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 long-time 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 its 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.”
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