Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy

by Havens, Candace

  “Afterlife is a great Hollywood action-thriller with a grinning plot that seems so simple on paper but takes a grand master to craft into something that stays off the road of hokum. With equally large dollops of fantasy and reality, Joss is able to walk the center ground—and strike the heart of impermanent movie heat.”

  Joss also got involved with X-Men, doing a rewrite which was then almost entirely rejected. “I just felt there was some weak characterization,” 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 I put in a big Danger Room, I tried to keep it, you know, cheap. But they threw all that out. I was so excited about writing it. It was so much fun. I felt very passionate about it, which was probably a terrible mistake.

  “I can’t tell you how excited I was to write that film. They said, ‘Hey you want to do this?’ and I jumped at it. Who wouldn’t? I love comic books and at that point no one had made a great movie from one. This was my chance to really make my mark, and then they trashed the whole thing. I think one line of what I had written was left in the film. It could have been so much better if they had let me do what I wanted with that one.”

  Like Charlie Brown running at the football, Joss again ran at the movies, only to fall flat on his back. “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 [expletive] 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.”

  I felt very passionate about it, which was probably a terrible mistake.—Joss

  Halle Berry delivers one of the few Joss lines lef in X-Men. “Do you know what happens when a toad is hit by lightning? The same as anything else.

  8

  Firefly

  “Fox came to Joss and said, do you have any sort of uplifting, homegrown stuff that’s yatriotic, and he said, ‘I have [a] show about depression in deep space’. And they said ‘OK, we’ll have that. . .”

  —Anthony Head

  “It’s about the search for meaning . . . and did I mention there’s a whore?”

  —Joss Whedon

  Joss entered the 2002/2003 television season with a full plate. Buffy was in its seventh and possibly last season, and Joss was determined to see it to a brilliant conclusion. Angel, just hitting its stride, faced the loss of both David Greenwalt and David Simkins. But despite these responsibilities, Joss’s most important project was Firefly. Heavily promoted and launched on a major network, (Fox, by some measures, is one of the top-rated networks) Firefly was a high-profile new series. Unlike Buffy, Firefly would not have the luxury of operating in relative obscurity as it slowly develops its audience.

  Joss was well aware of Firefly’s importance and he felt the pressure. “We aren’t flying under the radar any more, I’ll tell you that,” Joss explains. “And that’s a different feeling. I miss it [flying under the radar]. It’s more pressure, but ultimately, developing a series is always complicated. Firefly is no exception, but neither were Buffy or Angel. It’s a miserable process. More miserable than it should be. The fact is I have three shows now that I adore and are exactly as I had hoped they might be and more. So, ultimately the process must work.”

  Set five hundred years in the future, the hour-long drama takes place on a small transport spaceship named Serenity. Serenity is a Firefly-class spaceship (the ship lights up in the back and vaguely resembles a firefly). There has been an interstellar civil war, and the show focuses on the rough-and-ready crew of Serenity. The crewmembers are willing to take any job, legal or not, to stay afloat and make money They are the cowboys of the Western frontier of the future. They seek adventure and, occasionally, try to find a purpose in a difficult world.

  The idea for the show came about “three years ago, when I was reading The Killer Angels, the book on Gettysburg,” says Whedon. “I just got obsessed. I’d always wanted to do a science-fiction show and I got obsessed with sort of the minutiae of life way back when—that early life, frontier kind of thing, when things were not so convenient as they are now. And I wanted to do a show in the future that really had that sense of history. The idea that it never stops, that we don’t solve all our problems and have impeccably clean spaceships in the future; that we’re all exactly the way we are now and were a hundred years ago ... I got to thinking about what might have happened after the war, and then sort of ran with that into the future.

  “The people on the ship are struggling to put meaning to their lives and find hope in a very dark time,” continues Whedon. “They don’t have easy lives by any means, but they make the most of what they have. I think great westerns aren’t good guy/bad guy. And I think sometimes they’re bad guy/ worse guy. . . .”

  I think great westerns aren’t good guy/bad guy. And I think sometimes they’re bad guy/ worse guy. . .—Joss

  With Star Trek the prototypical starship series, Whedon was determined to do something different and unexpected. There are no aliens on Firefly, but Joss promises people “more frightening than any alien.” And there are no strange planets. Remembering his budget frustration on Buffy, and knowing where he would have to shoot the show, he decided to make the most of what he had.

  “Another part of the whole frontier thing was knowing that I was going to be shooting in Southern California, and that if we tried to build weird space worlds every week, . . . we won’t be going back to Earth. But every planet is Earth. That’s the one giant technological advancement that we luckily made,” he says, tongue-in-cheek. “They found a galaxy with a bunch of planets, a bunch of moons, and were able to terraform all of them, so that you know there are no planets that look very bizarre. They’ve all been turned into little wannabe Earths.”

  While Buffy and Angel rely heavily on metaphors, Whedon wanted to take Firefly in a different direction. “Buffy bigger than life—Firefly actual size. And I think that’s the important thing ... You know, it’s a different thing in the sense that I actually built Buffy to be a cult figure ... an iconic figure that I wanted to devise. This is a very different show,” he says of Firefly. “I believe it has the same kind of heart, and ultimately can have the same kind of following. But it’s not about creating an icon. It’s really about doing the opposite.

  “The thing I love about this show is that they’re not superheroes,” he says. “They’re not bigger than life. They’re not, you know, fighting monsters and all that stuff. They go through the same struggles; they have the same problems and drama, and of course, action and all that stuff. But it’s really about people who are just people. It’s about the group. It’s about life on this ship. It’s Stage-coach [the classic John Wayne movie directed by John Ford].

  “So it’s not—you know, you don’t go in there thinking, ‘How can I make a cult show?’ You go in there thinking what is the most compelling thing to me right now? And to me right now—what it was then was the adolescent metaphor, what it is now is really getting a chance to look at life from a lot of different points of view. That’s why we have nine regulars.”

  I believe it has the sama kind of heart, and ultimately can have the same kind of following. But it’s not about creating an icon. It’s really about doing the opposite.—Joss

  Firefly set vísít

  In July 2002, I had a chance to visit the sets for Firefly on the 20th Century-Fox lot and I discovered that Joss was right. There was very little his spaceship and the sets within had in common with what we had seen in television and film before. As you walk into the door of the first Firefly set, the enormity of it is overwhelming. Two huge bulbous thrusters poke out from each side of the two-story ship, and the cargobay door lies open like a giant mouth. The actual cargo area is filled with boxes, trunks, and giant barrels that a
re made of various types of colored plastic. It’s dirty and a little musty. There’s lots of black and brown, and everything is in muted tones.

  Chinese lettering marks the walls and cargo on the ship, evidence of China’s power and influence in the years before the war. I could see where Inara’s shuttle would normally be docked off to the right side of the ship.

  Joss explained that while most of the spaceships we’ve seen on TV and film were clean and almost pristine, he wanted his to look like someone actually used it. The walls are a grungy gray, and overhead there are metal walkways that look well used. As you enter through the large cargo bay, there is a sliding metal door that you duck through and walk into a small lounge area. The eclectic and well-worn furniture looks like something you might find in a ’60s bachelor pad mixed with stuff from your grandma’s living room.

  To the left is the infirmary, which is the cleanest-looking room on the set. The white-and-silver walls look very sterile. Metal tables, small computers, and a variety of bandages occupy the spotless counters.

  Past the infirmary, I walked up a large ramp leading up to some of the travelers’ quarters where the guests stay. It’s a tight fit (think jail cell minus a few feet), and many of the scenes shot in the area can only be done with a handheld camera–this free form of shooting lends the show that stylized look Joss deemed appropriate for a space adventure. Though small, the room seems complete with a sink, bed, and places for clothing. This warmly decorated room feels more homey than the rest of the set. The oxygen mask lodged in the wall by the bed reminds you that this is the set of a spaceship and not a spare room in some suburban home.

  Back out through the cargo bay, we walked across the street to a different soundstage to find a bright and cheerful galley, painted yellow with delicate leaf accents. A huge wooden table takes up much of the space with several different kinds of chairs. The eclectic hodge-podge mix of wood and plastic furniture somehow seems to work in the space. It feels very lived-in, like a big family kitchen. It certainly doesn’t look like what you’d expect to find in the future; it’s pretty low-tech.

  A small hatch in the wall leads to Kaylee’s home, the engine room. You definitely know that you’re in a spaceship when you step into the mechanical gloom; what a striking contrast to the sunny galley! Kaylee’s hammock is the only hint that someone actually lives here; everything has such a technical look. This is such a far cry from the look and feel of the Buffy and Angel sets I’ve visited. It’s difficult to imagine that those worlds and this one were born of the same mind.

  Though this particular set is 190 feet from the tail end to the nose and takes up a good portion of the soundstage, it was crowded with crew members, equipment, and props. After poking around the set a bit more, we ended our tour so that the busy crew could do their jobs away from the prying eyes of curious journalists.

  In Firefly, Whedon again tries to break the rules in his depiction of what space looks and sounds like. In Firefly, he has taken every stereotype about space travel and reworked it into his own unique vision.

  “It’s largely influenced by westerns, but hopefully with a twist. But the thing about the West that people forget about is that it was full of immigrants. And that was another thing, every time people are colonizing or stealing a new area, they bring the old world with them. And in this case, every old world. And some of them have meshed, and some of them have, you know, stayed, and some of them have changed.

  “Also a very heavy Asian strain, because in my vision of the future, you know, America and China have basically been the big powers, and the two ruling planets are basically those planets; they really are the Alliance. And that’s why everyone speaks Chinese; there’s Chinese writing everywhere. And it’s just sort of been incorporated into American culture.”

  Whedon has gone so far as to create a dialect for the characters. Most of them come from different planets, but there is a specific 1900s sound with a bit of a twist. “English evolves constantly. I sort of took from a lot of older things, and in particular, westerns. Not just westerns, but, in particular, westerns. Plus making stuff up, because I don’t speak too good, so I just have to lie. But the idea, you know, of the frontier, was so important to what makes the show, the idea of the western. That’s what I wanted to draw on the most.

  “You kind of feel your way through it. Like Buffy ... People can bring their own thing to it. But there is a kind of rhythm to it that the writers are already starting to get down. But you just feel when it’s wrong, when it’s too much or when it’s incoherent or when it doesn’t flow. You just sort of make it up as you go.”

  Joss Whedon wrote the opening music. “The whole idea with the music, first of all, was to evoke to some extent the western feel. And also, you know, just to get away from, you know the bombast of space, space, and space! It’s very much—it’s just normal life. And I wanted to put something else in people’s heads when they see spaceships. I didn’t want the giant, orchestral, Jerry Goldsmith thing. Not that I don’t love Jerry and all of that other stuff, but I just felt that it had become de rigueur. That like we expected to hear big explosions and hear great big orchestras every time we went into space. And for these people, space, you know, it’s the wagon trail. It’s not that big a deal. And that’s what I want the audience to feel in that sense.”

  Whedon also wanted to try something that had never been done before. When his spaceships go to full power and we see the thrusters burn, there’s no loud explosions. “We decided since there is no sound in space, and since most of it takes place, you know, where there will be sound, it just—it felt real, and it also helped sort of get rid of the space that we are used to seeing.”

  As noted earlier, Firefly does not feature aliens, just humans, good and bad. “I’m not going, ‘No creatures, this is a western,” says Joss. “I’m going, ‘No creatures, this is reality’ That really is the mission statement. I wanted to stay away from the easy science-fiction fixes, the android, the clone, the alien, all the stuff that, for all I know, may be lurking around the corner, but I’m not expecting to see any time soon. You know, I wanted to go low-tech. It’s not so much about being a western.”

  “... It’s just about life when it’s hard. And for me, it’s about the idea of people always being people, always having the same problems that they had, putting it in kind of an exotic setting, having a spaceship, getting to tell some adventure stories, because I do love science fiction, but not playing—again it gets you into that grandeur.

  The cast of Firefly. Will they remain grounded?

  “And here’s the thing I’ve never seen. What I’m looking for is people to go, ‘These guys are me’; I feel that. I mean they’re cooler and they dress better and they’re taller,” Joss laughs, “but they are. They’re going through the same kind of struggles we are. They’re trying to pay the rent; they’re trying to buy gas; they’re trying to get these things at the same time as, you know, with the gunfighting and all the stuff, and the chasing and the Reavers [debased humans who cannibalize their victims].

  “But I really wanted to get that more than anything else, that feeling of reality, which is why so much of the show is handheld. I was like, I want to shoot this thing like it’s NYPD Blue, like, you know, these are the mooks that we all know; they just happen to be future mooks.

  “... I believe we’re the only sentient beings in the universe. And I believe that five hundred years from now, we will still be the only sentient beings around. And aliens, you know, that’s something everybody else has done, is doing. I don’t know a lot of the newer shows, but I know that there are a lot of shows out there, and they all share that kind of thing. And that’s a great metaphor to play with.

  “But it’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m really interested in ‘You are there,’ in ‘You are a part of this.’ And I think aliens, no matter what, take you out of that. I also need to spend some time away from latex,” he laughs.

  Another way Joss differentiates Firefly from his
other shows is by not throwing in a lot of pop culture. While there are some things from the twentieth century that find their way into the future, Whedon was determined to keep it simple. “The Beatles, I’m sorry that’s Shakespeare,” says Whedon. “So that survives. But, you know, Backstreet Boys, not so much. We’ll make some references every now and then because we live in this time; it’s a part of our nature. But it’s not like Buffy, where it’s just a pop-culture blender, and let’s talk about everything... I want to maintain the reality of it. And the reality of it is most of the things that we think of as really important will have—myself included—will have disappeared into the dust long, long before these guys ever see the light of day.

  I also need to spend some time away from latex.

  —Joss

  “It’s not like we’ve forgotten everything. We used up Earth. We colonized a new galaxy. We’ve made it all a bunch of little Earths, but we remember. I mean, we do have written records and all that stuff. And Betamax comes back,” he laughs.

  There is a great deal of violence in the show, but Whedon is careful to never be gratuitous with it. “The trick is, you know, always for there to be some meaning or consequence when—every time you draw a gun. That’s why not everybody—a character—can or will,” says Whedon. “The show having become a little more of an action show, there will be a slightly higher body count because of that. But the trick is never to get so cavalier with it that it has no meaning whatsoever.

  “How we make decisions is basically about what feels right and natural, and what we need,” says Whedon. “Now, the fact is we could have laser beams. The problem for me is that laser beams instantly feel safe to people. A laser beam can be set to stun. A laser beam makes a cool visual. And I wanted the violence in the show to feel violent. When Kaylee gets shot, I wanted a bullet wound. I wanted it to matter to us the way it matters to us now. And the idea that, yeah, they may have invented cool lasers, but not everybody can afford them, is sort of the premise on which we work.