Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

  TIM MINEAR

  If you watch the early episodes of the series, you can see where we thought the show was originally going to go, which was in the direction of an anthology with the client of the week, and the emotional stakes would be with the guest character. Sort of like The Fugitive. We decided that the emotional action is with our people. You can have an interesting plot and an interesting client, but it’s difficult to create sympathy for someone you’re introducing for one episode. Season one’s “Eternity” is a good example. Originally this actress had a problem and it was dealt with from her point of view. But if you look at how the episode ended up, it’s really about our core people, and by the end of the episode the client’s gone. So the way the story originally broke is that it was about this actress and the entire second half of the story was still about this actress. Joss came in one day and said, “You know what? This is wrong. What needs to happen is Angel needs to go bad.” Suddenly that element was added and now that’s what that episode was absolutely about.

  You can see, in that episode, Joss and David and me and everybody else saying, “Let’s stop doing these closed-ended detective stories and start making it about Angel.” I remember Joss saying, after watching the cut of the episode, “We have to start making it about Angel and his friends, in the way that Buffy is about Buffy.” Whenever they would break an episode of Buffy, if it would start to become too much about the machinations of a plot, Joss would always come back to the question, “What’s the Buffy of it? What is the story we’re telling? What is that saying about her? What is it doing to either further her character, or how is this a roadblock to her character? What does she learn about herself? Why does this story need to be told about this character?” Often, whole stories would be thrown out, and we’d start them from scratch, because we didn’t have the Angel of it.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  When we started the show, we thought, “Well, this will be an anthology show. We’ll solve a case every week.” And then we fell in love with our characters and we actually became more interested in what happens with the people. We wanted to know what’s going on with their lives. So we sort of reverted to a little bit more of a saga, I think.

  TIM MINEAR

  Once we used that as a guiding principle, we could always come back to what was important. We took that into Firefly, too. People loved the few episodes that we made of that show. Part of it was because Joss was absolutely fanatical about saying, “Every minute of air time has to do something to make the audience love these people.” It can’t just be about some wacky hijinks or some wacky story. Every moment that we have is precious in order to have the audience connect with these characters. That’s a lesson we learned on Buffy. It’s a lesson that we actually knew from Buffy that we learned on Angel by spinning our wheels for the first nine episodes of season one. Then when you get into season two, things become much more about the mythology, much more about story arcs and character arcs. The danger with that, of course, is that when it starts to become just that, then the snake starts eating its own tail. In a way, it starts to become about nothing because it all becomes about Phlebotinum and ancient scrolls, and ex machina devices. It’s easy to get lost in that stuff, too. For the most part, I think we avoided that.

  JOSE MOLINA

  Joss from the get-go knew that in order for a show to work, it lived and died with the characters. If you can’t tell a story that emotionally involves and engages the characters, you’re not going to engage the audience. He knew that the way to do that was to have a soap opera backdrop to all the weekly shenanigans. You could have your monsters of the week, but your monster of the week only really served to enlighten what was going on with the characters in the soap opera. The monster of the week with the serialized story became the norm, and it still kind of is twenty years later.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  If you’re a deep fan, you’re going to get more layers of the thing with serialization, and that’s really what we did on Buffy and Angel, and I’ve tried to do on my other shows. Particularly Grimm. Some people wouldn’t remember that guy was in year three or whatever, but for us it makes it seem more real.

  TIM MINEAR

  The living nature of the show is not always conscious, but it’s what happens when you get a certain amount of hours of the show under your belt. The things starts developing a life of its own.

  And that life was developed even further, thanks to the use of extensive flashbacks, which served to illuminate Angel’s backstory, particularly when people from his past have survived into the present and reenter his life. It was something that the network wanted jettisoned, but the writers continued to embrace far more than Buffy ever did.

  TIM MINEAR

  I definitely loved the idea of going into his past. At the time the Internet board said that we were ripping off Forever Knight, which I think is funny, because they’re both vampire detective shows. So you’re going to go certain places with a guy who has a couple of hundred years under his belt and who has a violent past and is trying to redeem himself. Obviously, there are similarities. But if you looked at our flashbacks over the course of season one, they were sort of a piece. In “Prodigal” the flashbacks took place before he was turned into a vampire and up until that moment. And then in “Five by Five” it was after he got his soul back. Actually, right before and right after he got his soul back. So we were telling the progression in the flashbacks, but in separate episodes, and I thought that was interesting.

  In the first season we did the episode “Hero,” and I wanted to do an origin of Angel. I had a big hard-on for that. When I pitched it to Joss, I said, “It’s Angel clawing his way out of his grave and Darla standing there.” And he just said, “It’s so important.” To me, my favorite scene in that episode is when he comes back, confronts his father, and then kills him. And also, if you play close attention to the episode, you find out how Angel got his name. His father says, “You can’t come in here. A demon has to be invited in,” and Angel glances over to the door and says, “I was invited,” and you see his little sister, dead. He looks at his father and says, “She thought I was an angel returned to her.”

  IAN WOOLF

  Flashbacks were expensive and there was the money crunch of it all on a first season show. It was Fox producing it for the WB, so it had to be done on budget. There was a constant pressure of being able to come in on budget every episode. Kelly Manners was the element producer, so he kept an iron fist on that. There was a little bit of that tension about money, but I think we all had a great time that first season. We all enjoyed working with Joss, the cast was great, and the flashbacks did add a lot to the show.

  STUART BLATT

  The flashbacks were great. We did 1930s Chicago on the Universal back lot. We did Transylvania. We shot European streets at Universal, which became a go-to for us. We did Rome there—we took all the cobblestone streets and covered them with dirt. We had horses and carriages, and old fire engine carriages pulled by horses. One of the most fun things was building one wall of a giant ship. It was a flashback of Angel coming to Ellis Island in 1908 and on one stage we built an enormous wall of the ship, with a gangplank and hundreds of extras coming off in period costumes. We had horse-drawn carriages on the stage, and it really was kind of a spectacular vision.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  We’d always intended flashbacks to learn a lot about Angel’s past, but some of those were our more exciting shows. The guy’s been alive for a long time—there’s lots to reference about him, lots to learn about him. They were really fun to do and the exciting thing was figuring out how they reflect on the modern-day story. Obviously, the flashbacks in the Faith episode were about what happened to him the day after he got his soul back. This is sort of in the place that Faith is about to be in; she’s sort of got the chance to have a soul. So his journey is interesting while at the same time it reflects directly on what’s happening to her in her story.

  TIM MINEAR

  Here’s h
ow they worked for us: the flashbacks throughout season one were there to tell us more about Angel, but at the end of the day we’ve told you who Darla was. When she appears in that box in the season finale, we understand what it means. And that in turn gave us some fertile ground for interesting stories in year two.

  IAN WOOLF

  As an assistant director, you’ve got to be a chameleon, because every episode that you’re out there on the floor AD-ing, you have a different director with you. Those directors roll in and roll out. It’s always a challenge as the first AD to sort of mold yourself to whomever you’ve got to be working for that particular episode. Some of the directors were very experienced and make your life easy, while others were neophytes and look like deer in the headlights when they showed up on the set. It was a constantly evolving situation as the first AD on that kind of show. Lots of elements to deal with. A lot of elements to schedule—all those fight sequences and the wire work that we would do, and the vampire makeup. It was a giant jigsaw puzzle every eight days that you had to deal with. That’s what I spent my whole life doing. Now I’m a producer, so I still have to do it, but on a larger scale.

  Not helping the situation was the fact that the show’s exterior filming mostly shot at night, which wasn’t always easy. Added to this is that there were plenty of instances throughout the series when the vampire Angel is in uncomfortably close proximity to shafts of sunlight—for instance, in the police station.

  TIM MINEAR

  Believe me, our backs were all up about the sun thing. It made Joss crazy and [was] something we tried to get a handle on, especially when Angel was in the police station. We never wrote that he should be in the light; it just turned out that way. The truth is, the schedule was punishing; they had to light it very quickly, and we had to shoot an episode in eight days. We actually went back and reshot stuff that was particularly egregious.

  At the end of “Prodigal,” for instance, when Angel is watching Kate at her father’s grave, the first version of that he was clearly outside in the sunlight. We went back and reshot it very close and very dark, and left it more ambiguous. There’s actually a scene in that episode between Kate and Angel where she says, “It’s the middle of the day, how did you get here?” and he explains, “Well, I came up through the sewer.” She remembers she was dragged down there in a previous episode.

  IAN WOOLF

  It was a really tough show, because, obviously, vampires don’t come out during the day, so we would spend a lot of time shooting the grungy alleys of downtown Los Angeles at night. Typically, your Monday would start out with a 7 A.M. call, and by the time you got around to Friday, you were in for a 5:00 or 6:00 P.M. call, working all night long, and then the sun would be coming up Saturday morning when you’d wrap. It was a grueling process for the crew and cast. I know that there was, at one point, an episode where there was the Ring of Amara, which Angel could wear and he could come out in the sun. At the end of the episode it got destroyed. For a couple of months after that, there was a chant from the crew about bringing back the Ring of Amara.

  DAVID BOREANAZ

  Oh, the ring. I was able to walk out in the sun with the ring. Every crew member was pissed, because I had the ring and that meant they had to work until four or five in the morning.

  That episode, “In the Dark,” has James Marsters guest-starring as Spike, who battles Angel over the ring that renders vampires invulnerable. At episode’s end, Angel has the ring, experiences a day in the sun, and then destroys it, a move that many compared to the end of Titanic, when the elderly version of the Rose character (played by Gloria Stuart) throws a priceless diamond into the sea. Humorously, the episode also began with Spike on a rooftop, narrating a moment between Angel and a woman he’s just rescued.

  JAMES MARSTERS

  (actor, Spike)

  Working on Angel for that episode felt very much like working on Buffy. My biggest memory of that, however, was that I was still at that point jealous of David, so I could not stand going on his show and being so much shorter than he was. I remember I put lifts in my boots for the first time that episode. It worked, but I had to hide it; I didn’t tell anybody. I remember doing the stunts with lifts, which is a little harder. It’s like doing it in high heels. When I got on the show for real in the fifth season, I remember thinking, “Oh, that’s just too pathetic, James. You can’t wear lifts the whole time. Just admit it: you’re shorter than David.” By that time I wasn’t jealous. But when you watch that first episode, Spike is unnaturally tall.

  And with Spike’s commentary—that was a very brave piece of writing to just undercut your lead like that. Just merciless. I’m not sure a lot of shows in the beginning would have the balls to do that. If you’re really confident, then you can get away with that and still hold the audience’s interest and still make the lead character inspiring. But you have to have that confidence and you have to be able to back it up.

  MARTI NOXON

  If I was Angel, I might just put the ring away rather than destroy it. You never know when you might need it. But I understood why he did what he did, better than Gloria Stuart in Titanic. I wanted to slap her. Give that diamond to somebody.

  TIM MINEAR

  That’s not the problem I have with the ending of Titanic. My problem with the ending of Titanic is that she throws it in the water as if that means something about Jack [Leonardo DiCaprio]. It’s got nothing to do with Jack. It was the other guy’s diamond, and I have no idea why she’s throwing it in the water. But in this episode, it makes perfect sense for Angel to destroy the ring. Can he be trusted? That is the point of the series. If he has the power to be invincible, what would happen if he spent eternity as Angelus? It’s too dangerous. Was there any other vampire in the history of the Jossverse at that point that has a soul? No, so the person that could possibly wear that ring would be Angel, and Angel knows that he can’t be trusted. Think about Jenny Calendar. In that light, the ending makes perfect sense to me.

  Early on in Angel’s run, there was a dependency on crossover elements from Buffy to help build an audience for the new show. Not only did James Marsters appear in “In the Dark” along with Seth Green (Oz), but Sarah Michelle Gellar came to the show as Buffy Summers in “I Will Remember You.” The first full-fledged crossover, it has Buffy travel to Los Angeles as Angel, splattered with a demon’s blood during a battle with it, suddenly finds himself human. The two lovers come together, believing that they’ve found true happiness with no chance of Angelus returning, but learn that Angel must become what he once was to save the planet. The price for being allowed to do so: no one but Angel will remember the events of the day.

  And then there was the two-part “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary,” which saw Eliza Dushku reprising the role of Faith. In the former, she’s hired by the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart to kill Angel, but by episode’s end, as Faith and Angel battle in an alley, she’s pleading with him to kill her, which he refuses to do. In the latter, Angel has begun the rehabilitation process with Faith, complicated by the arrival of Buffy and a militant group of Watchers intent on capturing Faith. An intriguing moment between Buffy and Angel occurs when, hurt by Angel’s defense of Faith, Buffy comments that she’s found happiness with someone (Riley), for which Angel rebukes her, noting that she has the fortune to have such an opportunity, but he doesn’t.

  TIM MINEAR

  A lot of people have issues with the resetting of the clock thing in “I Will Remember You,” but I personally love it. For me it’s all worth it, because of the scene where Sarah is saying, “I’ll never forget; I’ll never forget; I’ll never forget,” and then, boom, she forgot. Oh, man, it just kills me. And then Angel and Buffy having sex—never a bad thing. The one thing that I would say about the episode is that we discussed the idea that the entire situation was a test by the Powers That Be.

  It was supposed to be sort of the Last Temptation of Angel. In The Last Temptation of Christ, his whole fever dream when he’s on the cross is that he co
mes down off the cross, he gets to live a normal life and grow old, and at the end he chooses to make the sacrifice. That was sort of the idea, and something that got lost there was the idea that they were trying to see if he was worthy. There were no scenes of this shot; I think the idea just kind of fell out of the script naturally, but it was one thing we had discussed during the breaking of the story. But then, as would happen, it became about the emotional aspect of it instead.

  DAVID GREENWALT

  That episode was their last time together, and their “perfect moment,” but I don’t think it would have lasted even if the Powers That Be hadn’t intervened. It would be like getting back with your first wife, you know? It would be a nightmare.

  ELIZA DUSHKU

  (actress, Faith)

  I was kind of this really hard Boston chick. That worked well for Faith and for the creation of that character Joss really zoned into that, and we worked with it. But as the years go on, and you start recovering and repairing from high school, I became less defensive, less hard. My friends and I were saying to each other, “OK, we don’t have to be such haters. We don’t have to be so terrified. We can start evolving.” I don’t want to say that I’ve softened up, but I’ve definitely lost some of that anger and fear and defensive nature that I had when I was seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old.

  When I returned as Faith, I said to Joss, “When I get to Angel, do I get, like, really soft?” He said, “I wouldn’t say soft, but you’ve definitely changed. But the ways you’ve changed—art definitely imitates life.” It’s not so hard to draw these parallels between the characters and the real life people when we’re always growing and changing. Even Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character evolved in so many different ways.