Slayers and Vampires
Page 27
JOSS WHEDON
There is a heightened state, particularly in a song in a musical, where if the musical is being done right, this is the moment where it all comes out; this is where everything is building to, and you have this perfect state where not only is somebody articulating who they are and what they need, but it rhymes. Like, it is absolutely this pristine, very structured thing. Everything I do is about that structure and about that moment of somebody going, this is the best version of me that I can explain. You’re always trying to hit that feeling, whether it’s sad, happy, or scary, whatever that feeling you get when a musical number is in that moment where you’re trying to hit those peaks all the time in conversation.
MARTI NOXON
What can you say about old Genius Head? There was a tremendous amount of work and love put into that episode. Joss is a huge musical fan. He spent the majority of the summer writing the music and figuring out exactly how it was going to work. It took a lot more time and a lot more production value than a usual episode but [was] well worth it. It was almost like a vacation for everybody. Joss obviously conceived it and was the mastermind behind all of it creatively, but all of us got into the act one way or the other. Some of us quite literally.
JAMES MARSTERS
I was comfortable singing publicly; I was already doing it in clubs around Los Angeles. Tony [Head] had already come out with an album, so we were comfortable singing, but a lot of the other cast members rightly said to Joss, “You hired me to be a one-camera comedic-dramatic actor. That’s my wheelhouse and we’re succeeding here, and now you’re asking me to do something that I’m not trained for and you’re going to ask the audience to be entertained by that? Like, please, no!” I think one actor actually went to Joss and begged to juggle live chainsaws rather than sing, because that would be probably safer for their career than singing.
DAVID FURY
Everybody was excited about the idea, especially the actors who sang. The ones who couldn’t Joss assured them they weren’t going to look bad: “We’re going to record these things and you’re going to do fine.” I think Aly [Hannigan] and Michelle were probably the most nervous. Sarah, as uneasy as she was initially, rose to the occasion beautifully. She loved dancing, she loved learning the choreography, and she thought she couldn’t sing, but I think ultimately what she was able to do was great. There was some anxiety about it. Nobody said I’m not doing it; no one had a hissy fit about it. It was just definitely out of some people’s comfort zones. Aly and Michelle were nervous but were given limited things to sing. Joss really protected them. He said, “I’m not going to make you sing huge songs. Just sing a line here, sing a line there.” They got very excited once we were doing it. It was all very exiting. There was a lot of energy and buzz around the whole experience.
MARTI NOXON
Everybody felt really energized by it, because they got to do different things and the actors were all really excited. People were going to music lessons, rehearsals, and it was like putting on a show in the barn—only this was a really big barn and there was a $2 million budget. We were all awestruck by the end results. It was a culmination of years and years of stuff that Joss had wanted to do. He’s very lucky that he gets to make it happen, and we’re very lucky we get to see the end result. Most musical episodes on television are a little more gimmicky than this and don’t necessarily move the story forward in a huge way. But this was so important in terms of the season.
JAMES MARSTERS
I thought Joss had gone crazy. I thought that he was absolutely jumping the shark. That he was taking a perfectly good show and just flushing it down the toilet. I mean, it’s one thing to watch “Once More, with Feeling” because when you watch it it’s just obviously a success and amazing and the music is fabulous. But if you just get the script and you haven’t done it yet, it’s a big risk.
I think the reason I have such fond memories about “Once More, with Feeling” is that, after a few days of complaining and fear, the cast realized that we were not going to talk Joss out of it and we stopped being so fearful, and we stopped whining, and we got to work. And suddenly people were hiring vocal coaches and dance instructors with their own money. Rehearsing in between scenes—this is the episode before we started filming “Once More, with Feeling.” And we got to work. In the face of certain doom . . . guaranteed failure . . . we decided that we would go down swinging and try our best.
We knew we would fail, but we decided to try our best anyway. I was never more proud of us as a company. And then of course Joss edited the first scene that we shot and showed it to us . . . wheeled out a TV onto the sound stage . . . and we crowded around it, and it was brilliant! It was the Xander-Anya dance scene, and it was fabulous. We suddenly realized this thing could actually work. And then from that moment on, we were just flying high. Until the final scene when Hinton Battle came to town. Hinton played Sweet, the villain of the piece. Hinton is a Tony Award–winning Broadway musical stage actor. That man has chops. The Buffy cast was just standing in the Bronze staring up at Hinton doing his thing up onstage and realizing, “Oh, that’s how you do it . . . we’re screwed. Like, we can’t do that.” But luckily through the magic of editing, it all came together.
DAVID FURY
The story is so sound, which is the great part. It’s one thing to do a musical episode, and a lot of shows have done it, but they do it as a lark. They do it as a goofy thing, but the songs in the Buffy musical and the story are so rich in meaning and emotion. The fact that this is the way Joss wanted to exposit where Buffy had been after she died and the reasons she’s being the way she is. Getting under the skin of all these characters in the form of the musical . . . made it so much of a magnificent accomplishment. It was not just, OK, our characters can sing; they sing some songs, and we go back to some silly plot. It was very emotional. It’s one of those episodes that makes you cry. It makes me cry when I think about it. It was so beautiful and so well done.
DAVID GREENWALT
(executive producer / cocreator, Angel)
Here’s the thing that that’ll really just make you want to quit being a writer. Joss, when I met him, had a keyboard in the office and he did like a few chords. He piddled around on the piano a little bit. He certainly was no musician. The summer before the musical, he went to Cape Cod, where he and [his] then wife Kai had a home in Cape Cod, and Tim and I and some of the writers went back there and Joss spent about six or eight weeks working on these songs. He’s playing us these songs that are just incredible and then everybody had to sing and dance—even the ones that were shy about singing and dancing. He came up with this great episode, this amazing music. I frankly think it’s better than most stuff that’s been on Broadway.
JAMES MARSTERS
It was brilliant. It was absolutely wonderful. Everybody was just flying and smiles all over. There is something about music that just taps into emotions more directly than words. I often feel like words have to be processed by the intellect and then accepted or not accepted by the heart. But music bypasses the intellect completely and goes right into the heart. We’d be acting the scene and the time would come for the song. Joss would hit playback, and the big speakers would roar up and this beautiful music would come out and you’d lip-synch, but you’d feel like you were singing, and we were able to go to emotional places that you couldn’t just doing dialogue. When a musical is designed, there is a point where the characters can’t talk about it anymore. In order to express what they really want to express, they have to sing about it, so it jumps up a level. Then Joss, of course, puts that on its head, and he had people singing things they really should shut up about.
DAVID GREENWALT
I used to go when he was directing it with my then wife and we’d just watch it. It would be Friday night till midnight or two, and it was so beautiful to watch the making of that episode. And then his assistant forgot to enter it in the Emmy nominations, which is a pity because it certainly would’ve won something.
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p; DAVID FURY
One thing I knew after I heard it was I wanted very much to film the making of it. I want to be behind the scenes, because I thought this is significant and really special, which Joss allowed me to do. By doing that, I wasn’t around as much as I probably should have been since Marti needed help, but I got caught up in the musical and wound up going to all the recordings and filming everyone as they were doing all their voice tracks and doing the shooting. It’s on the Buffy DVD behind the scenes. It was just me and my little camcorder interviewing everybody, asking them to talk about what the experience was like. It was really neat and great to do. But it put me in a weird place when I came back into the room after all this; I felt I’d been away forever. I feel badly I didn’t help Marti as much as I should have. But she never complained to me or asked me to stop doing it. She held down the fort and got things done just perfectly without me.
JOSS WHEDON
It was an actual musical where people not only break into song, but they break into songs that I write that are about the story. It’s not one of those, “We do a scene, then we do a Motown hit that vaguely fits the scene.” It’s actually song-driven storytelling that was very connected to the season, because it deals with emotion. I actually think of it as a sequel to “Hush,” because singing is like being quiet. You say the things you wouldn’t otherwise say. So a lot of the emotions were building over the first few episodes of the season, and then they burst out, literally, in song.
MARTI NOXON
We wanted to do something good and spooky. It was about following the repercussions of what they’d done. There had to be continuing repercussions from what had happened. Obviously, that one has the great scene at the end with the revelation that she had been in a nice place. It was a continuation of the same idea, that you don’t get to come back from the dead without some heavy tariffs.
DAVID GREENWALT
I don’t know any other executive producer who would be working that hard in year six. Joss would find something that would challenge him, that would actually frighten him a little. “Can I do an episode with no music? Can I do an episode with no dialogue? Can I do an honest-to-God musical and write all the songs?” Him challenging himself like that fired us all up on all of the shows. There was no phoning it in allowed around there; no resting on your laurels. Then our excitement kind of fed him and it was a nice a little circle. If people were reading Shakespeare at his house on Sundays, he got me writing songs again, which I hadn’t done in twenty years. It was all like a little renaissance. A very exciting place to be.
RAYMOND STELLA
(director of photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
It was just the show with a little more of a flair. If I was outside, I would make it a little brighter, make it feel a little more dreamy. Adam Shankman was the choreographer, because there’s a lot of singing and dancing. Shankman was the director on the Mystery Girl thing that I did in San Diego. Gay as a three-dollar bill. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
KEVIN LEVY
The musical episode was a big deal for us. We did have a party for the musical episode. I remember we screened it on the Paramount lot in that big theater that they have, and we invited a lot of the cast. That was the first time any of us had seen the final cut of it. It was great. It’s just amazing to see that years later people still do all those sing-alongs.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
His musical talent is vast. You can see his love of music and musical theater just shining through in that and Dr. Horrible. I long for another Joss Whedon musical, because I think he’s so damn good at it.
DAVID GREENWALT
We all went and watched it. It was just amazing. Joss went from knowing five chords when we met to writing that episode in five or six years. That’s a talent that’s not visited on everybody. You combine that with the hard work ethic and you can’t go wrong.
JAMES MARSTERS
By the time we got to “Tabula Rasa,” which was the one after the musical, we were, like “Oh, this sucks. There’s no music! It’s boring.” And in fact, “Tabula Rasa” was one of the most delightful, where we all lost our identities and it was complete farce.
MARTI NOXON
It was Joss’s notion that they all lose their memory. I thought that was just brilliant, because that way we can have a fun, lighthearted episode and then in the end, you know, reality comes crashing back. And it’s not good. So, that was really the goal there; to do something we knew there were going to be repercussions, but we also knew wasn’t going to be so serious and sad. And we found a way with Big Genius Head’s help. I was really into that one. You know, we got to really poke fun at ourselves. It was farcical and turned out really well.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I love humor. One of the biggest things I loved [about] working on Buffy was just what Joss had set up. That you could have a deeply serious scene and somebody can say something funny, like in real life. It was never one or the other. The show does have so much great, great funny dialogue. I was surrounded by incredibly funny writers. David Fury, Jane Espenson’s hysterical, Doug Petrie—just everybody was so much fun. In that sixth season, Drew Greenberg joined us, who was also just absolutely delightful.
MARTI NOXON
I would have done things differently if I had to do things again. But at the same time, overall I felt like it still was compelling. It may have made you mad or nervous or frustrated, but it was always interesting. We also had some really lovely episodes in there. I was just invested in the whole Spike-Buffy thing and the whole Willow thing. Those story lines really worked for me. I don’t know how we could have done another, “Here comes the Big Bad.” We’d done it so many times and very successfully, but I just feel like you had to shake it up and that was probably what was going on. Joss was just interested in trying some new stuff and we were all for it. Season seven might not have been as successful if we hadn’t had season six. We needed to do some downbeats in order to get back to doing the show with the same enthusiasm.
LEAVING SUNNYDALE
“What are we going to do now?”
After five years on the WB and two more on UPN, it was clear to the Buffy brain trust that the show had run its course. Most of all, its star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, was ready to move on. Despite rumors that the series might continue with Faith or one of the other slayers created in the finale, season seven would bring Buffy full circle and end the series with a suitably epic conclusion. While Angel would continue for another year on the WB and dark Horse would extend the series in comic books ad infinitum, this would be the last year Sarah Michelle Gellar would wield Mr. Pointy, and rumors of a feature film resurrection, which Gellar quickly dismissed, have sadly never materialized.
JOSS WHEDON
(creator / executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
The fact is most of the cast not only knew it was the last year but were very glad of it. However, some of the crew did not know, which was totally my bonehead mistake. The actors did know and they kind of sucked up some energy from the crew. They just felt an official announcement should have been made before it was [on] the cover of a magazine, and they’re not wrong. I just was, like, “We’ve known this from the beginning of the year.” It was just about paying respect.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer / show runner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I definitely feel like we left before we jumped the shark. It really felt right and was the right time. People were glad to be out of the dark pit of despair, so that’s good. Everybody was very positive about the final year, so it felt like a good time to say goodbye. I actually feel we could have gone on. There were fresh ideas. I do think that it would have been harder and harder to make it feel like we weren’t treading over the same territory, but do feel like we could have gone on. I don’t know if it would have been the same people leading the troops, because, speaking for myself, I was ready to do other things.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
Season seven was a bitch to film. They were trying to convince Sarah to come back for an eighth season, and Sarah would have none of it. We were known as “Buffy the Weekend Slayer” around Hollywood. Most shows film twelve hours a day and not a minute longer than twelve hours, because after twelve hours you have to pay the crew double. Twelve hours was a minimum day on Buffy. It was fourteen, sixteen, eighteen normally. We went up to twenty quite often. So, we would start at 4:30 in the morning on Monday and we would end when the sun rose Saturday morning. There were a lot of people in Los Angeles that would not work on Buffy, because they knew the long hours. And nobody got toasted more than Sarah Michelle Gellar; she was in almost every scene. When you do that to an actor for seven years straight, there’s a good chance that they’re going to want to marry Freddie Prinze Jr. and make cookies after it’s over. No amount of money was going to change that. She was the consummate professional. She was on time all the time, had her lines down without fail, never missed a beat. That woman is a machine; she’s amazing, and she carried that show for seven years.
JOSS WHEDON
The seventh season was a return to girl power stuff, a return to high school, a return to the mission statement of the show. A little less questioning of the meaning and possible evil of her own power and all of their power, and more in their reveling in the usefulness of it. I wanted to see more of a proactive Buffy. She was very reactive season six, though I disagree with people who say it sucked. Our mission statement season six was let’s make things difficult for them, and seventh season it was let’s show them in charge. The grown-up world sort of hit them in the face [in season six], and now let’s see what happens when they hit back.