Slayers and Vampires
Page 5
JOSS WHEDON
Quite frankly, I don’t know what makes a big spec sale. I think certain things will sell, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what they want and why they think they should pay a lot of money. I know they don’t revere writers. Although I’ve been treated well by good people a lot of the time, I have the usual bitter, “They’re jealous of us, they need us and they hate us because they need us” writer thing, which is probably true. I think that on the totem pole, writers are still pretty much the part of the totem pole that’s stuck in the ground so that it will stay up.
I think the compensation and the high profile has to do with the whole media being more insider than it used to be, with people knowing more about directors and the industry. Everything is becoming sort of more high profile. But I think that, ultimately, the industry’s attitude toward writers is pretty much the same: “How can you facilitate our blockbuster and how can we push you around?” The fact that they’re paying them a lot of money doesn’t really have anything to do with that. In a way, I found that the more successful I got as a writer, the less power I had.
Alien: Resurrection, released in 1997, would eventually be helmed by French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the brilliant director who was part of the critically acclaimed duo behind the masterful, The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. It was an odd pairing with Whedon’s distinctly American sensibilities and colloquialism, and the film would please few, including Whedon himself.
JOSS WHEDON
I got the gig for Alien: Resurrection by writing a treatment that did not involve Sigourney [Weaver]. Then they said they wanted to get her in it. At first my response was, “Bullshit, she’s dead.” I had to figure out how to bring her back. We didn’t just say, “We’ve brought her back, let’s make the movie.” It’s the central issue of the movie, the fact that we bring her back. We knew that once you do that, everything must be different. Somebody comes back from the dead, especially in a movie where death is the ultimate threat, you can’t just say, “It’s OK, anybody can die and come back because we can do this now.” It was very important to me that it’s a very torturous, grotesque process so that people will viscerally feel what it’s like to be horribly reborn in a lab.
I enjoyed the bleakness of the third film, but it played that and it played it to its logical conclusion. Originally my whole pitch was that she wakes up and she’s got to be pretty angry, and she’s got a lot of shit to work through. What’s interesting about this was she could be all kinds of different people at this point rather than just play that same note again.
GLEN C. OLIVER
I’d argue that much of what Whedon chiefly intended throughout his screenplay drafts made it to screen—more or less at times, in other instances exactingly. I can see Whedon trademarks stamped throughout the film—both on paper, and on screen. One example: characters project a vibe, a ’tude, which can be spotted fairly easily and can be correlated to Whedon’s approach to characters in his other works. There are some innate Whedonesque thematics present as well.
JOSS WHEDON
I saw Alien when I was fourteen and there’s not another movie that had as big an impact viscerally and aesthetically on me. Alien changed the face of science fiction, even more than Star Wars, into a working man’s universe. It was a submarine movie. It’s like that thing in Star Wars where Luke looks at the Millennium Falcon, which is the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and says, “What a piece of junk.” All of a sudden you’re not in robes proclaiming, “Mars will explode!” You’re in a science fiction universe inhabited by us. I think that’s a huge part of it.
Also they created a monster that was not only genuinely new, but sort of horribly resonant. For the first one, that was the huge thing. Aliens just made brilliant changes on it. That’s what was disappointing about the third one for me. I thought the attitude and the feel of it was great, but people want to see those changes. They say, “We know the Alien and we know it intimately, what’s new? What’s different?” Cameron did it big just with the title, and Alien 3 said, “Yeah, well this one is small and kind of slow.”
They weren’t rushing to make another one afterward. I think they were disappointed, because it wasn’t the film they were hoping to make. And, again, how does that happen? How does a bunch of guys with a ton of money and a great franchise set out to make a certain kind of movie and then say, “Oh, I don’t get it”? They all felt that the matter was kind of closed, and Sigourney had dissolved into a pit of lava, so it wasn’t like they thought they had a star. Alien 3 was beautiful, but it was neither exciting nor scary, which is a travesty. It needs those things.
My friend Tommy had an interesting theory about what was wrong with the third one. He said that all of the Alien movies were very specific. The first one was a bunch of pros on a submarine, the second one was an army movie, and the third one was a prison movie, only it wasn’t a prison movie and that’s where it failed. As he said, it was just a bunch of bald British guys and you couldn’t tell one from the other. That’s not prison genre. In prison genre, they’re Americans very specifically. That was a big mistake in terms of trying to evoke a prison movie, because they carry their own level of terror and it was hard to be scared of these guys. Making them all British totally undermines the prison movie idea. I think the fans were robbed in the third one. You know what they did in the third one that just upset me beyond imagining?
They actually had a scene where people we didn’t know were killed by the alien. That’s bullshit, because nothing is more boring than people you don’t know being killed. I just want every scene to contain something amazing. I want to do Evil Dead, where it’s really menacing and then about twenty minutes into it the action starts and never stops.
GLEN C. OLIVER
One of the brilliant conceits of the Alien franchise is that each of the film installments has represented radical stylistic departures from the previous entries. Thus, I don’t think it would be fair to say that what director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Whedon were attempting was categorically less relevant or worthy than previous films in the cycle. Each movie has its own approach, its own aesthetic, its own thematics, and its own voice. Which, for my money, is exactly the kind of diversity that should be reflected in an ongoing big screen franchise. So, Resurrection got that part right, at least.
JOSS WHEDON
I fucking hated it! I thought it was as badly directed as a movie could be and I thought it was bad in ways that I didn’t know movies could be bad. I learned more from that movie than anything I’ve ever been involved in. I thought it was badly cast, badly shot, I didn’t like the production design. Everything that was wrong in the script was incredibly highlighted by it, and everything that was right about the script was squashed with one or two very minor exceptions. I just couldn’t believe how much I hated it.
GLEN C. OLIVER
Jeunet’s overall execution of Whedon’s “vision” is highly suspect. When viewing the movie, I’ve always perceived a sense of conflict and struggle within the filmmaker. At some level, he was clearly aware of the enormous dramatic potential of the project. Ripley’s discovery of her prototype clones in the Auriga lab somehow manages to be both horrific and touching and thrilling simultaneously—not an easy feat to accomplish for a director. Our heroes taking on the alien beasties underwater is both quite striking and very smartly executed. In moments like these, Jeunet shined as the amazing and provocative filmmaker he can often be. The filmmaker this particular project needed more of.
JOSS WHEDON
I wasn’t really involved in production. I went to the set once, because I was busy doing Buffy. I went to dailies once and thought, “This doesn’t seem right, but I’m sure it’s fine.” I saw the director’s cut with the studio brass and I actually began to cry. Then I started to put on a brave face and tried to be a team player, but I can say with impunity that I was just shattered by how crappy it was.
I worked really hard on it for a really long time. But you know what? It was
an epiphany, a wake-up call. After that I said, “The next person who ruins one of my scripts is going to be me.” I have always wanted to direct. I’m not just a bitter writer trying to protect his shit. I think they’re two very different talents, but there is an element of, “Enough already.” I was making an argument in the past that I had yet to really live, as far as I was concerned. It was the final capping humiliation of my crappy film career.
GLEN C. OLIVER
Where the film suffers most greatly—and deviates most significantly from Whedon’s intent—there are frequent instances where Jeunet is clearly viewing the source material as little more than a glorified B movie. Certain action and suspense movements feel not that far removed from the less disciplined days of Troma or New World. Some moments here feel like they’ve been carved from a less thoughtful, respectful version of the franchise. Not quite parody, but not fully reverential, either. There were times when I wondered if Jeunet was making an Alien movie, or . . . in some weird way . . . if he was lampooning the “scruffy crew in a compromised setting” genre on the whole. It’s a strange, and unclear, tone at best—one which I think resulted in no small portion of pushback from audiences.
JOSS WHEDON
A lot of writers become directors because they want to protect their material, and after Alien: Resurrection anybody would feel that way. Directing is the other half of storytelling, and that’s what I wanted to do. What I only ever wanted to do is tell stories, and sometimes it was very frustrating to me that I’m not this incredible lens man. I’m not the most adept. I see people who can shoot so much better than I can and it’s a little frustrating. But I also have a little bit of that glint thing of, Was the gun in the frame? I know what’s important and it’s what they’re feeling and what I’m feeling about what they’re feeling and for the rest, I’ll do my best. I’ll work very hard, but it will also take care of itself. But writing was always just the first half. And back then when I started, you wrote a script and then maybe a studio would buy it. But I had ten scripts I wrote, one hundred pages plus each that nobody ever made. So the act is somewhat masturbatory. If you don’t get the partner, if you don’t get the other person involved, if you don’t see it to fruition, then you’re just telling stories to yourself like when you masturbate.
GLEN C. OLIVER
I can’t fathom that, given the body of his work on the whole, Whedon ever once conceived that the characters in Alien: Resurrection shouldn’t connect with viewers more fully. If an audience doesn’t care for the characters on screen, the audience doesn’t care what happens to them either—and the fabric of the film quickly begins to unravel. Which I very much feel happened here. And the fact that the film’s principal iconic contribution to the franchise—the alien “Newborn”—looked like a rubber chicken which had been left in the sun too long didn’t help much, either.
Whedon also was involved with an even more notoriously troubled feature film, Kevin Reynolds’s 1995 would-be sci-fi epic, Waterworld, in which most of the Earth is underwater after the polar ice caps have melted. Kevin Costner’s Mariner befriends Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her young companion, Enola (Tina Majorino), as they escape from an artificial island pursued by Dennis Hopper and his malevolent Smokers in the hopes of finding the mythical Dryland.
JOSS WHEDON
I lost the patient! That experience was pretty interesting and a pretty good example that, by the time I got there, there was too much going on for me to make a real difference. They were too far into it. With Speed, I had leeway to kind of really work on it. With Waterworld, there were only tiny cracks I could get in between. I will tell you that that film is one of the projects that proved to me that the higher you climb, the worse the view.
BEN EDLUND
(creator / executive producer, The Tick)
I ended up working on Titan A.E, which was a late ’90s sci-fi, which actually had eighteen writers that worked on it, but the credits ended up landing on myself, Joss Whedon, and John August. We were the ones who got screen credit. But I had actually not worked ever a moment with either of those dudes. We all did our own individual drafts, but I had actually been cocredited with Joss on a movie and had never met him.
After a succession of these unsatisfying but financially lucrative writing gigs, Whedon got the phone call that would change his life from the WB (forerunner to the CW), a fledgling network that was attempting to stake out the young audience that had all but been abandoned by ABC, NBC, and, especially, CBS. The idea was to come up with programming that would never be greenlit by the mainstream networks, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite its failure as a feature, somehow seemed ideally suited to their needs at the time.
GEORGE SNYDER
(former assistant to Joss Whedon)
I’d worked for the producers of the Buffy film and was introduced to Joss by Gail Berman. Then Joss mentioned that the Warner Bros network was talking about doing a pilot of Buffy for television and wanted to know whether or not I had ever done a pilot. I told him, “No” and he said, “Neither have I. Let’s do it.”
JOSS WHEDON
I thought a series would be very different from the movie, but there is an idea in the “high school horror show” that would sustain . . . an entire television show [and] keep it going for years. The movie, the idea, the premise is really just for one piece. Where the show would be different is we could broaden it out a little with different monsters, different problems, new characters, and things like that. It was appealing to me as an idea for a show, but I hadn’t thought of it until they brought it to me.
DAVID GREENWALT
Gail Berman worked at Sandollar at the time and she was the one that said, “The vampire story should be a TV series.” They said to her that you got to get Joss Whedon, knowing that he’d already sold a million-dollar script and done all this stuff in movies. Gail went and got Joss, whom we thought would never do TV, because he’s a big movie guy. But he doesn’t care if it’s TV, movies, that Dr. Horrible Sing-a-Long thing, or a play in his backyard. He only cares about quality, and he was disheartened with the movie version of Buffy, which was very camp. It was a great script that I don’t think was that well executed, and he wanted to do it right. They made a deal with him that they only owned him for the first twelve episodes. That’s unheard of, not to own a guy for at least two or three years who’s going to be the igniting element in the show. He just stayed and did it because he loved it, and because he was getting it right. Gail turned out to be pretty smart.
FRAN RUBEL KUZUI
I wanted to make the sequel in Hong Kong, and make it even more of a martial arts movie than Buffy. I lost interest in it, though, and it wasn’t until a few years later that Gail Berman approached me about possibly turning Buffy into a TV series. Gail’s timing must have been right, because I agreed to go ahead and do it. I loved doing the movie, loved so much of it that I was ecstatic when I was given the opportunity for it to have another life as a TV show.
IAN WOOLF
(first assistant director, Angel)
What happened was that the Kuzuis produced the feature film and had the ancillary rights in perpetuity. We never saw them. I used to do a funny thing early on in the first and second seasons. On the first day of principal photography on the first episode of that season, I would call the Kuzuis’ office and call in for a shot. They were, like, “Who is this?” “It’s Ian Woolf, first AD on Angel. Just calling in the first shot for the Kuzuis.” They’re, like, “What?” because they don’t know. It’s kind of a joke, because, typically, when you get the first shot, it’s always called into the production office or called into Fox, because they like to know when the first shot rolls and when the break for lunch is and all that stuff. I just used to fuck with the Kuzuis and call in the middle of the show.
But they had nothing to do with it; they just got a check and that was it, basically. When they would do crew jackets for everybody, they’d always ask the Kuzuis for money, because we felt it was a waste of mone
y. The crew jackets just end up in somebody’s closet. We prefer to give the money to a charity. But the Kuzuis never gave money to the crew. They were real assholes.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
Joss had no desire to have another awful experience where his idea was there to get basically trampled on, and where he has no voice because he sold it and they’re going to do it their way. In the end, he wanted control over his vision, and he had no desire to have another bad experience where he didn’t get to do his vision. So when Gail [Berman] was able to go, “No, no, no, you will have total creative license,” she was able to kind of talk Joss into it.
He has always been sort of a pioneer—I remember after Buffy and Angel, after I wasn’t on the show anymore, he called me and asked if I would participate in this round robin with some of the writers and actors from the show and talk about stuff. I always thought he hated me and one of the things he said is how we have to own our own content and how important it is to do it ourselves and not let big budget or studios control it. He’s a rebel. If you want something done right, it has to be your voice. You can’t have any interference from the financier.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
I see parallels with Dark Shadows in the sense that Dark Shadows started with the vampires and branched out to include just about everything: witches, ghosts, werewolves, even “Diabalos.” I think that’s how the devil was billed, though never so named out loud. It was an attempt to recycle familiar, well-loved horror clichés in a television format. The “rules” of these creatures might be bent a little bit, but there was generally no overt revisionism. In the same way, Buffy might have played around with the nature of vampires, but they didn’t sparkle in the sun.