Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  Just over a month after learning that Angel would be no more, Joss got some of the best news of his life. Universal Pictures had managed to secure the necessary rights to a Firefly movie from 20th Century Fox. Fox did retain the rights to the title Firefly, however, so on March 3, 2004, the studio announced that it had greenlit Serenity, named for Mal’s ship in the original series. Joss himself would direct. Considering he had no previous experience directing feature films, Universal demonstrated great faith in Joss by giving him the job of helming a multimillion-dollar action movie. It was a bounty of riches: Joss got to continue telling tales for a universe that he loved dearly, and as a director, he would have an autonomy not offered with his previous feature film scripts.

  “I’ve been in Hollywood a long time, and it’s a highly, highly, highly unusual story,” Chris Buchanan notes. “The fact that Serenity ever got made is amazing.”

  The riches did not include a generous budget. At the time, many space adventures and fantasy films were budgeted for $100 million or more. Universal had followed that pattern and lost money in 2003 with its live-action version of The Cat in the Hat, which had recouped just over $133 million worldwide against its $160 million budget. Its adaptation of Peter Pan that same year fared a little better, bringing in over $121 million to cover its $100 million budget, but the studio’s 2004 sci-fi flick The Chronicles of Riddick would be a big box office disappointment. With such a spotty track record with genre films, Universal found Serenity to be an attractive proposition—because Joss was sure that he could finish all of principal photography in less than two months and way under the budget Universal usually gave to such films. With a budget of less than $40 million and a shooting schedule of fifty days, production was set to begin in Los Angeles on June 3, 2004.

  Jewel Staite was working on Tim Minear’s Wonderfalls when she learned of Firefly’s return. “I was in the car on my way to the airport to shoot another episode. My phone rang, and it was Joss. He said, ‘I just want to tell you that we’ve been greenlit for our very own movie.’ I was totally shocked. I didn’t dare hope that it would ever really happen. I think I was just stunned for the entire plane ride to Toronto.”

  Adam Baldwin had been skeptical that this day would ever come. “There had been rumors and rumblings about it, but until it’s official, it’s not official,” he says. He had picked up a few guest-starring roles since Firefly ended, but he was looking for more work; he admits that “2003 was a tough year for me. I didn’t land a pilot, and did a couple of small things. I pretty darn near close ran out of money. So when he finally did get the green light, I said ‘Joss, I gotta do some things, you know, to get ready for you, but, um … I need a job.’ And he said, ‘Well, funny you should call, because we got a guy on Angel that you’d be perfect for. He’s kind of like Jayne but smarter and in a nice suit.’”

  With that, Baldwin walked into a recurring role in the final episodes of Angel: Marcus Hamilton, liaison to the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart. “That was a lifesaver. There are a few jobs over the course of a long career in Hollywood that are career lifesavers. Whether they’re high profile or not, they put food on the table, they pay the rent, and that was one of them. He really stepped up and helped me out. He’s met my family and I’ve met his and we appreciate what it’s like to be fathers,” he laughs. “Big responsibilities.”

  When Morena Baccarin got the call from Joss saying that Firefly was back, she couldn’t believe it. “It was one of the happiest days of my life,” she says. “I just thought … wow. We get to come back, all of us. And that was in his contract—that we all had to be back, we all had to do this movie and play again. And this time we knew that it was going to be over, so we savored every second of those three months we were shooting.”

  Perhaps inspired by the success of the Firefly campaign, Angel fans didn’t give up on their show so easily. They organized letter-writing campaigns and online petitions, bought advertisements in trade magazines, and even held a “Save Angel” blood drive for the Red Cross in the United States and Great Britain. They lobbied other networks to pick up the show, especially UPN—despite the fact that it had canceled Buffy the previous year. It was a passionate outpouring, but the WB’s decision stayed the same, and no other network came to the rescue.

  Star David Boreanaz was relieved by the show’s impending end. “I don’t wanna sound like I was cheering, but when Joss broke the news, it was almost more like the burden of pressure came off me after five years,” he said. “It’s a lot of responsibility [carrying a show], and you don’t realize how much that is until they say it’s done and then you can breathe…. Look, it’s a f—in’ show, and it was a great experience. I think we can be very proud of what we’ve accomplished. Now, you just move forward.” No doubt the passage of time had a much bigger effect on his human self than it did on his immortal vampire character, and he said that he had no interest in returning to the character once the final credits ran. Many fans, however, were a bit stung by how gleeful he seemed about leaving a show they’d loved and supported so much.

  Garth Ancier, then-chairman of the WB, laid the blame for the cancellation on 20th Century Fox. “They had pushed for an early decision on whether the show should come back or not,” he said. “I think the mistake that was made is that between us and 20th, we didn’t wait until May. We just made the decision early based upon their request.”

  On May 19, 2004, Angel aired its final episode, “Not Fade Away.” Unlike Buffy’s finale, in which Angel made a brief appearance, Buffy does not show up. Sarah Michelle Gellar had declined to guest-star earlier in the season, and while she was open to returning once it was announced to be the final season, she was available only for the final episode. Joss didn’t want the finale to focus on a guest star; he wanted to celebrate Angel’s own cast and characters. “I want to end the show with the people who’ve been in the trenches together,” he explained.

  “The original goal [with Angel] was to do a story about redemption as an adult looking back on a bad decision and atoning for that,” Joss said. “But we ended up doing even more than anticipated. It was first designed as a stand-alone mystery show, but the characters were the most interesting. So we explored them in great depth and complexity and it exceeded my expectations.”

  There was no question what the next step in Angel’s redemption story was going to be had the series continued. “We knew [season six] was going to launch into [a] post-apocalyptic show,” Fury explained. “It was going to be Angel in The Road Warrior, which I thought would be awesome. In the ruined city of LA or out in the desert or something, it was just going to be kind of a really cool, different, show.”

  The writers had many discussions about the upcoming apocalypse, who would survive it, and which characters could return in season six. But without that next season, the writers had to find a way to bring closure to the series and its characters. The idea of a world-changing apocalypse remained. The final scene revealed Angel and his remaining friends in an alley, preparing to fight an army of demons big enough to overtake L.A. The ambiguity of their last moments gave hope to fans that this would not be the final chapter in Angel’s story. “The last thing you will see of Angel is the last thing you should see,” Joss said. “ ‘Angel’ is about redemption, and redemption is ongoing.”

  Eighteen months earlier, Joss had had three series on television. Now he had none. But he was about to take his storytelling skills back to the big screen—and this time, he would be in control of how the tale would be told.

  22

  GRANT ME THE SERENITY

  Crafting Serenity was a challenging proposition even for an experienced screenwriter like Joss Whedon. Joss had to keep two audiences in mind as he wrote: Firefly fans who already had watched and rewatched the entire fourteen-episode series and moviegoers who had never seen the show. Too much dependence on the established mythology and the new viewers would be lost and alienated; too few connections to the series and the diehard fans who supported Fir
efly and campaigned for a film continuation would feel cheated and bored.

  The task was made even more difficult by the fact that Firefly had a particularly complex backstory. Joss had to work with ten very different characters who all had a history together; he couldn’t use the standard screenwriting technique of introducing the characters to each other as a way of introducing them to the audience. He also found it difficult to put the rather western Mal and the noirish River in the same story and make it work. He discussed his concerns with Jeanine Basinger, who guided him back to two films he had studied at Wesleyan: The Furies and Johnny Guitar.

  Initially, Joss cribbed together a story for the film based on some ideas that he’d had for a second season of Firefly. The original draft was a “kitchen sink” version, in which he tried to touch on all of the major plot points from the series. All of the characters are on the ship (save for Inara, who left Serenity at the end of the series), and Joss struggled to give them all meaningful storylines. This draft came in at 190 pages, well above the average screenplay length of 90 to 120 pages. Universal was supportive of Joss but was not prepared to bankroll a three-plus-hour movie based on a little-seen television series; the studio asked him to cut the script down to a more manageable length. He trimmed more than sixty pages—removing, in particular, a lot of extensive exposition, often replacing it with simply a line or two, or sometimes just a simple look between characters. These revisions made for more powerful moments and a much cleaner and more concise film.

  The final draft of Serenity focuses primarily on one particular element of the series’ mythology: the story of River Tam, the young prodigy who was subjected to traumatic government experiments before being rescued by her brother, Simon, and brought aboard Serenity. Set a few months after the Firefly finale, the film pits the crew against the Operative, a shadowy assassin for the Alliance government who is sent to kill River before she can access and share the government secrets buried in her head. Captain Mal Reynolds is faced with the daily question of how far he’ll go to protect River and her brother, who are now part of his crew.

  Joss was also able to streamline the story by cutting back the involvement of several of the characters. Universal had wanted all nine main actors to sign multi-film contracts, but Alan Tudyk (Wash) and Ron Glass (Book) could not commit to sequels. So Joss needed to find a sensible way to take them out of the story while honoring the relationship that fans had with the characters. Joss moved Book off the ship and gave him a storyline previously assigned to a side character, adding weight to a big moment that motivates Mal to take action against the Operative.

  On June 14, Nathan Fillion took to the official Firefly forum to announce that Joss and Kai had taken the cast out to dinner to celebrate the news that the movie was a go. Joss also enlisted Jack Green, who was also the cinematographer on the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven, and editor Lisa Lassek, who had worked on all three of the Whedonverse series.

  Joss had very specific intentions when casting the new characters in the ’verse. For the determined Operative, he chose British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, because “he brings such depth and soulfulness and regret to everything.” In the small but essential role of Dr. Mathias, the pompous Alliance researcher working on River’s case, he cast comedic actor Michael Hitchcock. Mirroring his approach for Buffy writers, Joss picked “comedians, because they have the chops that I will need.”

  Another essential character, the ship itself, needed to be rebuilt from scratch. “I’ll always remember the walk-through of the new Firefly/Serenity set on a gigantic stage at Universal,” Adam Baldwin recalls. “Just to see Joss’s face and how happy he was that it was reborn, sort of a resurrection—he was just like a kid in a candy store. I was so happy for him. This was his baby and … his baby got killed, but he gave it his Midas touch and brought it back. He was so happy again, and he had that little dance in his step, and a smile on his face, this little sheepish grin that he has, like, ‘We did it! We did it, guys!’ And it’s like, ‘No, Joss, you did it. Thanks for bringing us along.’”

  The vibe on set was a combination of the joy of being back together, getting to play in a world that they all knew and loved, and the relief at not having to deal with the threat of cancellation that had hung over their heads when they last shot together. “We didn’t have to worry about losing our jobs or not being able to pay our mortgages,” Jewel Staite says. “We had this beautiful piece of unfinished business to attend to, and for six glorious months, we got to play it out in just the fashion we wanted to. It was total bliss.”

  Though the principal actors wore their characters like a second skin, Joss’s direction gave them new facets to explore. “There was a scene where I had a very infamous line about using a vibrator [‘Goin’ on a year now I ain’t had nothin’ twixt my nethers weren’t run on batteries!’],” Staite recalls. “Initially I played it in sort of a whisper. Joss asked, ‘Why are you whispering? Kaylee isn’t inhibited! She’d shout that as loud as she could to get her point across, no matter who was listening!’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah. Of course she would.’”

  Early in the film, Mal and his crew land on a planet to undertake a heist and end up in an intense chase sequence with a vicious band of Reavers. One of the Reavers harpoons Jayne’s leg as he clings to the side of the crew’s small hovercraft, and Mal must shoot the rope off the harpoon to set him free. Nathan Fillion gave a lot of thought to how he would play that moment. “I thought I was going to crick my neck and take my time to do a really slow aim,” he remembers. “Joss said, ‘Or, after this blade comes whipping past your face, it’s like, “You almost hit me with that blade,” bam, he shoots. It’s like the angrier Malcolm Reynolds gets, the better he shoots.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s so much better.’ I was going for this overly dramatic, ridiculous, stereotypical, unrealistic moment. And his moment was just so much better. And I get the credit! Until just now.”

  It was in this same scene that Joss loosened the reins on being the supreme overlord of his dialogue. He was busy with all things directing, so with the Reavers roaring up on them, Joss told Fillion to “say something that Mal would say.” Fillion then ad-libbed a now-classic Whedonverse line: “Faster, faster, faster would be better!”

  As director, Joss had some learning of his own to do. He’d honed his producing skills over eight years and three television series, continuing the informal schooling that he started in the Buffy writers’ room. “You’re basically teaching people how to write your show and how to make your show and how to act it and how to direct it and everything else,” he said. Directing a feature film forced him back to square one; he went from seasoned teacher to floundering student.

  Fortunately, he found another mentor in Mary Parent. Joss credits the Universal executive, who was also a producer on the film, with teaching him more about making movies than anyone since Jeanine Basinger at Wesleyan. “That was very humbling and very difficult, and sometimes very frustrating, but ultimately the best thing in the world.”

  23

  ELECTION 2004

  On September 17, 2004, Joss announced that Serenity had finished shooting. But that didn’t mean that he was taking a break. In the fall of 2004, with an intense American presidential election nearing its November crescendo, Joss felt that he needed to get involved.

  The incumbent president, Republican George W. Bush, was locked in a close race with his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry. Joss believed that Bush’s administration had made America less safe, that under his guidance the country was “regarded with more contempt by other countries than it had ever been,” and that “nothing in this country [was] going right, and the president [was] acting as if none of that matters.” Joss was concerned that so many people seemed apathetic toward the election and saw little difference between the candidates. “If you’re for Bush I doubt I can sway you,” he said. “But if you’re one of those people grumbling about politicians all being the same I’m begging you to look hard at the facts and a
t the smirking face of the man who is doing more damage to this country than any president in my lifetime. We cannot let apathy decide our fate.”

  Joss decided to host a fund-raiser for Senator Kerry in conjunction with the website Ain’t It Cool News. The popular and highly trafficked site had gained attention for posting insider news and reviews about film and television projects before they were released—much to the irritation and sometimes anger of the production studios. The initial plan was for fans and supporters to participate in a conference call with Joss in exchange for a thirty-five-dollar donation to the Kerry campaign. Joss promised to talk about politics, his series, and anything his fans wanted to discuss.

  To get the word out, Joss officially joined the fan site Whedonesque.com, creating a profile that read:

  A svelte and mysterious Jewel Thief, Joss Whedon has appeared as Batman’s nemesis in several embarrassing fantasies. He also goes by the names “El Hombre,” “The Shadow-guy,” and “Hoppy Hoppy Bunny.” He likes long walks on the beach if they’re brief and nowhere near water. He prefers blondes, brunettes, redheads, bald people or people with big hats so you’re not even sure. Turn offs: insensitive men, people who smoke and then burst suddenly and horribly into flame. He is often very dizzy. Location: I’m inside your house.

  As with his “Bootleg the puppy” battle cry of 1999, the troops were ready to be rallied. Interest soared, and plans quickly changed. The conference call evolved into a party, attended not only by Joss but by several Whedonverse cast members as well, with tickets selling for a fifty-dollar donation to the campaign. Joss would also answer questions on a conference call with forty-two fan parties across the country.