AVC: How did your episode of The Office come about?
JW: I knew Greg Daniels a little bit, because he's married to Susanne Daniels, who is largely responsible for Buffy ever being on the WB. And I know Jenna Fischer because she's married to James Gunn, who briefly worked for me, and is a friend and an awesome guy. I saw him at a con, saw his wife, and said, "What do you do?" She said, "I'm starring in an NBC sitcom." I felt really dumb. So I rushed off and watched it. As it happened, I also took offices, briefly, right next to their writing staff, pre-season, and I became chummy with all of them. It was sort of a giant group of chum. So when somebody suggested it, it was kind of like, "Well, the comfort factor is pretty high, because I already know the writing staff and a bunch of the cast, and I adore the show. This will be a completely new thing for me, a real departure." And then they said, "It's about a bat, and there's a vampire." [Laughs.] I was like, "You have to be fucking kidding me." They were like, "Your stunt meeting is here, and your CGI meeting is here." I was thinking, "Didn't I just leave this party?" That was just coincidence. But that's how that happened. God, it was fun.
AVC: Did you have any input into the script, or freedom to alter it?
JW: I wouldn't say freedom to do things with it, because that sounds disrespectful. [Laughs.] But way more input was asked for than I would have ever anticipated. They wanted my notes on the draft before they went into the rewrite. There was a lot of physical stuff, especially when the bat appears, that I got to pitch. I got to pitch a ton of stuff. Some of it, they were like, "Great!" Some of it, they were like, "Hmmm… try it." The physical stuff made it in pretty well, and there was some stuff where I was like, "We're not going to shoot this, we don't have time, and I know that it's not going to work." They're incredibly open with their actors, and they're shooting improv. There was that thing about Pam's art. I got to the set and saw Pam's art, and I was like, "This is not right." [Laughs.] I held up production for an hour while they frantically made new art. That was the one time when I felt the power of the visiting director. What are they going to do, fire me? Somebody was like, "You're really working to protect your vision." I was like, "No, no, no, no, no. This is in the script. This is Greg and Brent Forrester's vision. They've written down a very beautiful thing about exactly what her art should be like, and that's what I'm going to put on the screen." The fact that they were that open and collaborative, and the fact that I was always completely respectful of their process and their world, I'm just going to do my best. Obviously, as a director on that show, all you want to do is hide. If anybody notices that it was directed, you've kind of failed. They gave me way more freedom than I can remember giving people. Ever. [Laughs.] I'm not going to lie about it.
AVC: How much freedom do you have working on Marvel characters? Does the company dictate or suggest plot points or directions?
JW: Nothing like that, no. They are extremely hands-off. It's only if I try to set a toe in the actual Marvel universe. There's a reason that one of my teams is in outer space, and the other is in 1907. I didn't want to do a Civil War tie-in. At the end of my run, I don't want anyone coming to it who's trying to read it, going, "What's this about, this new information?" It should just be a piece in and of itself. It has happened, like for example, with the Kingpin. They were like, "Well, he's out of the country." He's the Kingpin! It's New York! He's iconic! Finally, they were like, "Put in something that says he took a plane trip." [Laughs.] I was like, "Okay, thank you." The universe itself is too tricky. I can't even live there. But as far as what I'm doing, they've always been completely respectful. They know that I'm not going to do anything too crazy, and I do run it by them beforehand.
AVC: When you write comics, do you tend to work ahead and write up an arc on one title or the other, or are you more month-to-month on everything?
JW: Kind of month-to-month. I have on occasion gotten ahead. On Buffy, I delivered like three scripts in three weeks. I just couldn't stop writing, but that's a different animal. Usually, I have my schedule, and after I've written one, I'll try to rush through an outline for the next one based on the momentum of excitement. But trying to get the next script out is tough, so usually I'll wait. I'll write something else, and then later on, I'll try a bite of that and a bite of that. That works out pretty well. It seems like it's going terribly slowly for various reasons, which has been my fault occasionally, but not so much. It seems like it's a long time between bites, especially for the fans, but I do know exactly where I'm going, which is nice.
AVC: Do you ever have scheduling issues where you really want to be off on a tear on Buffy, but you've got a deadline on Runaways or whatever?
JW: All the time. You never want to be writing the thing you're writing, unless you're actually in it, unless it's just flowing, and you're typing, and you're laughing, and you're crying, and everything's giddy, and you're in the moment. That's the beauty of it. All the rest of the time, all you want to think about is whatever it is you're not supposed to be thinking about. Having said that, most of my best ideas have come while I was procrastinating about something else I was supposed to be writing. So I respect that. If my brain is saying, "You know what? You're supposed to be working on Runaways, but you're in an X mood," I go there, because if that's where the muse is hovering, I'm gonna go visit her. Sometimes you've got to bite the bullet, and be a man, and say, "Just write the script. Come on, find the inspiration. Bring that muse over here." But if I have a little leeway, and it's clearly going one way and not the other, that's what I'm going to follow.
AVC: You've talked a lot in interviews about how the best thing about your job is getting to be alone with a good story. But if that was enough, wouldn't you be less frustrated over the difficulties in getting those stories out to the public?
JW: The thing is, you can never turn your back on the idea that you may one day tell that story. Three years down the road, I'm doing a Buffy comic. Now we're telling that story about Angel in a comic. I got to make Serenity. I got to make a TV series out of Buffy, which, as you know, did not do that great as a film. If there's one thing I've learned, and this is ever-increasing, obviously, with the Internet and all of the cross-pollination, is that there's always a way to tell the story. There's novelizations. That's why I resolutely will not tell anybody what happened in Shepherd Book's past, because I'm still clinging to the notion that I one day may be able to. There's been talk of doing that inside a multiplayer game, having his past buried somewhere in that game. That's another great way to create narrative. I'm all about that, assuming that ever gets off the ground. Telling somebody at a dinner party or at a convention is never as cool as doing it. So, yeah, I can protect something to the grave. I'll tell my writers, or the person I hope will write it, if I'm not. I told fans my big Tara moment, because the opportunity had come and gone. I still feel like I shouldn't have. I still feel like it's almost disrespectful to what I did, to tell them what I was going to do with her.
AVC: You've had more luck getting comics going lately. Could you see yourself just doing comics for a career?
JW: I would like my children to eat solid food, and possibly go to grade school, let alone college, so not so much. I love comics, very much, and I love being alone, but I also love the other part. I love actors, and I love filmed entertainment, and that is not something I plan to turn my back on. The comic world has its own limitations, as everything does. I adore it, I respect it, but it's not going to take over all of me.
AVC: What do you think about the current wave of comic-book movies?
JW: After Spider-man finally got it right, they've improved. I still take issue with most of them, not just as a comic-book geek, but as a storyteller. Every now and then, I see something that I really like, and I think we're out of the time when it was a bunch of old men in suits, going [Old-timey businessman voice.] "Kids like the comic books. He's bitten by a spider. Does it have to be a spider? Nobody likes spiders, they don't test well." Now, the guys in those jobs grew up reading those comic books, and they finally figured out the formula. "Oh, just do what they did in the comic book, and it will be good," as opposed to changing everything. With the exception of Superman, nobody had ever really come close to getting it right. Now that there's a different generation and comic books have a different kind of weight in our culture, the movies have gotten better. Not all of them, but a few of them, and that's nice. That aesthetic has infused, à la The Matrix, movies that are not comic-book movies, and that's fun, too.
AVC: If you had carte blanche to make your own movie version of any comic-book property out there, would it be Wonder Woman or something else?
JW: Well, I've already written Wonder Woman, so I'd probably go with that one. If I could do absolutely anything… You know, I don't really think about it, because most of the things that I would love to do… I pitched a Batman before they made Batman Begins, basically a different version of Batman Begins. I still have as much grief about not being able to tell that story as I do about my script for Wonder Woman. I fell so in love with just my three-minute pitch. I'd like to do all the greats. You know, Spidey, and the Bats, they've been done. And the X-Men. There's not that much left. Although, you know, Kitty Pryde. First of all, she's got a great power, walking through walls, and stuff like that, and they already have Ellen Page playing her, so that would be cool.
AVC: Last time we talked to you, there were a couple of things on your plate that have long since stopped coming up in interviews. One of them was the Iron Man movie.
JW: The Iron Man movie is already in production by Jon Favreau. It has nothing to do with my script whatsoever. All I did was write an outline, and what happened with that wasn't them going, "No, we don't like it." Everybody said "We love it," but I just didn't want to be in production, in development with a studio. I had the TV shows going, and I just thought, "This is not the time for this." I really like New Line, and everything was going along fine. I loved the story, but I just suddenly had a flash of, "This is going to be a long period of development. This is not going to happen." Why I didn't figure that out about Wonder Woman, I cannot say.
AVC: So you pulled out?
JW: Yes, I just pulled right out. I said, "You know what? This has been fun, but I realize this is a mistake for me right now, career-wise."
AVC: What about your Alien 5 concept?
JW: Well, they did Alien Vs. Predator, so that already happened. And once he's versed a Predator, it's hard to get people juiced to go back. Not impossible, by the way, and I even kind of liked Alien Vs. Predator. But that's already kind of been capped by others.
AVC: Are there other back-burner projects that you'd theoretically like to get back to someday?
JW: There are so many that it's almost appalling. I make a list of the things that I'm working on, wish to be working on, or could one day think about working on, and it fills a page. I have 12 clipboards stuck to my wall with projects that I am working on, just to remind me where I am with each of them. I can pull one down at any moment and go, "Okay, here's the outline for the next issues," or "Here's the phone call I need to make to talk about funding for this concept." I've been writing music for a short, for a ballet that I want to film, a little short film with Summer Glau, for a while. It's very hard for me to write music, especially without lyrics, because I cannot play the instruments so well. So it takes me longer than it takes other people. It's a short, obviously, it's not a giant career move, but it's something I've been dying to do. But Summer's going to be very busy terminating people, isn't she? But, yeah, there's a ton of things. I never lack for things to occupy my time. I just lack for, at this point, it feels like traction.
AVC: Did the success of the Buffy musical episode "Once More, With Feeling" prompt you to want to write more musicals?
JW: Musicals were my absolute bread and butter. My father wrote Off-Off-Broadway musical lyrics, so did his father, before they both worked in TV. I was raised on a steady diet of Sondheim. That has never changed. I'm absolutely a musicals boy. A lot of people didn't know that, because I love horror movies, and I love other things, but those were the things that you could get off the ground. I made a musical because I was six years into a show, and I knew that nobody was going to stop me. The fact of the matter is, I'm dying to do another musical, more, possibly than any other single thing. The other fact is, nothing is more labor-intensive. Because I have so many things that I want to be doing right now, I'm going to wait before I buckle down and say goodbye to the world for a year or six months. Let's say six months. "Once More, With Feeling" took me four months to write, so let's call it eight.
AVC: Do you have a story or concept in mind for it?
JW: I've had different ideas. Some people have told me I should do Buffy for the stage, which I get, and it could obviously be very fun, but I'd like to do something on film. I've got a few different ideas, but I'm still circling them. Although now, my favorite subgenre, thanks to Drew Goddard, is the Final Fantasy VIII interstitial videos cut up to music by Evanescence. I think that's the movie I want to make.
AVC: Do you spend a lot of time on YouTube trolling for that kind of thing?
JW: Not a lot of time, but enough. They're awesome.
AVC: "Once More, With Feeling" has been touring the country as a subtitled sing-along show in movie theaters. Have you been to any of those screenings?
JW: I just went to one with [Buffy producer] Marti Noxon a few weeks ago. It was really fun, and oddly moving.
AVC: Did you go incognito, or as part of an event, or what?
JW: I snuck in the back, and then at the end, Marti and I came out and waved at everybody. I was actually kind of nervous. I was like, [Vaudeville voice.] "What manner of person would come to a late-night screening of this episode of television? I don't want to be seen, I'll wear a false mustache." [Laughs.] But it was a delight. It was really sweet.
AVC: Are you still doing your in-home Shakespeare-readings with friends?
JW: Well, I haven't been in-home. Everybody's been sort of scattered to the four winds, so we haven't done one for a while. If I could just get my peeps to all stop going to Canada to do episodes of things, and hang out long enough… I want to get back to it, it's been too long.
AVC: You've always been a surprisingly candid interview subject, secrecy about projects aside. When we last interviewed you, you called Donald Sutherland a prick.
JW: You know, I try to restrain myself.
AVC: Has that forthrightness ever gotten you in trouble?
JW: Oh, yes. Oh God, yes. The fact of the matter is, it's not my natural bent. Don just pushed, okay? He just pushed. [Laughs.] The fact is, I feel really strongly that one shouldn't be overly candid, one really should follow the old rule of talking about people as though they were in the room. But I called Don that, I can't help it. He was mean.
I tend to try to see both sides of everything. The Wonder Woman situation was frustrating for me, I'm sure it was incredibly frustrating for them. It took me a very long time to write. I was in a very bad place. Having just made a movie, it was very hard for me to get back into the writer's seat. They wasted my time, but I wasted a whole lot of theirs. If you come to it always realizing that the other guy has a perspective, then being candid is all right. If it starts to sound like a bunch of complaining, then you should shut up, you should just shut up. That's not the point.
I have stories I like to tell. Sometimes I got to tell them, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes they came out right, sometimes they didn't. I hope that I'm just as candid about my own mistakes as I am about grousing, but the fact of the matter is, there are things that I can never say, and I think that goes for absolutely everyone who works in this town, or any town, or are human. "Yes, darling, that outfit makes you look fat." Do people say that? No, they do not. Actually, I would, if anyone did. But they never have. Luckily, I haven't been faced with that one.
It bit me in particular with X-Men, where I was treated sort of shoddily. I was in England, very tired, and some fanzine asked a question, and I went kind of off. Well, of course, that fanzine was a web fanzine, I didn't know about this web thing. I hadn't really gleaned the fact that there wasn't such a thing as a guy with a photocopier handing out sheets of paper anymore. Everything I said got to the Fox executives before I went to bed that night. They were pissed, and they were right. That's not what you do. I kind of treat moviemaking and TV like the Army, and I kind of always have. Whoever is in charge, is in charge, and if they're going to march you up a hill and get you all killed, that's what you do. You march up that hill. You have to respect that, you have to respect that chain of command. I've done it under directors I believed in, I've done it under directors I didn't believe in. I've done it with executives and on projects.
Alien broke my heart, and I never said a single word about it until it was out on DVD. I thought, "Okay, now I can start to bitch and moan." Quite frankly, now, because there's always another DVD, or another thing, and everything is reported forever, there really isn't a good venue to cut loose like that, except perhaps the director's commentary. They actually asked me to do an interview about Alien 4, and I was like, "Guys, no, you don't want me to do that." It's important to be candid, or else everything sounds like a press release. But it's also important to have perspective, and not to get so up in one's own righteous rage that one forgets that other people are also people.
AVC: Have any of your experiences changed what you're willing to say in interviews?
JW: I've always had a rule. What happened with X-Men happened because I was exhausted, and because I had gotten so used to being a muckity-muck in TV that I'd forgotten that in movies, I'm nobody. When you're a rewrite guy in movies, it doesn't matter that you have a successful TV show, you're nobody. They had no obligation to treat me any better than they did, but I had gotten so used to being in a position of respect that I was sort of overly appalled by what happened, because, quite frankly, things just as bad have happened to me a lot, and to other people. It has always been my rule to tell the truth as much as it is useful to the interviewer, so that they are interested and want to call you back someday. [Laughs.] I'm not out there to blow the lid off such-and-such, or get back at so-and-so. I don't have any of that. You can't live with that. It's ungentlemanly, and ultimately self-defeating.
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