Joss Whedon: The Biography

by Amy Pascale

  “The enemy of humanism is not faith,” he said. “The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is what we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.”

  His speechifying was not done; he headed back to Wesleyan to be the keynote speaker at the 2009 Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns. The seminar’s focus was almost custom made for Joss: “Defining American Culture: How Movies and TV Get Made.” He spoke to students looking to break into the television industry, telling them that they shouldn’t feel prohibited by the cost of production, because they would have increasing access to high-quality, low-cost equipment. Instead, he felt that their real hurdle would be finding an audience. Joss proposed the idea for a website where writers and producers could collaborate on projects that could be later viewed on the site. He encouraged them to tell their own stories in new ways, like he had with Dr. Horrible.

  In July, Joss returned to Dollhouse with a challenge ahead of him. He knew that the first season had been uneven and he needed to figure out how to right the ship. “About two hours after starting to talk to the writers about story,” he later recalled, “I was back with such a vengeance, and so energized and so pumped because we really understand the show now. We understand what works, and what didn’t work so well or what we weren’t so thrilled about. We don’t have the onus of trying to be a big hit sitting on our shoulders. We can just be ourselves. And so the stories we’re breaking are pure, and exciting, and everybody’s on-board in the room, and it’s never flowed better.”

  In its second season, Dollhouse moved even further away from realist procedural storylines, embracing an overarching conspiracy narrative with a slightly dystopian bent—an idea closer to Joss’s original pilot. The Big Bad of the series shifts from Alan Tudyk’s Alpha to the Rossum Corporation itself. Other familiar faces pop up: Angel’s Alexis Denisof plays a US senator whom Rossum kidnaps and turns into an Active so as to have a high-ranking government official under its control, and Firefly’s Summer Glau is programmer Topher’s counterpart in Rossum’s DC Dollhouse facility, with whom Topher indulges in a bit of hero worship.

  The second-season episode “Belonging” also serves as a strong return to the sex trafficking themes that Joss had originally hoped to explore. The episode centers on the Active Sierra, played by Dichen Lachman. It reveals that before she came to the Dollhouse, Sierra was Priya, an artist who was being pursued by a wealthy doctor named Nolan Kinnard. When Priya rejects his advances, Nolan has her committed to his psychiatric hospital and then admitted into the Dollhouse under false pretenses. Once Topher has reprogrammed Priya to become Sierra, Nolan continually enlists her services as a sex worker now that her free will is gone.

  “‘Belonging’ is (in a very unpedantic way) a genuinely radical feminist plotline,” Emily Nussbaum wrote for New York magazine. Nussbaum called the episode “a truly unsettling metaphor about ‘false consciousness,’ the social condition that results when someone is convinced to crave something they don’t in fact want at all. The moment one Dollhouse character shifts from one type of slavery to another is almost too hard to take.” It directly addresses rape from all sides: Sierra the victim, Nolan the attacker, and Topher the enabler—at first unknowingly complicit and then dealing with his guilt over his involvement in Nolan’s ongoing attacks.

  Dollhouse’s second season premiered on September 25, 2009. The viewership was far more consistent each week, but it was roughly half of what the show had garnered during its first year. The series was officially canceled on November 11, while Joss and company were in production on the eleventh episode of its thirteen-episode order. Fox had learned its lesson from Firefly—regarding its relationship with both Joss and his fans—and with the announcement the network confirmed that all of the remaining episodes would air to provide Joss “the opportunity to end [the series] in a significant way.” The final episodes ran through January 2010.

  Miracle Laurie found the announcement to be bittersweet. While she was losing her job, Joss planned to give her a badass death scene to close out her storyline. “Every actor wants at least one great death scene in his or her career and I got a beautiful one. It was perfect for [the character] and my last gift from Joss during our little adventure in the Dollhouse,” she says. “Joss was with us that night on set, which meant a lot to me. That scene was not only my last scene of the series but the last scene I ever shot on Dollhouse, the last shot of the night, and the last shot of the episode. I guess you could say for a sad ending, it was a pretty happy one.”

  Dollhouse may not have been Joss’s most successful project, but it marks an interesting point in his evolution as a writer. “When Joss made Buffy and especially the early [seasons] of Buffy, it was very much about feminism in its bare form, about teaching girls their power,” Emily Nussbaum says. “But the longer he went on, the more his shows become not about individualist things [or] female power but about corporations and corporate control, about the United States, and about politics.”

  Angel starts out as the story of one man’s struggle to “help the helpless,” but by its final season it has became a show about an evil law firm and the ethics of working for an organization that is actually in control of the world. Firefly shows Joss’s issues with a government that claims to be doing what is best for its citizens but in reality does many questionable things in the name of peace and security. And finally Dollhouse, created in the shadow of the WGA strike and Joss’s autonomous production of Dr. Horrible, explores the concept of signing up for a group and expecting to be taken care of, only to find out that you’re being used in dehumanizing ways.

  As Nussbaum puts it, “It just feels that the longer he’s gone on the more his stuff has been not about sexual false consciousness but about political anger and people’s gullibility.”

  “I’ve had people come up to me who are big Dollhouse fans [who told me,] ‘That show really helped me,’ Joss says. “That is really interesting to me, because that is what it was designed to do, like all my shows. Echo is the most helpless person that I ever invented. I was so excited to tell the story of her building—not only discovering or becoming self-aware, but building a personality. Creating a self from a place of complete selflessness or being unhappy. To me that was, you know, a beautiful statement—somebody who gets to say, ‘I am. I actually exist.’ Not just ‘Help, help! I’m being oppressed!’ as they say in the Holy Grail, but starting from nothing and becoming aware of your own existence.”

  Though Joss had turned some of his attention away from The Cabin in the Woods, he played a decisive role in one major postproduction battle. MGM wanted the filmmakers to cut a particular sequence from the movie: before Dana and Marty discover the truth about the secret facility, their tormentors believe that the latter has been killed, so they gather to celebrate the successful completion of the sacrifice. The studio had issues with the idea that Sitterson, Hadley, and their colleagues would throw a big, alcohol-fueled party as Dana continued to struggle against their monsters on the monitors around the room.

  To Drew Goddard, that juxtaposition told the story of The Cabin in the Woods. It also set up the third act, in which Dana is saved by a still-living Marty, the two find their way into the facility, and they enact revenge on those who made their life a living hell. Joss, as Goddard’s producer, went back and forth with MGM over the issue, until he conceded that it was a battle they had lost. Sitting in the editing room, Goddard started to cry, because it was a battle that he didn’t want to lose.

  Joss stared at Goddard, then turned and picked up the phone to call the studio head. He simply told them that they were not cutting the sequence from the film. Goddard exhaled. “Oh, thank God.”

  Throughout the production, Joss questioned what
he should and should not be concerned with in his role of producer. He’d had years of experience producing television, but this was an entirely new medium in which he no longer had final say. As his cowriter put it, “You have to fight these battles and sometimes you don’t quite know. But when it’s important you know.”

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  FANBOY DREAMS COME TRUE: THE AVENGERS

  On January 21, 2010, the Producers Guild of America presented Joss Whedon with a somewhat belated honor. The Vanguard Award, given for achievement in new media and technology, had been bestowed on George Lucas, John Lasseter, and James Cameron, and now they presented it to Joss, for his work on 2008’s Dr. Horrible. By now, the web series was not only available on DVD but had spawned two soundtrack albums (for the series itself and Commentary! The Musical), several high school and college performances, and its own “Once More, with Feeling”—inspired sing-along events.

  Joss was preparing to dive into another new technology at the time as MGM, excited by the early buzz for The Cabin in the Woods, announced that the film’s release would be delayed from February 2010 to January 2011 so that it could be converted into three dimensions. Hollywood was in the midst of a burgeoning 3-D trend that encompassed not only blockbusters like Avatar and Up but also horror films such as My Bloody Valentine, Saw 3D, and The Final Destination.

  However, in June, MGM announced that due to the studio’s financial difficulties, it was shelving Cabin indefinitely. Joss and Goddard pressed for details, but they were slow in coming. “It was very gradual, because with billion-dollar bankruptcies, no one wants to tell you anything,” Goddard says. Once they realized that the studio was going bankrupt, they knew that the January 2011 date was dead; it would take well over a year to get everything figured out. “When we saw things like The Hobbit and James Bond getting delayed, we knew we were in trouble,” he says. “Because if those heavy hitters are getting delayed, it’s gonna take us a while to come out.” Yet knowing that they were in the company of Peter Jackson’s highly anticipated Hobbit adaptation gave them a small sense of peace. “When The Hobbit is getting delayed, there’s not a lot you can do,” Goddard laughs. “’Cause every movie studio in the city would rush to get it into production.”

  With Cabin postponed and his only television project canceled, Joss was susceptible to a new attempt to woo him back into a familiar universe. By 2010, Marvel Comics had developed its film licensing arm into a full-fledged studio capable of financing its own movie projects. Marvel Studios quickly set out to create a franchise of interconnected superhero films, finding success with Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), and Iron Man 2 (2010). Up next were Thor (2011) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)—but the capstone of the project would be to bring all these characters together as Marvel’s ultimate superhero team in The Avengers. But who would direct?

  “We needed somebody who wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel, because the die was cast and the cast was cast,” said Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios. “And yet we wanted somebody with a unique voice, because this had to feel like a part one, not Iron Man 3 or Thor 2.” Marvel also needed someone who could both handle action and juggle the multiple storylines required in an ensemble piece.

  Feige was well aware that Joss Whedon was a strong contender. “I’ve known Joss for many, many years,” he says, “going back to almost ten years ago when we had a project set up at New Line back before Marvel was our own studio. We would license our properties [Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four] out to other studies to produce the films, and New Line had a movie that we were sort of interested in Joss directing. We went to lunch with him, and we brought him into New Line. As a very strange aside, the first meeting we were going to have with him we had to reschedule because it was September 11, 2001. And the project that we were talking about having Joss direct at New Line: Iron Man.”

  According to Feige, Joss remained on Marvel’s radar for the next decade. He wrote a treatment for Iron Man that was approved, but with Buffy and Angel on the air and Firefly in development, he had to back out. There were also brief discussions with him to direct X-Men and X2 (both of which were ultimately helmed by Bryan Singer). More recently, he’d put in a good word with Thor director Kenneth Branagh when his Cabin in the Woods star Chris Hemsworth was auditioning for the title role. “I was about to go back for the audition for Ken and Joss called him just, you know, without me even knowing and just said, ‘Hey, look. I really like this guy’ and ‘He’s talented and fights for the right things,’” Hemsworth says. “Ken really respected his opinion, and I’m sure that helped me get the job.” (Joss and Drew Goddard also prepped the actor with a slew of Thor comic books.)

  Joss, says Feige, “was always somebody that I was a very, very big fan of and I always sort of hoped that our paths would cross, but frankly, he’s got the Whedonverse, right? He’s got his own empire. But when I started making calls about The Avengers, his agent mentioned his name. And I said, ‘Of course.’”

  Joss agreed to the meeting because he was a fan of the Avengers, but he didn’t necessarily want to take on the project. First, Dr. Horrible had proved that he could have great success on a project that he fully controlled. He and Kai were already set to meet with their accountant to do another self-funded project. Second, would he even be the right person to write for the Avengers? In 2005, he told In Focus magazine that the X-Men universe was the only Marvel property he felt comfortable in. “The thing about the X-Men is they have a coherent core. The Avengers to me is tough. I wouldn’t approach The Avengers, I wouldn’t approach the Fantastic Four,” he said. “The X-Men are all born of pain, and pain is where I hang my hat.” Third, he’d already struggled in Serenity to tell a cohesive story about a diverse group of people with extensive backstories that would be accessible to both devoted fans and complete newbies. And last, he’d been burned in his past three attempts to make a comic book movie, the perpetually delayed Wonder Woman project being the latest and most frustrating failure.

  He went into the meeting with a single intention: to have a discussion about the current version of the script, by Zak Penn, the screenwriter for The Incredible Hulk. That is not what happened. Between the end of filming on Thor and the start of filming for Captain America, Joss and Feige got together, and the production chief explained the Avengers script and laid out how each movie related to the next.

  “I don’t think you have anything,” Joss told Feige. “You need to pretend this draft never happened.” Then he went home and wrote five pages of material explaining how he would tell the story of the Avengers. “In the process of writing it, I got that bug,” Joss said. “I realized, oh, yeah, this would be so much fun.”

  Joss’s document, according to Feige, was incredibly well written and articulate, was full of great ideas, and ended with the motto “The Avengers: Some Assembly Required.” “What a great way to kick off this project!” says Feige. He loved the phrase so much that when they added an Avengers teaser to the end of Captain America in July 2011, they used it as a tagline. “That’s where ‘Some Assembly Required’ came from—I remembered it from Joss’s original memo.”

  It was the underlying concept of family that spoke to Joss. “He’s got a great quote,” Feige says, remembering Joss’s line about The Avengers being a group of people who have no business being in the same room together, and yet they are forced to work together. “Isn’t that the perfect definition of a family?”

  Marvel liked Joss’s ideas and gave him an offer to write and direct, with several stipulations, including a ninety-two-day shoot and a quick turnaround for postproduction, even the substantial special effects sequences. The studio specified that the villain must be Loki, brother of the fallen Norse god Thor, who turns against his sibling in the superhero’s solo film. Also, it wanted a big fight among the Avengers in the middle of the film that leaves the team shattered, and an epic battle at the end. “I was like, great, you just gave me your three acts,” Joss said. “Now all I ha
ve to do is justify getting to those places and beyond them.” Or as he put it at another point, “I have enough signposts to build from, all I had to do was try to make it matter and try to have reasons for the conflicts.”

  The Avengers was already set for release in May 2012, which gave Joss confidence that, unlike Wonder Woman, this film was really going to happen. He was all in.

  “I kept telling my mom that reading comic books would pay off,” Joss joked. His stepfather, Stephen, had jokingly taunted him for years with the question “When are you going to make a real, grown-up picture, without the vampires and the rocket ships?” Each time, Joss would reply with the same answer: “Never. It’s never gonna happen.” Now he was about to board the biggest rocket ship of his career.

  In fan circles, rumors abounded over who would take the helm of The Avengers. Early buzz focused on Iron Man and Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau, but he declared himself out of the running. Other rumors pointed to The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier, who reportedly had expressed interest in the project. But fans really started to get fired up with the news that Joss Whedon was in the mix.

  Oddly, the possibility was first raised on April 1, 2010, via the now-defunct website IESB. The fact that the story was posted on April Fool’s Day caused many to question its validity. The Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex website did some digging and reported on April 3, 2010, that “insiders at Marvel Studios say no director has been signed yet but that Whedon was on the short-list and conversations took place. This could be promising, Whedonites.”