Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  Unfortunately, by the time Dollhouse started to find a new focus, many viewers had moved on; viewership bounced between 4.3 and 2.75 million for the rest of the thirteen episodes. Fran Kranz says that they were always just waiting to get canceled, so it made the cast very close. “Maybe with a different creator, director, guy at the top, it might have made us all hate each other and want to get home that much faster each day. Instead, on Dollhouse, we loved each other that much more. Each day we were grateful to be working, and we kind of felt like we were in our own little pocket of the Fox lot, doing weird little things. It brought us closer together, knowing that at any moment it could all be over.”

  When comedian-actor Patton Oswalt guest-starred in the sixth episode of Dollhouse, he and Joss bonded over the frustration of becoming a fan of a series that only exists for a brief time and then is gone. Oswalt, a fellow comic book and sci-fi nerd, brought up the Firefly universe, which he’d followed from series to movie to comics. After the 2005 Serenity tie-in comic Those Left Behind became the bestselling Dark Horse title up to that point, more volumes had followed, and Oswalt told Joss that these comics had made him want to learn more about the Firefly characters. Joss said to let him know if he had any ideas for other stories in that world.

  Oswalt, who would later improvise an eight-minute rant detailing an epic crossover between Star Wars and The Avengers for a 2013 episode of Parks and Recreation, did some thinking and pitched Joss three Firefly ideas. The first was about the cannibalistic Reavers and what their society might look like; the second focused on troubled psychic River Tam and what it would be like to get impressions of the future but not necessarily understand what they mean. Finally, Oswalt suggested a story exploring the history of pilot Wash and the impact of his death, which occurred at the end of Serenity. This last idea hit a nerve for Joss, and he enlisted Oswalt to write it as a comic, Float Out, which Dark Horse would release in 2010.

  “It’s kind of an elegy for the character of Wash,” Oswalt told Time. “It’s three of his friends, who haven’t met before, old friends from before he was piloting the Firefly, and they’ve bought a new boat and they’re christening it Jetwash, and they’re telling stories about him before they christen it and float it out.”

  In April, a minor controversy flared regarding the thirteenth episode of Dollhouse, “Epitaph One.” Felicia Day, who had played Penny in Dr. Horrible and was guest-starring in the episode, told fans that it wouldn’t air on Fox, which caused many to think that the network had again canceled one of Joss’s shows. Tim Minear allayed their concerns on Whedonesque, explaining that the episode was shot to fulfill contractual obligations to 20th Century Fox Television to deliver thirteen episodes for international sales and the DVD release. But it was not to be part of the Fox network’s thirteen-episode order, which was already covered with the scrapped “Echo” episode.

  On May 8, 2009, Fox aired the twelfth episode as the season finale. It pulled in the fewest viewers of the entire season—about half as many as the premiere. But mere days later, the network picked up Dollhouse for a second season—albeit with a reduced budget. “Epitaph One” never aired in the United States, but in July, Joss screened it at San Diego Comic-Con, and later that month it was included on the Dollhouse DVD set.

  The unaired episode is a departure for the series, set ten years in the future. Los Angeles has become a postapocalyptic ruin, and a new group of characters breaks into the Dollhouse for refuge and finds videos of the Dollhouse team. Flashbacks reveal what became of the dolls and their overseers in the Rossum Corporation. Joss explained that the second season would continue with the flash-forward device and that several characters who first appeared in “Epitaph One” would have recurring roles in the series.

  The flash-forward technique was in the zeitgeist at the time, as ABC’s Lost, famous for its flashback scenes, had changed up its formula in its 2007–08 season to show the bleak futures of its rescued castaways. And perhaps the dual-world concept was in Joss’s consciousness as he readied for production on his latest movie, a fractured take on the beloved tropes of the horror genre.

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  THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

  After being acquired by MGM, The Cabin in the Woods moved to its subsidiary United Artists for further development. At the time, United Artists was being partly overseen by Tom Cruise, who gave script and story notes to Joss and Goddard. “That was definitely one of those surreal experiences,” says Goddard. “It was wonderful…. I’ve never met a more enthusiastic, creative, and supportive person [than Tom Cruise]. He has that energy, and to feel that energy directed toward you, about you, it’s like a drug. It’s wonderful. He was so excited about the script and so complimentary and really just pointed out scenes in the movie that he felt we should bring out more. And he was totally right.”

  At its core, however, the final version of the screenplay remained pretty close to the draft they’d hammered out during their three-day hotel stay back in 2007. Five college students are lured to the titular cabin, where they become the latest victims of a family of zombie sadists. Unbeknownst to the unfortunate visitors, however, the entire scenario is in fact a high-tech setup. Though at first it seems to resemble some sort of twisted lab experiment, it’s ultimately revealed to be an elaborate ritual to appease a group of malevolent gods who would otherwise destroy the world. The scenario’s creators force each of their victims to conform to one of five predetermined roles before offering his or her life to the Ancient Ones. With the deaths of the Athlete, the Whore, the Scholar, and the Fool (the Virgin’s death is optional, as long as she suffers greatly), the gods will be sated and all of humanity can go living another day, none the wiser.

  It was important to Joss and Goddard that the technicians who engineer the ritual be believable and realistic characters. They’re certainly the villains of the film, but they’re villains with an understandable belief system. They think that causing the deaths of five young people is a rational and proper action if it saves the rest of the human race from annihilation—even if they do take a kind of pride in watching the results of their handiwork. Goddard based them on people he knew growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the men and women who developed and built atomic weapons. “They’re wonderful, decent people and yet their job is to create weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “They’re all just people. They believe what they believe for a reason, and their reason is not ridiculous.”

  Joss mined his own childhood memories to further develop the technician characters, once again calling on the perspective of an educator’s son who knew better than most how his teachers saw the school and the kids. When the Cabin in the Woods techs aren’t knee-deep in manipulation, they’re grumbling about other departments in the compound failing to do their part to ensure a successful slaughter. “This is basically the same thing,” Joss said. “They’re in the faculty lounge complaining about the kids.”

  While writing the script, Joss and Goddard had one actor in mind for the role of lead technician Gary Sitterson. They thought that Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under) had the gravitas the role required and the fearlessness to jump into such an unconventional project. Joss, however, warned Goddard against getting his hopes up, because at the time Jenkins was in contention for an Oscar for his turn in The Visitor (2008). “Here’s an example of me really showing what a great producer I am—I told Drew, ‘Don’t even try, it’s not worth it…. We don’t have a chance,” Joss said. “Good call, pretty proud of that.”

  But Jenkins was their dream choice, and they decided that it couldn’t hurt to send the script to his agent. That was on a Friday night. She read it, and even though she knew her client was skeptical about appearing in a horror project, she insisted that Jenkins check it out. Once he finished the script, it took him two seconds to decide to sign on. He was won over by the “very good, funny and smart” writing of a story concept that he’d never come across before. Monday morning, Jenkins called and said that he was in.

  On their
first try, Joss and Goddard had scored big. Not only did they get their ideal actor for the role, but they also got the enhanced cachet that came with having an Oscar-nominated actor signed to their project. People started to take the film more seriously than a run-of-the-mill slasher film, and it attracted a higher caliber of talent. Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) came aboard as Sitterson’s partner, Hadley.

  Joss and Goddard next set about casting the roles of the techs’ five sacrificial lambs. Since the idea was to show multifaceted young people who are forced into stock horror roles for the sake of the ritual, the actors needed to both fit into and work against stereotypes. For the part of the Fool, the stoner Marty, Joss suggested they look close to home—on the set of Dollhouse. Goddard had come to the set to look over different cabin locations that the location scouts had suggested to Joss. Actor Fran Kranz started to geek out over horror films with them, excitedly explaining that he had held a Friday the 13th marathon in college. Goddard pointed out that one of the locations they were considering was the original Crystal Lake, where that film’s Jason Voorhees does his stalking and killing.

  Neither Joss nor Goddard said anything more to Kranz about Cabin, so he didn’t know what to think when he got an audition toward the end of Dollhouse’s first season. He wasn’t given the actual script but rather some fake scenes in which the police interrogate his character after a multi-clawed monster rips his friends’ heads off. Kranz took on a defiant slacker attitude that would play well into Marty. After the audition, he heard nothing until he had pretty much forgotten about it. Eventually Joss approached him on set and said that he was really good in his audition tape, but the testing process went on. Although Joss and Goddard were happy with Kranz as Marty, the studio took a while to sign off on him.

  The waiting did lead to several tense moments on set. “It was awkward,” Kranz said. “We had a good working relationship so I felt comfortable talking to him about mostly anything. But there was this big elephant in the room, at least for me. I would be on pins and needles whenever he walked by. At one point … Eliza Dushku asked him how Cabin in the Woods was coming and he said, ‘We’re just putting together a really second-rate cast.’ It was a joke but I was so insecure I was like, ‘Oh, s——, what’s happening?’ It totally freaked me out. Of course, he’s screwing around.”

  When Kranz was finally told that he got the part, he found out that his initial meeting with Goddard was not as random as he’d initially thought. “Joss [said that he’d] been seeing me in this role for a while, and that he brought Drew to set to check out this dude for Marty,” Kranz recalls. “So that whole day that I just happened to be geeking out with Drew, I probably could not have done better [than] just sitting around being a fan of horror films and just being myself. Luckily, Drew right then was like, ‘Yeah, let’s definitely read him,’ and one thing led to another and I got the part.”

  Two more roles were cast with television actors: Jesse Williams (Grey’s Anatomy) would play the Scholar, grounded new guy Holden, and Kristen Connolly (As the World Turns) would be Dana, the essential horror-flick “virgin.” The final two were far harder to cast—the Athlete, Curt the jock, and the Whore, blonde party girl Jules. New Zealand actress Anna Hutchison auditioned for Jules from where she was working in Australia, and locked the role mere days before they were set to shoot.

  Goddard found his Jock in another actor from Down Under: the relatively unknown Chris Hemsworth. The Australian actor had filmed a brief but pivotal sequence for J. J. Abrams’s upcoming reboot of Star Trek, playing James T. Kirk’s father. “We probably saw over 100 people for [the role of Curt],” Goddard said. “I was looking for actors that can break your heart. These people need to be real, because we go to such unreal places. He just had that. As soon as he walked out of the room I said, ‘That guy’s got the job.’”

  With the cast announced on March 10, 2009, production could begin. The original plan was to shoot in California so that Joss and Goddard wouldn’t be far from their families for the several months of production. But right before they planned to shoot, the Canadian dollar dropped; combined with British Columbia’s tax incentives, the production could save a few million dollars by shooting in Vancouver instead. It was too much of a difference to ignore, so they packed up and headed north to the Canadian woods.

  Goddard settled into his position as director, with Joss serving as lead producer and second unit director. They both bounded into their new roles with a naïveté that both helped and hindered the production. The first day of principal photography, they were scheduled to do a scene in which our intrepid college students make a stop at an old-fashioned gas station on their way to the cabin. But when the crew arrived at the location, the set was covered in snow—not ideal for a film set in the summer. It was the first significant moment when Joss and Goddard realized that it was up to them to figure out what to do. They lost half a day out of their schedule resolving the problem, which they kept chasing to get back for the rest of the shoot.

  Initially, Joss thought that he’d spend more time on set as the producer, but he quickly realized that it was better for him to stick around Los Angeles to handle the bigger questions and manage day-to-day operations so that Goddard could concentrate on directing. Joss also accepted that while he’d had his moments of wanting to direct the film, it was much better off in Goddard’s bloodied hands. “Drew is a horror aficionado in a way that I am not. If you look at Buffy, it’s the least frightening horror show in the history of time and space. I have a problem with dismembering people,” Joss said. “Drew was ready to commit to it in a way that I wasn’t, and was ready to buy the most amount of blood you can purchase in Canada.”

  And there was a lot of blood—particularly during the final battle, in which surviving heroes Marty and Dana, having discovered the secret installation beneath the cabin, turn the tables on their tormentors by uncaging the facility’s vast menagerie of monsters. During the shooting of the ultragory battle scenes, the room had to be squeegeed, mopped, scrubbed, and bleached and still needed a couple of days before it was ready again. Just as impressive as the gore is the diversity of the creatures causing it; Joss, Goddard, and their crew developed numerous distinctive monster types: a werewolf, clowns, scarecrows, a dragonbat, a merman, “dismemberment goblins”—and Joss’s favorite, a ballerina whose entire face consists of lamprey-like rings of teeth.

  There was great excitement when a new performer arrived on set to take part in the final sequence of the film. In it, Marty and Dana confront the Director, the head of the facility, who explains the purpose of the ritual and the reason why Marty must play the part of the Fool and die to complete it—because otherwise humanity is doomed. Joss and Goddard wrote the part of the Director without specifying the character’s gender, which made it a perfect fit for the actress who had brought so much to another gender-unspecified role, iconic badass Lt. Ripley in Alien.

  Sigourney Weaver had the strength and authority to convince the audience that even if they still were rooting for Marty and Dana to make it through to the end alive, the Director’s decision to kill the five young people was the proper choice to make. Joss and Goddard discussed many other people for the role, but ultimately felt that, as Joss put it, “there’s nobody else who should be coming up those stairs.”

  Joss knew Weaver from working with her on Alien: Resurrection, but Goddard was intimidated by the prospect of working with the legendary actress—until they talked. The first thing she did was to ask him when the werewolf arrived, because she was so excited to work with a werewolf. She told him that they should make sure that the werewolf had someone to sit with at lunch. By the time the cast and crew were shooting the final confrontation, everyone else was burned out by the intensity of the production. When Weaver came in with her bubbly and enthusiastic attitude, it reenergized the set. “A person that has done the things that she has done is still excited about the fun of moviemaking,” Goddard recalled. “There’s something that’s so inspiring abou
t that.”

  Filming wrapped in May 2009, and Joss left it to Goddard to oversee the film’s postproduction stage. He’d already found that he was able to let go of his perfectionist tendencies, his need to control all aspects of the production. His more limited role on the film had also given him some flexibility in his schedule, which allowed him, in April at age forty-four, to accept the 2009 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism from Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy and the Secular Society. It was the third time the two groups had bestowed the award, this time given for how Joss’s works consistently deliver the message that to be a good person one need not believe in God but may instead “believe in yourself and in each other.” (The award was inscribed with a quote recommended by Kai: “However you live, / There’s a part of you always standing by, / Mapping out the sky” from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George.)

  Joss talked about his moment of geeker joy when Barack Obama acknowledged atheists in his 2009 inaugural speech. He compared his feeling of worthiness in that moment to those of gay fans who’d thanked him for his stories that gave them the courage to come out. He discussed how he sees religion as a tool that humanity created, and how religious people have laughed at him and his atheism, thinking that because he doesn’t have a “belief system that they can understand, it means that he doesn’t have a system of belief.” He ended his speech with a plea for people to embrace education—not because all educated people will come out as nonbelievers, but because they all will learn to question and examine the religious and political rhetoric with which they’ve been indoctrinated.