Slayers and Vampires
Page 9
GEORGE SNYDER
Angel was not designed as an ongoing character. What would you do with Buffy and Angel? If we froze them in time, if we had stayed in high school forever, maybe we could have kept it going. Anybody else would have been tempted to stay in high school and stay with that unrequited love. What is more boring than that? It’s Sam and Diane from Cheers. No, you don’t let them go to bed, and we all know that when Sam finally did get into bed with Diane, it was the end of an era. So your gut reaction is, “Let’s just keep him a dark, mysterious, brooding guy who helps out Buffy.” Joss said, “No, at some point you’ve got to go to the next step. Up the tension and go for the dark.” What’s the last thing you have happen? A slayer in love with a vampire! So you do it. But having done it, oh my God, now he’s bad.
Of course the mail came in: “Turn him back, turn him back.” Even the network came in with, “He gets cured next week, right?” Joss is, like, “Oh no, not next week. First of all, he’s never going to be cured. Second of all, he’s not going to turn back and he has to go to Hell.” They said, “He’s a very popular character and we’re a little concerned.” But, again, it was the narrative driving the show. Then, of course, we did turn him back and he was redeemed. Then the question was, “Now what?” Of course that led to him being spun off into his own show.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
David’s a good friend of mine but an odd duck. As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you a story about his show, Bones. My daughter went to work on it on season two, and she said the assistant directors don’t even look at David Boreanaz when you go to set. I said, “Well good, when you get called to set, I want you to run up to David and jump in his arms and when the AD’s freak out, then you better whisper real quick you’re my daughter.” She said the assistant directors went crazy, but David loved it. He’s a good guy. As with most actors as they got more and more famous, some of them change drastically. David’s a good guy. He has a big heart. David did get his nose up in the air toward the end, but he was still a great guy. Let me put it this way: I got fired by Don Johnson. There were no Don Johnsons on set.
RAYMOND STELLA
(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I remember he was always kind of an asshole. I worked with him on Angel, too. He was kind of stuck up a little. Married a Playboy model and he liked to play golf.
DAVID GREENWALT
I thought the way David handled his position on Buffy and his relationship with Sarah was really great and terrific and also very smart. He always treated her like she was the star of the show and then he got his own show and, of course, did a lot of crossover stuff. I never saw him misbehave in anyway on any of my shows with him.
The producers couldn’t have hoped for better casting when Sarah Michelle Gellar entered the process as Buffy. Already an acting veteran, having appeared in many television commercials, in 1980 Gellar moved over to the daytime soap opera Guiding Light, and guest-starred on William Tell; Love, Sidney; and Spenser: For Hire. In 1989 she cohosted the syndicated teen show Girl Talk before costarring in the teen soap opera Swan’s Crossing. A fairly big break came in the form of the TV movie A Woman Named Jackie, in which she played the young Jackie Bouvier. Small roles in several films were next, followed by Neil Simon’s Broadway play Jake’s Women. This was followed by a two-year stint on the soap opera All My Children, for which she was awarded an Emmy. As her tenure on the soap was coming to an end, Gellar went to the Buffy office to audition for the part of Cordelia and walked out with the lead.
JOSS WHEDON
Sarah Michelle Gellar embodies Buffy extraordinarily, and she brings an intelligence and depth to the character that I certainly couldn’t write. She is so incredibly sympathetic—she’s somebody that you just love to watch—but she’s also this extremely intelligent actress who thinks her way through everything. So she makes Buffy an emotionally very-connected character, which is huge. It’s never, “Oh, look at her, she’s a dork,” even though she’s kind of an eccentric. It’s never, “Oh, laugh at her and her silly ways.” You’re completely sucked into her story, because Sarah is so gifted.
GEORGE SNYDER
We had seen a lot of actresses for the role of Buffy. She read for Cordelia, but then they had her read for Buffy and knew she was right. The other actresses couldn’t get the balance. Somebody said to me, “It’s very interesting that for a girl as beautiful as Sarah is, she nevertheless has been able to sell the idea of being an outcast.” That’s no small feat. There’s a vulnerability there. Your initial reaction is, “Yeah, right, she’s not the most popular girl in school?” Yet when you watched, you got it. She sold it.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
My manager spoke to the WB and they mentioned they had this Buffy show. He thought it would be a great opportunity to use my tae kwon do and do comedy and drama. I probably had eleven auditions and four tests. It was the most awful experience of my life, but I was so driven. I had read the script and heard about Joss Whedon and how wonderful he was. I went to the audition the week he was nominated for his Toy Story screenplay. I thought, “I’m going to have this role.” He tells me I nailed it, but I still went through eleven auditions.
JOSS WHEDON
There was no second place. We read tons of people and several were staggeringly untalented. Buffy is a tough part. It is a character actress in the part of a leading lady. This girl had to look the part of the blond bimbo who dies in reel two, and yet she’s not that. Buffy is a very loopy, very funny, very strange person—kind of eccentric. Sarah has all those qualities and you don’t find them in a beautiful girl very often.
She gave us a reading that was letter perfect and then said, “By the way, it doesn’t say this on my resume, but I did take tae kwon do for four years and I’m a brown belt. Is that good?”
Finding Buffy was the biggest challenge, and I think if we hadn’t found Sarah, the series might not have happened or lasted. What Sarah brought to the part was her intelligence. At the same time, she had the hormonal idiosyncratic goofiness that made Buffy not just the Terminator. She approached the vampires with total irreverence, which drove them crazy. I called her Jimmy Stewart, because she suffered so well.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
I picked up tae kwon do when I was about nine or ten. It just seemed like something interesting to do at the time. I thought it would be fun, kick around a few people, get a couple of aggressions out. I studied for about four years and had my brown belt when I stopped training. So when Buffy came up, it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to use that. We shot the fight scenes very carefully. We usually tagged the other actor, which is sort of just a light kick. We used stunt doubles when necessary if it was really dangerous. Martial arts is a form of meditation—it’s an art form—and what I studied was a defensive form, not an offensive form.
JOSS WHEDON
My attitude is the show wasn’t so good that it’s worth anybody getting hurt for it. Sarah was always covered with bruises and I was saying, “Sarah, don’t do this stuff. We’ll get the close-up of you saying the funny thing after.” “No, no, I can do it,” she said, and then she gets this giant black-and-blue mark on her arm. “Sarah, stop, please!”
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
When I was growing up I watched Mallory worry about her dates and her boyfriends on Family Ties. I watched Blair on The Facts of Life. There were no strong female characters. I’m sorry, Tootie was not a role model. But with Buffy, we were showing real situations. Buffy was not the prettiest girl in her school; she was not the smartest. She made mistakes; she made good decisions and bad decisions. She was dealing with real situations that we can put on a fantasy level.
As an actor, you can always bring parts of yourself to the characters, but hopefully it’s only a small portion of it, and the rest is a new character that you developed. My junior high school was like Buffy’s. I was kind of a
nerd. I didn’t have many friends and I was an outcast. But I think Buffy was an amazing role model, because the one thing that I was able to do at my high school was to be an individual. The problem with most high schools is they don’t stress individuality. Buffy showed girls it’s OK to be different.
GEORGE SNYDER
I think Buffy was different from other high school–based shows in that it allowed its characters to move through their grades naturally. They all got to grow up. A decision Joss made early on was he didn’t want forty-year-olds in high school. So the decision was made that they would be sophomores, juniors, seniors, go to college, etc. Actually we weren’t sure what she was going to do, but we knew that she was going to graduate from high school in three years. This attitude allowed us to change the looks and to let them evolve as actors and in their characters.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
It’s always interesting when you go from being a child actor to an adult actor. All My Children was really that transition for me. Buffy was a really wonderful opportunity for me to play someone a little closer to myself and the situations I’d been in. Minus the vampires.
JOSS WHEDON
We had scenes where we’ve shot her reaction and she makes the entire scene even if she doesn’t have a line. I was the luckiest man in show business.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
Usually, you’re doing one thing on television, you’re funny, it’s action, and there were few shows on television where all of us get to do all of it. We got to be funny, sad, we got to fight. As an actor that’s your dream, to get to do all these amazing things.
HOWARD GORDON
(consulting producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
One of the genius things that Joss did was to not take the Buffy character and go with someone in terms of looks like Charisma Carpenter or Kristy Swanson, who played her in the movie. To not make her an airhead, but someone who’s beautiful and accepted by those girls, but at the same time is essentially a nerd herself. So I think Sarah Michelle Gellar was a great bit of casting, and she made her a more substantial character who fit in among the nerds and would have been welcomed by the popular kids had she chosen to do that. I think that was a genius reinvention of Joss’s original premise.
DAVID GREENWALT
I love Sarah. I directed a bunch of these and directing her was like driving some really high-class Lamborghini automobile. Sarah was very young, but she was very old for her age. I think she was eighteen when that thing started, but she’d been working since she was a kid. Sarah loved to have a director pay attention and give her notes. I swear to God, you could go up to her, it could be a big scene, maybe four or five pages, and give her eight or nine notes, and she would do every one of them in the next take. She was just born to do that job.
RAYMOND STELLA
Sarah was brilliant. She hardly needed more than one take. She really knew what she was doing and she was a joy. She would do more than one if the director asked. She started in soaps and commercials where she was the second person and the lead didn’t show up who had all the lines, and they were wondering what to do. Sarah knew all the lines. They weren’t even her lines, but she knew them and read them and they gave her a chance apparently and from there on she got a reputation that she knows what she is doing.
DAVID GREENWALT
She liked to have somebody important like Joss or me watching her performance, and I was sort of, like, “I’m not going to spend all my life on the set doing this.” I do remember one time she said, “Well, are you going to be here?” I said, “No, I’m not.” Then Joss ended up having to soothe her a little bit, but she always delivered.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
(actor, Principal Snyder)
When they cast me and I got the offer for Snyder, I’d already been watching the show, because my friend Kenny was on it playing Principal Flutie. I really liked the show a great deal and I wasn’t watching it for Kenny anymore, I was watching it because I really enjoyed it. But when they called and said, “You’re going to be doing this show,” I wanted to know who I’d be working with and what Sarah Michelle Gellar’s background was. They told me she’s a nineteen-year-old soap opera actress and I, being a theater actor and an older guy, went, “Ooooh, a soap opera actress.” I had a bad attitude about that. When I got to the set on the first day, they had me walking down an aisle in an auditorium and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to deal with these kids. And I’ve got a regular job, why am I doing this?” My attitude was not very good. And that’s Snyder. Snyder grew out of that attitude. They just built on it.
JAMES MARSTERS
If you know your lines and you show up on time, she was like your best friend. The beautiful thing is that no one screwed around, because Sarah doesn’t. Sarah doesn’t pull shit or diva stuff. She didn’t come in late, she’s always prepared, she always has little jokes to keep the set light without messing around. She’s pretty amazing.
ARMIN SHIMERMAN
After about the fourth or fifth episode of Buffy that I had done, I marched myself up to Sarah’s trailer and knocked on the door. She was surprised to see me, because after all she only knew me really as Snyder. We hadn’t really talked much and there was some antagonism between the two characters. I said to Sarah, “I need to apologize to you.” I told her the story about my initial reaction and then I said, “But I’ve come to realize you’re one of the finest actresses I’ve ever worked with.” And it’s true. I’ve rarely worked with actors as gifted, as talented, as amazing as Sarah Michelle Gellar. After that, we became great friends and we were very close off camera.
MARK HANSSON
All the makeup and hair people would do a synchronized hand movement from above their heads to their waists, saying in unison, “She, who must be obeyed,” whenever Sarah’s name would be mentioned. It’s from an old sci-fi movie.
RAYMOND STELLA
I remember before Buffy I was up to take over Gilmore Girls and the leading lady was, like, forty and that’s much harder to light. On Buffy, I had to make Sarah look better than everyone else and keep her on your good side. I remember she got so pissed off at me one time and I didn’t even think about it. The director never came back. He’s got Sarah somewhere and he goes, “I need a real wide lenses right up here when she comes up out of this trash bin at the Double Meat Palace,” or something, and she’s going, “This camera is too close and it’s too wide.” She got me in a corner and laid it out. And I’m going, “I’m sorry I wasn’t thinking. I won’t let him do it.” She was pissed, and so he never came back. I didn’t think about it. But, she’d get so tired. You just go with it.
JOSS WHEDON
I’ve worked with my share of divas. But I also have enormous respect for divas. They’re usually people who do something extraordinary and know it and show up and do it. And you have to deal with a lot of other stuff but they usually come in and say, “You’re going to have to deal with a lot of other stuff. I’m a diva. So here we go.” And then you get this beautiful work and you’re like “OK, good, and thanks for the heads-up.” Really toxic people I avoid. I cast for sanity. That’s a very important thing to me. But toxic people are different than divas. Divas are complicated but they know that there’s a simplicity to what they’re going to give you that you need and want. Truly toxic people are just about trying to tear something down. Whether it’s somebody else in the thing, whether it’s the story—they’re about power. Those people have no business in my life as far as I’m concerned in the industry.
HARRY GROENER
(actor, Mayor Richard Wilkins)
Sarah’s been doing it since she was an embryo. She is such a pro. There was never any crap on the set. They all seemed to like each other and enjoyed working together. That’s a wonderful environment to be part of and you want that.
Gellar’s first efforts as Buffy were showcased in the original half-hour presentation reel for the series—directed and written by Whedon—that sold the series.
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p; ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
That presentation was pretty ropey. I don’t think anyone would disagree with the notion that it left a lot to be desired. There were elements in that script that were strong, though. There was one really cool moment with me and Buffy in the library. We had a library set that was two tiers. There was a mezzanine balcony with a spiral staircase coming down from it. In the middle of a conversation Buffy is on top and I’m down below. While she’s talking, she does a handstand on the banister rail and flips twice and lands on her feet. At that time we had two stunt doubles, one to do acrobatics and one to do fight scenes. The acrobat was just astonishing; she did this great flip.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
That was Joss’s first directing experience and he didn’t have a very good support team behind him. We didn’t know what we were doing with the show. It was like all these ideas in your head and they’re not working out right on paper. We had a whole summer to fix it by the time we did the real pilot, and I think we did a pretty good job. What made everything work is we needed to find Alyson Hannigan. She was the best and what allowed Nicholas Brendan and myself to become a threesome. Once she came aboard, everything clicked.
ANTHONY STEWART HEAD
Joss did not have a very sympathetic crew for the presentation. Generally you hope when you pull a crew together and it’s your directorial debut, there will be some give and take and some leeway. But they were very odd. I’m being very general here, because some people were great and some people were off, but they weren’t very generous, which was all rather surprising, really. By the time we got the unit together for the series, it was a very different matter.