Joss Whedon has had a long and storied history in Hollywood as a screenwriter, on television as the writer-creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, and back in Hollywood as the writer-director of Serenity. As an enthusiastic, unabashed fan of all things smart and geeky, it was inevitable that he'd find his way into comics, where (among other things) he's written the far-future Buffy spin-off Fray, a well-received run on Astonishing X-Men, and the Firefly miniseries Serenity: Those Left Behind. Currently, he's wrapping up his X-Men run, taking over writing duties for Brian K. Vaughan on Runaways, and scripting future issues of Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight, the official comics continuation of his beloved first show.
Recently, Whedon took the spotlight at the San Diego ComicCon, where he announced that he's in negotiations to bring the Buffy spin-off Ripper to the BBC, showcased his online Dark Horse comic Sugarshock, and took five charity auction-winners to dinner, raising more than $60,000 for the worldwide women's-rights organization Equality Now. Just before heading to San Diego, Whedon spoke with The A.V. Club about his current and upcoming comics projects, his film project Goners, the status of Serenity, why spoilers are ruining our culture, and his much-publicized work on—and break from—the Wonder Woman film project.
The A.V. Club: Do you intend for Buffy Season Eight to be completely open-ended, or do you have a specific arc in mind?
Joss Whedon: It has a specific arc and an ending. It will be open-ended in the sense that there could be a Buffy: Season Nine.
AVC: In comics, or on television?
JW: In comics. There's not going to be a Buffy season nine on television. I don't think Sarah [Michelle Gellar] has the slightest interest in doing that, and quite frankly, I don't think it's a good idea for me, either. I do have to prove at some point that I can do other things.
AVC: Are there things you can do with the comic that you couldn't have done with the show, and vice-versa?
JW: Yeah, absolutely. The thing with the comics is that you have license to go down every alley your brain can think of. Willow's been on a mystical walkabout, you can actually show that. Instead of, "Well, she can talk about it in the magic shop for seven pages, because that's the money we got." You can pursue every thread, emotionally and visually, in a way that you just can't on TV. But on TV, you're on TV. There's actors, the people who created the characters with you, that everybody loves. Oh, and also, the paychecks don't make your family laugh.
The hard part about writing comics is creating juice. Let's say I'm trying to create a love interest for Buffy. People are like, "It's Angel!" "It's Spike!" Some people are saying it's Riley, possibly. Not many. I think that's above Andrew, actually, in the poll. But to create somebody in the comic who has anything like the juice of somebody who was on the show, that's an insane challenge. It's going to be really tough. That goes for the Big Bad, as well. A villain that people care about, who they've only seen as a drawing, is, again, a challenge.
AVC: So is the temptation to stick to established characters?
JW: Well, as much as it serves you. We don't want to just do, "Oh my God, it's this guy! Oh my God, it's this guy! Hey, it's that guy on the left from 12 years ago, he's in it!" Eventually, you have to let go and move on, and let the comic-book world be the comic-book world. I think after time, people will come to accept some of the characters, if we paint them vividly enough.
AVC: What's the status of the Angel season-six comic-book concept?
JW: Well, we're not calling it season six, because I don't want to people to confuse it with the Buffy comic. But it does take place after the end of the show. Brian Lynch has delivered a basic arc outline, and he's doing all the heavy lifting. We sat down and talked about where everybody was, and what kind of world it was, and what we were planning to do, and what we could never have done, and wanted to do. He's sort of taking it from there. I think the first issue is slated to come out later this year. Late, late, late, late this year.
AVC: Did the show getting cancelled affect the plotline you had in mind?
JW: I never would have killed Wesley if we hadn't been cancelled. [Laughs.] I decided how I wanted to end the season before we were cancelled, and I wanted to end it exactly that way while it was still in question. Which was, we're going out in mid-battle, because if we come back, we have something to come back from. If we don't come back, then this is how I want it.
With Buffy, I needed closure, because she, poor girl, had earned it. Buffy is about growing up. Angel is really about already having grown up, dealing with what you've done, and redemption. Redemption is something you fight for every day, so I wanted him to go out fighting. People kept calling it a cliffhanger. I was like, "Are you mad, sir? Don't you see that that is the final statement?" And then they would say "Shut up."
It didn't affect, with the exception of the untimely death of young Wesley, where we were going with it. But we did have an idea. The miniseries is called Angel: After The Fall. It is much huger in scope, and Brian has brought a lot of new ideas to the table. It is oddly more like what we had planned for season six than Buffy: Season Eight is.
AVC: Why did the TV series ending mandate killing off Wesley?
JW: Because it was awesome. The writers pitched it, with Illyria turning into Fred, and I was like, "Uh, okay, we have to do that, really, now." You squeeze all the juice out that you can. That was one of my favorite moments that we shot. If you're going to go out, go out hard. If you just go, "Well, off to another mystery. Here we are, arm in arm," that ain't an ending.
AVC: Do you regret making that decision, since you're planning to continue the series after all?
JW: Most people in my universe get more work after they're dead. Look at Harmony. If we had suddenly been given a reprieve, there would not have been a single episode without Wesley in it, dead or not. He'd have been given an eleventh-hour stay of execution. That has to do with my love of Wesley, and let's face it, my love of Alexis Denisof, who is, apart from being a dream to work with, staggeringly versatile.
AVC: Did you ever feel that the ending was painting yourself into a corner if you did want to continue the series?
JW: No, had we had a season six, it would have picked up right where season five ended, because I knew what I planned to have happen right after that battle. If nobody ever found out what I had planned, then we were going out with the statement that life is a battle. And love, sidebar, is a battlefield. But had they given us an 11th-hour reprieve, we absolutely would have picked up right there. After The Fall should give you a glimpse into what we were planning to do about that battle. But no, we didn't paint ourselves into a corner, we were right where we wanted to be. Except for the fact that we were cancelled.
AVC: Is your Wonder Woman film adaptation irrevocably dead, or is there any possibility of going back?
JW: I loved what I was doing. I mean, it was really hard. It took me a long time to break the story structurally to my satisfaction. When I did that, it was in an outline, and not in a draft, and they didn't like it. So I never got to write a draft where I got to work out exactly what I wanted to do. In terms of the meaning, the feeling, the look, the emotion, the character, the relationship with Steve Trevor, all of that stuff, I never wavered for a second. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It was really just a question of housing it. I would go back in a heartbeat if I believed that anybody believed in what I was doing. The lack of enthusiasm was overwhelming. It was almost staggering, and that was kind of from the beginning. I just don't think my take on Wonder Woman was ever to their liking.
I wasn't getting them to feel what they wanted to feel. They couldn't describe what that was to me. We're talking about a huge investment. To ask somebody to jump on that, what is going to be a few hundred million dollars these days, if they just don't have that feeling… I had that feeling. I got chills when I think of some of this stuff, but apparently I was the only one who was chilly. Everybody was very gracious about it. It was a blind date, and everybody thought we'd get married, but let's just leave it at the door.
AVC: What would you do on a set with $100 million dollars, having never worked with a budget like that before?
JW: It's the exact same job. The money has never mattered. If you have $100 million, if you have $100,000, you're trying to hit someone in the gut with an emotional moment. If you can back that up with an awesome visual, that's really neat. If you can back that up with a visual that's not awesome, but at least gets it done, tells them what they need to know to hit them in the gut emotionally, that's neat too. If the characters can only talk about it in a room, then the emotional moment has to be really, really good, but it's still neat. That's never really worried me. I've always thought way too big, and then people have gone, "Great. Now you have to scale this way back." In this case, I didn't have to scale it way back, I just had to stop doing it.
AVC: Can you say anything about the plot you had in mind for your version of the film?
JW: Well, I'll tell you one thing that sort of exemplifies my feelings. The idea was always that she's awesome, she's fabulous, she's strong, she's beautiful, she's well-intentioned, she thinks she's a great big hero, and it's Steve Trevor's job to go, "You don't understand human weakness, therefore you are not a hero, and you never will be until you're as helpless as we are. Fight through that, and then I'll be impressed. Until then, I'm just going to give you shit in a romantic-comedy kind of way."
There was talk about what city she was in and stuff, but by the end, she had never actually set foot in America. Wonder Woman isn't Spider-man or Batman. She doesn't have a town, she has a world. That was more interesting to me than a kind of contained, rote superhero franchise. I think ultimately the best way I can describe the kind of movie I was wanting to make—it was a fun adventure, not gritty, or insanely political, or anything like that. There was meat to the idea of, "Well, why aren't you guys better? What's up with that?" Her lack of understanding of how this world has come to this pass.
My favorite thing was the bracelets. I mean, the bracelets are cool, but how do I make that work? In the original comic book, they needed them because they fire guns on Paradise Island. I don't think I'm going there. So, I thought about it for a while, and I realized, "Oh, right, this is how this works." So in my version, she left Paradise Island with Steve, who was a world-relief guy bringing medical supplies to refugees, which is why he was so desperate to get off the island. She goes with him, and the moment she sets foot on land outside of Paradise Island, somebody shoots her in the chest. And it hurts. [Laughs.] She's just so appalled. And obviously, she heals within a few hours. She pulls the bullet out herself, and kind of looks at it like, "What the hell is this?" She heals, but she's appalled and humiliated, and the next time someone shoots at her, she puts her bracelet in the way because she's terrified of getting shot. It's just a reflexive thing. She has these bands that they all wear, just a piece of armor, and she puts it up. And then she gets good at it. By the end, it's kind of her thing, but it's because she got shot one time and didn't think that it was awesome. I think that is probably not the feeling the producers wanted to have. Though honestly, that could have been their favorite thing. I don't know, because when I asked Joel Silver, point blank, "Well, if they don't want what I'm doing, what do they want?" he said, "They don't know."
AVC: In movies and comics, an awful lot of female characters still fall into eye-candy/damsel-in-distress fantasy-object roles, even the supposedly strong heroine types. You've taken a strong stance toward a more empowering kind of feminism in your work—was that ever an issue?
JW: I have no idea. Obviously, nobody ever said "Don't be a feminist." And nobody ever said "Don't be political." The politics of the movie were all more or less moral, it wasn't like we picked somebody to root against, it's just more like everybody either steps up or they don't, and this is their opportunity to do that. I think that's part of how I got the gig. They wanted her to be strong. It wasn't like Buffy was a crone. It wasn't like anybody thought I wasn't going to make Wonder Woman extraordinarily beautiful. That's part of her thing, that she's so beautiful that men can hardly bear it. I'm all about that, and power just makes her sexier. I certainly wasn't turning my back on her hottie-ness, just because of my politics. I think that's a common misconception about feminism in general.
AVC: Most of your experience working on films seems awful: development hell, and processes that take forever, and having your work second-guessed, dumbed down, or bowdlerized. Have you ever considered giving up on film?
JW: Yes. Yes. When I was a script doctor, I was wealthy and miserable. I never had less fun succeeding at a job in my life. Then I got to do TV, and for the first time in my life, people just let me do the thing. That was amazing. Then, when I made Serenity, they let me do the thing. They helped me, they guided me through it. It was my first movie, and the people at Universal were amazingly supportive at the same time as being instructive, but at the end of the day, I did my thing. Once you've done that, it's hard to go back to the other, to not being able to do your thing. To putting up with, "Gee, these guys had a bad weekend because of such and such," or "Now they're looking at this actress," whatever it is. And the appalling things that happened to Firefly. I could just live inside my rage. I did for a while. Ultimately, it ain't that tasty, and I've learned to sort of put it in a box. I've had more luck than any 10 guys I know. I've been able to tell my story more than a few times, and that's the greatest gift. If I'm never given that gift again, I still will have had it, and I'm grateful for that. My gratitude has finally exceeded my rage by a good, long margin, and when I wake up in the morning with my work and my family, gratitude is the thing that guides me, not rage.
AVC: Do people still try to get you to do script punch-ups?
JW: Every now and then. Now that I've actually directed une filme du Joss Whedon, it more tends to fall into the, "There's a script that needs work, and you might shoot it as well." I've looked at a couple of those, and I'm interested in that, because I'd like to do that. I actually enjoy the process of script-doctoring very much, it's just like being an executive producer, finding out what's wrong with a story and fixing it, finding out what makes it mean something. That's fun. But then if they don't shoot it, or they shoot it in a way that's counter to what you had hoped for, it becomes frustrating. The fact that I am now the director that might shoot the things that I might rewrite means that that's kind of a different animal. But you never know which project is actually going to go, and which projects they're talking about really fast so you think it's going to go. It's part of their job, but they had me so completely convinced that Wonder Woman was so going to happen instantly. Every time I'm convinced of that, I'm wrong. You'd think that I would learn, but here's the funny twist, the M. Night Shyamalan moment: I'm a moron. I'm a complete dweeb. I don't get it, I never get it. Every time, I think everybody's lovely, and it's all going to work out, and I've never been right. For some reason, I can't get that right, can't figure that out. I think I'm getting better. I think I'm mean now. You're going to see a whole meaner person, now.
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