Slayers and Vampires
Page 6
SARAH LEMELMAN
Dark Shadows started off as not even having any supernatural elements, and then much later into it, we’re introduced to Barnabas Collins. My mom has said that’s who she remembers from the show and I think that just speaks to the popularity of vampires. She said it had werewolves and time traveling, but she, and everyone who watched it, remembers Barnabas. He was this charismatic character that drew in the audience, especially with the love story between him and Angelique. It’s likely that Joss was aware of Dark Shadows, and may have partially based the relationship of Angel and Buffy off Barnabus and Angelique. I think it’s safe to say, people love forbidden love. That’s why Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde have stayed popular for centuries. Vampires shouldn’t be with people, and when a vampire falls in love with a vampire slayer, now that’s a captivating story.
STEVE BIODROWSKI
The other parallel between Dark Shadows and Buffy would be that both retained the basic notion vampirism was a bad condition even while allowing that individual vampires might have a conscience. Barnabas Collins didn’t want to be a vampire, but occasionally he was able to use his unwanted powers for good (several of his victims were villains we were glad to see him kill). On Buffy, Angel was a sympathetic if conflicted vampire, and of course he got to put his undead powers to good use on his spin-off series.
GEORGE SNYDER
Gail Berman went around to the major networks and was literally laughed out of the room. People said to us, “Why did you go to this little network?” and Joss would say, “Well, they were the only network that would take us.” Fox, who were producing it, said they already had their own vampire show, which was Kindred: The Embraced, but they would produce. It was Gail Berman who said, “This has got legs,” and she’s the one who asked Joss if he would be interested in pursuing it as a TV series. He thought it could be intriguing as long as he could do what he wanted to do with it. Then it was a matter of trying to sell it.
DAVID GREENWALT
She’s great and we had a lot of fun, and then she ran Fox Network. My wife always liked Gail, because Gail never treated her like she was a piece of shit because she wasn’t in our business.
GEORGE SNYDER
The reason I think the WB took on the show is that they were very smart people; it was a little network that had nothing to lose at that point. I think they just got the idea and a lot of people didn’t. Hybrid shows, shows that play with genre . . . there was just something very different, but they got it. As Joss has said more than once, they were very nurturing. They were willing to take the risk, they could afford to take a risk, but it was a risk nonetheless.
JOSS WHEDON
The idea of the movie was that Buffy is someone who is completely ignorant to the world, who was never expected to do anything except be pretty. And someone who’s nice but self-centered and kind of vacuous who learns about the world, basically because she has to learn about vampires and stuff and becomes a more mature person in the process. This Buffy is dealing with the same stuff, but she’s already a slayer and has been a slayer for a while. She is instinctively a hero, but at the same time there are some things she will always be dealing with: the pain of adolescence and growing up, but her journey is not quite the same. In the series she’s already empowered; she’s just trying to deal with how that empowerment affects her. She tries to put the events of the film behind her a little bit, but basically she accepts what she is. It’s just a question of balancing her life as a slayer and her life as a teenage girl who would rather go out on a date than spend the night killing vampires.
THOMAS P. VITALE
(executive vice president, Programming and Original Movies, Syfy and Chiller)
The original Buffy movie was fun and entertaining, but if considered in a vacuum, I don’t think that movie would ever be considered an “important” film. Beyond that, I don’t think anyone in the Buffy movie audience could have imagined that little film turning into an iconic and long-running television series. The fact is that very few film-to-television projects ever become hits. The “prebranding” of a theatrical movie definitely helps with the original launch of the show, as familiarity can attract viewers to sample the series version. But if the television series doesn’t stand on its own and have something new to say, it won’t last. Out of the countless television dramas ever made, I’d estimate there are only a couple of dozen film-to-television series that have become hits, and maybe none as special as Buffy.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(executive producer, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena)
I remember when I heard they were doing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, I thought, “Well, that’s not going to work.” Like everybody else, I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie. Then I watched the first episode and I’m, like, “Oh, wait a minute . . .” I think by episode three I was, like, “This is the best thing ever. This is brilliant.” I really, really loved it. I started watching it before I had broken into the business.
JOSS WHEDON
Truthfully, I can spot the similarities between Buffy and my other scripts. It’s not that different. Our approach on Buffy was to make little movies. The good thing is that I had no idea what I was doing, so a lot of that works to my advantage. We shot a little higher than we should and it’s easy to break rules when you’re not sure of them. At the same time, I’m very traditional. I like to tell a good story, I care about my characters and all that stuff.
It’s not like Twin Peaks where it’s completely out there. I’m actually a very conservative storyteller. We’re always so dedicated to “what is the emotional reality of being locked in a cage by the substitute teacher who then turns into a giant praying mantis?” And we’re very serious about it. Otherwise it becomes jokey. If you can’t connect your story to some emotional reality to your characters, then there’s no reason to tell that story.
GEORGE SNYDER
The WB got the metaphor. When you go in to pitch a show, you pitch some ideas for possible episodes. The two Joss went in with were what eventually became “The Pack” and “Out Of Mind, Out of Sight.” The pitch for “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” was that this is a girl who is so shy and so unpopular that she doesn’t get noticed to the point where she becomes invisible. Well, everybody got that. It was one of the hardest episodes in the end to write, but that pitch was something they got. The high school metaphor, the idea of being lonely in high school, Buffy’s problem of, “I can’t be a part of this, because I’m a slayer,” translates to, “I’m too tall,” “I’m too short,” “I’m too funny looking,” “I’m not athletic.” Whatever teen issue I’m burdened with keeps me separate, and this is a story about that alienation. We were off and running.
JOSS WHEDON
It made sense to me, but it definitely surprised most people. Why are the best writers in TV? Because they can control their product, they’re given something resembling respect, and they see what they create come up on the screen not only the way they want it, but also within a few months as opposed to, like, four years. Plus it’s steady work. That’s my theory, because most movies are so bad that you have to wonder who in their right mind would want to write those. I love movies and want to make more movies, but if the idea is to tell the story, then TV is the best way to do that.
SUSANNE DANIELS
(president of programming, WB Network)
Every once in a while you meet a writer whose passion and vision just blow you away, and that’s what happened when we met with Joss Whedon for the first time. As soon as we saw Joss’s pilot script, we knew we had something unique.
SARAH LEMELMAN
Susanne Daniels was sold on the idea as she was looking to reach the profitable teenage audience. For Daniels, the targeted teenage, and moreover young girl, demographic was critical, as in the late 1990s they were seen as an ideal target market that spent an estimated eighty-five billion dollars per year. It certainly helped that during that time frame, third wave feminism was taking its hold on America,
and media depictions of “girl power” were everywhere. Its reach ranged from magazine cover stories and spreads to newly formed female music groups, like the Spice Girls, who headlined festivals and tours across the world and disseminated the girl power mantra. The time was ripe for a show to be broadcasted about female empowerment, and Daniels wanted to take full advantage of this.
JOSS WHEDON
Buffy starts in a new school, hoping to leave her vampire-slaying days behind her. Unfortunately, the school is built on a Hellmouth, which is kind of a mystical portal between our dimension and the demonic dimension. So in this high school, anything goes. Right from the start, we had witches and werewolves, giant insects, and, of course, vampires. She and her friends—who find out her secret—become the core group to fight them. What’s fun about the concept is that our characters go through all of that and then have to worry about school. The humor comes from, “I have a test, I have a giant insect attacking me, and I have to deal with both of those realities.” And they deal with both of those realities, because they have to. They can’t get kicked out of school and become bums. They’re hoping that if they can stop the monsters, normal life will continue.
SUSANNE DANIELS
In fact, it’s a show that we thought appealed to the Goosebumps audience at the same time it captured X-Files viewers. Buffy was much more than a vampire slayer. She’s the chosen one, chosen to fight all of the forces of evil she comes upon, and in this series evil ranged from powerful modern-day witches to a seven-foot praying mantis disguised as a teacher.
JOSS WHEDON
Early on there were so many ways that people described the show as everything from “Clueless meets The Night Stalker” to “90210 meets The X-Files.” Those things were a great way of selling the show. Clueless was a bit of a mislead, because that’s really a camp show where everyone is laughing at the characters, and Buffy is an actual hour drama where, although it’s got a huge amount of humor, it takes itself seriously. It’s not one of those postmodern things where everything is referential and everything is a big joke. Visually, I don’t think the show was quite as dark as The X-Files; it had a lighter side and all of the actors weren’t Canadian. But that was definitely the closest forebear at the time, because we weren’t just vampires. We were dealing with all kinds of monsters and demons. We weren’t interested in doing variations of the same thing every week.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
What we did was take the concept of the movie of this sixteen-year-old aching that everyone felt in their adolescence: Am I an adult? Am I a child? And, suddenly, she has to save the world. Now she’s an outcast. She doesn’t fit in. She doesn’t know if she wants to be a cheerleader or fight vampires, and that is what makes her interesting and believable. Buffy is a person who is lost, who doesn’t know where she belongs, and you can feel for her. Junior high was my time to feel that I didn’t know where I fit. I tried to be a jock. I tried to be cool. And I couldn’t find my place. I think that is what Willow, Xander, and Buffy were all going through. That’s what made them such wonderful friends—they helped each other to get through this time.
JOSS WHEDON
The people of Sunnydale sort of had a notion that things aren’t right. Terrible things happen all the time at this school; kids are dropping like flies, but everyone else is pretty oblivious. The group and Buffy’s Watcher are the only ones who really know what’s going on. Believe me, they want to have normal lives. Hopefully the high school situation we presented was not totally unrealistic. It’s not, “Oh, there’s a nerd; there’s a jock.” We tried to show people the way they act in high school. We tried to create a little more of the reality of high school, because, of course, that’s where the horror is really coming from. A lot of these stories were supposed to work as fun-house mirror reflections of normal life, so that the werewolf story would be a puberty nightmare, basically.
Then we do a story about a girl who is so unpopular that she becomes invisible; there’s a story about a witch who tries to get on the cheerleading squad, and it’s basically a story about girls and their mothers, which also happens to have a witch, magic, horror, and all that stuff. Everything was supposed to come from high school. We were facing a sort of almost absurdly huge and horrific extension of our own normal everyday high school experience.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
High school is horrific! Let’s be honest—it’s the most horrific time in life. Kids are vicious for no reason. You’re labeled with your reputation as a freshman, and it’s virtually impossible to change that throughout high school, and you live like that.
JOSS WHEDON
It’s also why I wanted to do the show. I wanted to do the movie because I liked the character and I liked the premise, but that won’t carry a show. What carries the show is that it’s about high school. It’s not just in high school, it’s about the human relations that are going on in there. Those things are just blown so out of proportion that instead of having a sensitive heart to heart, we had to deal with a terrible, horrible beast. But it’s the same issue. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it to my grave: high school was a horror movie. And a soap opera. And a ridiculous comedy. So we go from the sad scene at school where Buffy finds out that the guy she likes is interested in somebody else, to the slaughter of innocent people.
DAVID GREENWALT
At that time Joss had longish hair that kind of came across his forehead. As years went by and the hair began to disappear, I used to tease him mercilessly. Sometimes I’d come in and I’d go, “God I have all this hair.” I thought he was sweet, very smart, and my first impression was you know this is a really smart guy who has his own style, his own language, and he’s come up with this great concept. In the horror movie where the blonde goes into the dark alley and kicks the shit out of this person who attacks her, the reverse of what all of the horror movies have been based on.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Oh, gosh, it was like, who’s this guy in charge? We shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch, he wears layers, he picks his buttons, he’s kind of sheepish, funny, awkward. It was, like, he’s in charge? Never had such a young boss! But wicked smart, and very educated, and he studied in England, and was a Shakespeare authority. He’s changed so much even now; now when I see him he’s a man.
We were all just kids. I had all this respect for him, and definitely aimed to please and do my best, and wanted his approval, of course. And then Gail [Berman], I wanted to be next to her; if she was on set, I wanted to be anywhere she was. I wanted to hear what she had to say, because I was able to identify with the woman in power in her. She is the embodiment of female power; I felt that she made it happen—if it wasn’t for her, there would be no Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wouldn’t have gone to TV.
JOSS WHEDON
People always say comedy and horror are different, but they’re actually quite similar to me. Because a lot of great comedy comes from a character’s lack of control; the unexpected, not knowing what’s coming from out of the frame. Not just slapstick. Look at Groundhog Day, which is a movie that I adore. The guy is not in control of his environment and is just completely confused by what’s going on. And a horror movie is sort of the same thing. It’s also, “What the hell is going on?” Only in that case you’ve got a guy with a really big axe or it’s a slimy monster. A horror movie is very much about, “I don’t understand the space I’m in and I don’t have control of the situation.” An action movie is, “I have control of the situation and I understand the space that I’m in.” Cameron is a great action director. The thing about his action is that he tells you exactly what the space is, what the problem is, where the people are, what you need to do, what’s going to happen, and then he uses that space. So you know exactly where everybody is. What’s exciting is seeing a person in control of the space that they’re in. That, for me, is textbook great action filmmaking. Horror is the opposite.
The hardest thing about the Buffy series is you had to put a heroic character and her fri
ends into peril, and at some point she has to take control and become an action hero, so we played both things in the show. One of the things we were always saying is, “We need a space that’s small and dark so it will be scary, and big and bright enough for her to kick ass in and us to get that epic sense that she’s a hero.”
HARRY GROENER
(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)
I like all the Anne Rice books. I thought her interpretation of what a vampire is supposed to be was much more interesting than Bela Lugosi. As soon as you have a vampire that can have sex and all that, and the idea of everything is human. It’s just transitioned out of you. It’s all about love and power and you get stronger and stronger and just live all these years gathering information and understanding for almost a thousand years. That’s fascinating to me. The idea that they’ve been around and have seen how the world has changed is why I loved the Anne Rice books. Joss took that and mixed it with all the high school stuff. Am I pretty? Does everyone like me? Do they hate me? Do I have a boyfriend?
JOSS WHEDON
Buffy was the most manic-depressive show on television. It ping-ponged from, “Oh, it’s light ’n’ fluffy” to “It’s Medea.” The show’s appeal early on was that it spoke so plainly to the high school experience, which is something you just don’t really ever get over. Everything’s bigger than life. In high school, my internal life was so huge and so dark and strange and overblown and dramatic that this show seemed kind of realistic in comparison. What’s funny about the show is that we never knew from scene to scene which way it was going to go. A scene that started out very dramatic could end up quite funny, or something truly horrible could happen.