: characters project a vibe, a ’tude, which can be spotted fairly easily and can be correlated to Whedon’s approach to characters in his other works. There are some innate Whedonesque thematics present as well.
JOSS WHEDON
I saw Alien when I was fourteen 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, into a working man’s universe. It was a submarine movie. It’s like that thing in Star Wars where Luke looks at the Millennium Falcon, which is the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and says, “What a piece of junk.” All of a sudden you’re not in robes proclaiming, “Mars will explode!” You’re in a science fiction universe inhabited by us. I think that’s a huge part of it.
Also they created a monster that was not only genuinely new, but sort of horribly resonant. For the first one, that was the huge thing. Aliens just made brilliant changes on it. That’s what was disappointing about the third one for me. I thought the attitude and the feel of it was great, but people want to see those changes. They say, “We know the Alien and we know it intimately, what’s new? What’s different?” Cameron did it big just with the title, and Alien 3 said, “Yeah, well this one is small and kind of slow.”
They weren’t rushing to make another one afterward. I think they were disappointed, because it wasn’t the film they were hoping to make. And, again, how does that happen? How does a bunch of guys with a ton of money and a great franchise set out to make a certain kind of movie and then say, “Oh, I don’t get it”? They all felt that the matter was kind of closed, and Sigourney had dissolved into a pit of lava, so it wasn’t like they thought they had a star. Alien 3 was beautiful, but it was neither exciting nor scary, which is a travesty. It needs those things.
My friend Tommy had an interesting theory about what was wrong with the third one. He said that all of the Alien movies were very specific. The first one was a bunch of pros on a submarine, the second one was an army movie, and the third one was a prison movie, only it wasn’t a prison movie and that’s where it failed. As he said, it was just a bunch of bald British guys and you couldn’t tell one from the other. That’s not prison genre. In prison genre, they’re Americans very specifically. That was a big mistake in terms of trying to evoke a prison movie, because they carry their own level of terror and it was hard to be scared of these guys. Making them all British totally undermines the prison movie idea. 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 bullshit, because nothing is more boring than 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 really menacing and then about twenty minutes into it the action starts and never stops.
GLEN C. OLIVER
One of the brilliant conceits of the Alien franchise is that each of the film installments has represented radical stylistic departures from the previous entries. Thus, I don’t think it would be fair to say that what director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Whedon were attempting was categorically less relevant or worthy than previous films in the cycle. Each movie has its own approach, its own aesthetic, its own thematics, and its own voice. Which, for my money, is exactly the kind of diversity that should be reflected in an ongoing big screen franchise. So, Resurrection got that part right, at least.
JOSS WHEDON
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, 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.
GLEN C. OLIVER
Jeunet’s overall execution of Whedon’s “vision” is highly suspect. When viewing the movie, I’ve always perceived a sense of conflict and struggle within the filmmaker. At some level, he was clearly aware of the enormous dramatic potential of the project. Ripley’s discovery of her prototype clones in the Auriga lab somehow manages to be both horrific and touching and thrilling simultaneously—not an easy feat to accomplish for a director. Our heroes taking on the alien beasties underwater is both quite striking and very smartly executed. In moments like these, Jeunet shined as the amazing and provocative filmmaker he can often be. The filmmaker this particular project needed more of.
JOSS WHEDON
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, but I can say with impunity that I was just shattered by how crappy it was.
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.” I was making an argument in the past that I had yet to really live, as far as I was concerned. It was the final capping humiliation of my crappy film career.
GLEN C. OLIVER
Where the film suffers most greatly—and deviates most significantly from Whedon’s intent—there are frequent instances where Jeunet is clearly viewing the source material as little more than a glorified B movie. Certain action and suspense movements feel not that far removed from the less disciplined days of Troma or New World. Some moments here feel like they’ve been carved from a less thoughtful, respectful version of the franchise. Not quite parody, but not fully reverential, either. There were times when I wondered if Jeunet was making an Alien movie, or … in some weird way … if he was lampooning the “scruffy crew in a compromised setting” genre on the whole. It’s a strange, and unclear, tone at best—one which I think resulted in no small portion of pushback from audiences.
JOSS WHEDON
A lot of writers become directors because they want to protect their material, and after Alien: Resurrection anybody would feel that way. Directing is the other half of storytelling, and that’s what I wanted to do. What I only ever wanted to do is tell stories, and sometimes it was very frustrating to me that I’m not this incredible lens man. I’m not the most adept. I see people who can shoot so much better than I can and it’s a little frustrating. But I also have a little bit of that glint thing of, Was the gun in the frame? I know what’s important and it’s what they’re feeling and what I’m feeling about what they’re feeling and for the rest, I’ll do my best. I’ll work very hard, but it will also take care of itself. But writing was always just the first half. And back then when I started, you wrote a script and then maybe a studio would buy it. But I had ten scripts I wrote, one hundred pages plus each that nobody ever made. So the act is somewhat masturbatory. If you don’t get the partner, if you don’t get the other person involved, if you don’t see it to fruition, then you’re just telling stories to yourself like when you masturbate.
GLEN C. OLIVER
I can’t fathom that, given the body of his work on the whole, Whedon ever once conceived that the characters in Alien: Resurrection shouldn’t connect with viewers more fully. If an audience doesn’t care for the characters on screen, the audience doesn’t care what happens to them either—and the fabric of the film quickly begins to unravel. Which I very much feel happened here. And the fact that the film’s principal iconic contribution to the franchise—the alien “Newborn”—looked like a rubber chicken which had been left in the sun too long didn’t help much, either.
Whedon also was involved with an even more notoriously troubled feature film, Kevin Reynolds’s 1995 would-be sci-fi epic, Waterworld, in which most of the Earth is underwater after the polar ice caps have melted. Kevin Costner’s Mariner befriends Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her young companion, Enola (Tina Majorino), as they escape from an artificial island pursued by Dennis Hopper and his malevolent Smokers in the hopes of finding the mythical Dryland.
JOSS WHEDON
I lost the patient! That experience was pretty interesting and a pretty good example that, 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 that film is one of the projects that proved to me that the higher you climb, the worse the view.
BEN EDLUND
(creator/executive producer, The Tick)
I ended up working on Titan A.E, which was a late ’90s sci-fi, which actually had eighteen writers that worked on it, but the credits ended up landing on myself, Joss Whedon, and John August. We were the ones who got screen credit. But I had actually not worked ever a moment with either of those dudes. We all did our own individual drafts, but I had actually been cocredited with Joss on a movie and had never met him.
After a succession of these unsatisfying but financially lucrative writing gigs, Whedon got the phone call that would change his life from the WB (forerunner to the CW), a fledgling network that was attempting to stake out the young audience that had all but been abandoned by ABC, NBC, and, especially, CBS. The idea was to come up with programming that would never be greenlit by the mainstream networks, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite its failure as a feature, somehow seemed ideally suited to their needs at the time.
GEORGE SNYDER
(former assistant to Joss Whedon)
I’d worked for the producers of the Buffy film and was introduced to Joss by Gail Berman. Then Joss mentioned that the Warner Bros network was talking about doing a pilot of Buffy for television and wanted to know whether or not I had ever done a pilot. I told him, “No,” and he said, “Neither have I. Let’s do it.”
JOSS WHEDON
I thought a series would be very different from the movie, but there is an idea in the “high school horror show” that would sustain … an entire television show [and] keep it going for years. The movie, the idea, the premise is really just for one piece. Where the show would be different is we could broaden it out a little with different monsters, different problems, new characters, and things like that. It was appealing to me as an idea for a show, but I hadn’t thought of it until they brought it to me.
DAVID GREENWALT
Gail Berman worked at Sandollar at the time and she was the one that said, “The vampire story should be a TV series.” They said to her that you got to get Joss Whedon, knowing that he’d already sold a million-dollar script and done all this stuff in movies. Gail went and got Joss, whom we thought would never do TV, because he’s a big movie guy. But he doesn’t care if it’s TV, movies, that Dr. Horrible Sing-a-Long thing, or a play in his backyard. He only cares about quality, and he was disheartened with the movie version of Buffy, which was very camp. It was a great script that I don’t think was that well executed, and he wanted to do it right. They made a deal with him that they only owned him for the first twelve episodes. That’s unheard of, not to own a guy for at least two or three years who’s going to be the igniting element in the show. He just stayed and did it because he loved it, and because he was getting it right. Gail turned out to be pretty smart.
FRAN RUBEL KUZUI
I wanted to make the sequel in Hong Kong, and make it even more of a martial arts movie than Buffy. I lost interest in it, though, and it wasn’t until a few years later that Gail Berman approached me about possibly turning Buffy into a TV series. Gail’s timing must have been right, because I agreed to go ahead and do it. I loved doing the movie, loved so much of it that I was ecstatic when I was given the opportunity for it to have another life as a TV show.
IAN WOOLF
(first assistant director, Angel)
What happened was that the Kuzuis produced the feature film and had the ancillary rights in perpetuity. We never saw them. I used to do a funny thing early on in the first and second seasons. On the first day of principal photography on the first episode of that season, I would call the Kuzuis’ office and call in for a shot. They were like, “Who is this?” “It’s Ian Woolf, first AD on Angel. Just calling in the first shot for the Kuzuis.” They’re like, “What?” because they don’t know. It’s kind of a joke, because, typically, when you get the first shot, it’s always called into the production office or called into Fox, because they like to know when the first shot rolls and when the break for lunch is and all that stuff. I just used to fuck with the Kuzuis and call in the middle of the show.
But they had nothing to do with it; they just got a check and that was it, basically. When they would do crew jackets for everybody, they’d always ask the Kuzuis for money, because we felt it was a waste of money. The crew jackets just end up in somebody’s closet. We prefer to give the money to a charity. But the Kuzuis never gave money to the crew. They were real assholes.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
Joss had no desire to have another awful experience where his idea was there to get basically trampled on, and where he has no voice because he sold it and they’re going to do it their way. In the end, he wanted control over his vision, and he had no desire to have another bad experience where he didn’t get to do his vision. So when Gail [Berman] was able to go, “No, no, no, you will have total creative license,” she was able to kind of talk Joss into it.
He has always been sort of a pioneer—I remember after Buffy and Angel, after I wasn’t on the show anymore, he called me and asked if I would participate in this round robin with some of the writers and actors from the show and talk about stuff. I always thought he hated me and one of the things he said is how we have to own our own content and how important it is to do it ourselves and not let big budget or studios control it. He’s a rebel. If you want something done right, it has to be your voice. You can’t have any interference from the financier.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
I see parallels with Dark Shadows in the sense that Dark Shadows started with the vampires and branched out to include just about everything: witches, ghosts, werewolves, even “Diabolos.” I think that’s how the devil was billed, though never so named out loud. It was an attempt to recycle familiar, well-loved horror clichés in a television format. The “rules” of these creatures might be bent a little bit, but there was generally no overt revisionism. In the same way, Buffy might have played around with the nature of vampires, but they didn’t sparkle in the sun.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Dark Shadows started off as not even having any supernatural elements, and then much later into it, we’re introduced to Barnabas Collins. My mom has said that’s who she remembers from the show and I think that just speaks to the popularity of vampires. She said it had werewolves and time traveling, but she, and everyone who watched it, remembers Barnabas. He was this charismatic character that drew in the audience, especially with the love story between him and Angelique. It’s likely that Joss was aware of Dark Shadows, and may have partially based the relationship of Angel and Buffy off Barnabus and Angelique. I think it’s safe to say, people love forbidden love. That’s why Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde have stayed popular for centuries. Vampires shouldn’t be with people, and when a vampire falls in love with a Vampire Slayer, now that’s a captivating story.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
The other parallel between Dark Shadows and Buffy would be that both retained the basic notion [that] vampirism was a bad condition even while allowing that individual vampires might have a conscience. Barnabas Collins didn’t want to be a vampire, but occasionally he was able to use his unwanted powers for good (several of his victims were villains we were glad to see him kill). On Buffy, Angel was a sympathetic if conflicted vampire, and of course he got to put his undead powers to good use on his spin-off series.
GEORGE SNYDER
Gail Berman went around to the major networks and was literally laughed out of the room. People said to us, “Why did you go to this little network?” 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.
DAVID GREENWALT
She’s great and we had a lot of fun, and then she ran Fox Network. My wife always liked Gail, because Gail never treated her like she was a piece of shit because she wasn’t in our business.
GEORGE SNYDER
The reason I think the WB took on the show is that they were 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.
JOSS WHEDON
The idea of the movie was that Buffy is someone who is completely ignorant to the world, who was never expected to do anything except be pretty. And someone who’s nice but self-centered and kind of vacuous who learns about the world, basically because she has to learn about vampires and stuff and becomes a more mature person in the process. This Buffy is dealing with the same stuff, but she’s already a Slayer and has been a Slayer for a while. She is instinctively a hero, but at the same time there are some things she will always be dealing with: the pain of adolescence and growing up, but her journey is not quite the same. In the series she’s already empowered; she’s just trying to deal with how that empowerment affects her. She tries to put the events of the film behind her a little bit, but basically she accepts what she is. It’s just a question of balancing her life as a Slayer and her life as a teenage girl who would rather go out on a date than spend the night killing vampires.
THOMAS P. VITALE
(executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)
The original Buffy movie was fun and entertaining, but if considered in a vacuum, I don’t think that movie would ever be considered an “important” film. Beyond that, I don’t think anyone in the Buffy movie audience could have imagined that little film turning into an iconic and long-running television series. The fact is that very few film-to-television projects ever become hits. The “prebranding” of a theatrical movie definitely helps with the original launch of the show, as familiarity can attract viewers to sample the series version. But if the television series doesn’t stand on its own and have something new to say, it won’t last. Out of the countless television dramas ever made, I’d estimate there are only a couple of dozen film-to-television series that have become hits, and maybe none as special as Buffy.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(executive producer, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena)
I remember when I heard they were doing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, I thought, “Well, that’s not going to work.” Like everybody else, I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie. Then I watched the first episode and I’m like, “Oh, wait a minute…” I think by episode three I was like, “This is the best thing ever. This is brilliant.” I really, really loved it. I started watching it before I had broken into the business.
JOSS WHEDON
Truthfully, I can spot the similarities between Buffy and my other scripts. It’s not that different. Our approach on Buffy was to make little movies. The good thing is that I had no idea what I was doing, so a lot of that works to my advantage. We shot a little higher than we should and it’s easy to break rules when you’re not sure of them. At the same time, I’m very traditional. I like 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.
GEORGE SNYDER
The WB got the metaphor. When you go in to pitch a show, you pitch some ideas for possible episodes. The two Joss went in with were what eventually became “The Pack” and “Out of Mind, Out of Sight.” The pitch for “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” 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 high school, Buffy’s problem of, “I can’t be a part of this, because I’m a Slayer,” translates to, “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.
JOSS WHEDON
It made sense to me, but it definitely surprised most people. 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 those. I love movies and want to make more movies, but if the idea is to tell the story, then TV is the best way to do that.
SUSANNE DANIELS
(president of programming, WB Network)
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. As soon as we saw Joss’s pilot script, we knew we had something unique.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Susanne Daniels was sold on the idea as she was looking to reach the profitable teenage audience. For Daniels, the targeted teenage, and moreover young girl, demographic was critical, as in the late 1990s they were seen as an ideal target market that spent an estimated eighty-five billion dollars per year. It certainly helped that during that time frame, third-wave feminism was taking its hold on America, and media depictions of “girl power” were everywhere. Its reach ranged from magazine cover stories and spreads to newly formed female music groups, like the Spice Girls, who headlined festivals and tours across the world and disseminated the girl power mantra. The time was ripe for a show to be broadcasted about female empowerment, and Daniels wanted to take full advantage of this.
JOSS WHEDON
Buffy starts in a new school, hoping to leave her vampire-slaying days behind her. Unfortunately, the school is built on a Hellmouth, which is kind of a mystical portal between our dimension and the demonic dimension. So in this high school, anything goes. Right from the start, we had witches and werewolves, giant insects, and, of course, vampires. She and her friends—who find out her secret—become the core group to fight them. What’s fun about the concept is that our characters go through all of that and then have to worry about school. The humor comes from, “I have a test, I have a giant insect attacking me, and I have to deal with both of those realities.” And they deal with both of those realities, because they have to. They can’t get kicked out of school and become bums. They’re hoping that if they can stop the monsters, normal life will continue.
SUSANNE DANIELS
In fact, it’s a show that we thought appealed to the Goosebumps audience at the same time it captured X-Files viewers. Buffy was much more than a Vampire Slayer. She’s the chosen one, chosen to fight all of the forces of evil she comes upon, and in this series evil ranged from powerful modern-day witches to a seven-foot praying mantis disguised as a teacher.
JOSS WHEDON
Early on there were so many ways that people described the show as everything from “Clueless meets The Night Stalker” to “90210 meets The X-Files.” Those things were a great way of selling the show. Clueless was a bit of a mislead, because that’s really a camp show where everyone is laughing at the characters, and Buffy is an actual hour drama where, although it’s got a huge amount of humor, it takes itself seriously. It’s not one of those postmodern things where everything is referential and everything is a big joke. Visually, I don’t think the show was quite as dark as The X-Files; it had a lighter side and all of the actors weren’t Canadian. But that was definitely the closest forebear at the time, because we weren’t just vampires. We were dealing with all kinds of monsters and demons. We weren’t interested in doing variations of the same thing every week.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
What we did was take the concept of the movie of this sixteen-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 were all going through. That’s what made them such wonderful friends—they helped each other to get through this time.
JOSS WHEDON
The people of Sunnydale sort of had a notion that things aren’t right. Terrible things happen all the time at this school; kids are dropping like flies, but everyone else is pretty oblivious. The group and Buffy’s Watcher are the only ones who really know what’s going on. Believe me, they want to have normal lives. Hopefully the high school situation we presented was not totally unrealistic. It’s not, “Oh, there’s a nerd; there’s a jock.” We tried to show people the way they act in high school. We tried 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 were 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 who is so unpopular that she becomes invisible; there’s a story about a witch who tries to get on the cheerleading squad, and it’s basically a story about girls and their mothers, which also happens to have a witch, magic, horror, and all that stuff. Everything was supposed to come from high school. We were facing a sort of almost absurdly huge and horrific extension of our own normal everyday high school experience.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
High school is horrific! Let’s be honest—it’s the most horrific time in life. Kids are vicious for no reason. You’re labeled with your reputation as a freshman, and it’s virtually impossible to change that throughout high school, and you live like that.
JOSS WHEDON
It’s also 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 in high school, it’s about the human relations that are going on in there. Those things are just blown so out of proportion that instead of having a sensitive heart to heart, we had 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. So we go from the sad scene at school where Buffy finds out that the guy she likes is interested in somebody else, to the slaughter of innocent people.
DAVID GREENWALT
At that time Joss had longish hair that kind of came across his forehead. As years went by and the hair began to disappear, I used to tease him mercilessly. Sometimes I’d come in and I’d go, “God, I have all this hair.” I thought he was sweet, very smart, and my first impression was you know this is a really smart guy who has his own style, his own language, and he’s come up with this great concept. In the horror movie where the blonde goes into the dark alley and kicks the shit out of this person who attacks her, the reverse of what all of the horror movies have been based on.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Oh, gosh, it was like, who’s this guy in charge? We shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch, he wears layers, he picks his buttons, he’s kind of sheepish, funny, awkward. It was like, he’s in charge? Never had such a young boss! But wicked smart, and very educated, and he studied in England, and was a Shakespeare authority. He’s changed so much even now; now when I see him he’s a man.
We were all just kids. I had all this respect for him, and definitely aimed to please and do my best, and wanted his approval, of course. And then Gail [Berman], I wanted to be next to her; if she was on set, I wanted to be anywhere she was. I wanted to hear what she had to say, because I was able to identify with the woman in power in her. She is the embodiment of female power; I felt that she made it happen—if it wasn’t for her, there would be no Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wouldn’t have gone to TV.
JOSS WHEDON
People always say comedy and horror are different, but they’re actually quite similar to me. Because a lot of great comedy comes from a character’s lack of control; the unexpected, not knowing what’s coming from out of the frame. Not just slapstick. Look at Groundhog Day, which is a movie that I adore. The guy is not in control of his environment and is just completely confused by what’s going on. And a horror movie is sort of the same thing. It’s also, “What the hell is going on?” Only in that case you’ve got a guy with a really big axe or it’s a slimy monster. A horror movie is very much about, “I don’t understand the space 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 that I’m in.” Cameron is a great action director. The thing about his action is that he tells you exactly what the space is, what the problem is, where the people are, what you need to do, what’s going to happen, and then he uses that space. So you know exactly where everybody is. What’s exciting is seeing a person in control of the space that they’re in. That, for me, is textbook great action filmmaking. Horror is the opposite.
The hardest thing about the Buffy series is you had to put a heroic character and her friends into peril, and at some point she has to take control and become an action hero, so we played both things in the show. One of the things we were always saying is, “We need a space that’s small and dark so it will be scary, and big and bright enough for her to kick ass in and us to get that epic sense that she’s a hero.”
HARRY GROENER
(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)
I like all the Anne Rice books. I thought her interpretation of what a vampire is supposed to be was much more interesting than Bela Lugosi. As soon as you have a vampire that can have sex and all that, and the idea of everything is human. It’s just transitioned out of you. It’s all about love and power and you get stronger and stronger and just live all these years gathering information and understanding for almost a thousand years. That’s fascinating to me. The idea that they’ve been around and have seen how the world has changed is why I loved the Anne Rice books. Joss took that and mixed it with all the high school stuff. Am I pretty? Does everyone like me? Do they hate me? Do I have a boyfriend?
JOSS WHEDON
Buffy was the most manic-depressive show on television. It ping-ponged from, “Oh, it’s light ’n’ fluffy” to “It’s Medea.” The show’s appeal early on was that it spoke 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 seemed kind of realistic in comparison. What’s funny about the show is that we never knew from scene to scene which way it was going to go. A scene that started out very dramatic could end up quite funny, or something truly horrible could happen.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Many years ago I was offered Buffy as a first assistant director and I turned it down. An executive friend of mine, Jamie Kleinman, said, “Kelly, I’ve got two shows you can be the AD on. One’s called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is a mess of people running around in rubber masks, and one’s called L.A. Firefighters.” She goes, “Buffy’s going to be twelve episodes and out, L.A. Firefighters is going to go five years.” I picked L.A. Firefighters and that was twelve and out and Buffy went seven years.