Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  In addition, Joss “wrote a lot of great lines that stayed in the movie,” Stanton remembers. “His best one was under the truck, where Buzz says to Woody, ‘You are a sad, strange, little man. You have my pity. Farewell.’”

  In April 1994, about four months after Joss joined the Toy Story team, Disney finally greenlit the film to go back into production. Joss had become a hot property and was being pursued for other projects, so he decided to part ways with the Toy Story team.

  Though Joss left, the rewrites continued; Pixar’s staff members are known to never stop refining the script even when a film is well into production. But Joss’s influence lingered. He had reset the bar, and the rest of the creative team rose to the occasion. “Joss helped set the tone of sincerity and the reverence that I’d like to think is an amalgamation of him and us—as what everybody in the world knows as Pixar,” Stanton says.

  The Pixar team didn’t see Joss again until a test screening when the film was nearly finished. He seemed a little shocked at how much it had changed. A couple weeks after the movie came out and he had finally seen it two or three more times, he sent a letter to the team. “‘I didn’t get it at first, but now I GET it’—and I remembered he capitalized GET,” Stanton says with a laugh. “It just took a while for him to adjust from where he had left the film to what it became.”

  Toy Story opened just before Thanksgiving, on November 22, 1995. Despite Jeffrey Katzenberg’s earlier concerns, fans from every age bracket embraced Toy Story. Critics admired the fact that such a warm and engaging tale could be told in CGI, through what the New York Times called its “utterly brilliant anthropomorphism” and “exultant wit.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman wrote, “I can hardly imagine having more fun at the movies than I did at Toy Story,” and Kevin McManus of the Washington Post said, “For once, reality lives up to hype. With Toy Story, gigantic superlatives become appropriate, even necessary…. In fact, to find a movie worthy of comparison you have to reach all the way back to 1939, when the world went gaga over Oz.”

  The film had earned more than $39 million by the end of its first weekend, on its way to becoming the top-grossing film of the year in North America and one of the most successful animated films ever released to that point (behind only 1992’s Aladdin and 1994’s The Lion King). Toy Story would go on to gross almost $362 million worldwide.

  After the film was finished, Lasseter called Joss to let him know that there was an issue with the story credits on the film. Arbitration with the original Toy Story screenwriters was still being worked out, and several animators had taken a pass through the script at one point or another as well. Some had even completely rewritten it, attempting to avoid carrying over the bad ideas they felt were in the previous versions. Eventually, a lot of names ended up on the cover page of the final version of Toy Story—many of them writers whose work didn’t appear in the final movie. Nonetheless, Lasseter wanted Joss’s permission to give story credit to all of the animators who worked on the movie.

  More than a year after the WGA arbitration issue with Speed, Joss was now in Graham Yost’s position. He told Lasseter it was fine to add the writers in. “[It is] gratifying to me because it means I finally have an answer to [Yost’s question]. Which is, ‘No, I wouldn’t,’” Joss said.

  Joss’s work on Toy Story landed him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The Oscar was later awarded to Christopher McQuarrie’s neo-noir mystery The Usual Suspects. Toy Story, however, is still an Academy Award–winning film; John Lasseter was given a special achievement award (the first for any animated film) for “the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film.”

  Joss’s next project wasn’t exactly another Oscar winner. In 1994, he was approached to do script rewrites at the end of production for Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner and produced by Lawrence Gordon. The film had already been plagued with production setbacks, and costs were running as high as $175 million—a record at the time.

  “When they said, ‘Do you want to come down to Hawaii next week?’ Mad Max in the water? Include me in! I was so excited,” Joss says. “Then I read the script, and it’s a hundred and twenty pages and the last forty pages all take place on land or a ship. ‘This guy has gills, man! What were you guys thinking?’”

  An assignment that was supposed to last one week quickly expanded to nearly two months. “I was there for seven weeks,” he recalled, “and I accomplished nothing.” The scenes he wrote weren’t filmed, and Costner had his own ideas of how the story should go; when he wasn’t giving notes to Joss, he was scripting scenes that the writing staff wasn’t allowed to touch. Joss described the experience as feeling like he was incredibly well paid to take dictation.

  According to Joss, his favorite thing that he wrote was the first time the Mariner (Costner) sneaks onto a big tanker to confront the bad guys. He promptly freaks out. The female character accompanying him asks what’s wrong. The Mariner, a man whose whole life has been on the sea, replies, “I can’t see the water.”

  “Of course it got thrown out,” Joss says. “In those situations, what’s really happening is they are asking you to make the climax cheaper. They don’t actually want you to fix the movie, even if you can.”

  When he wasn’t off in another city working on other people’s scripts, Joss focused his attention on Kai. He would curate movie montages for her: “He puts together these unbelievable bits of movies, little bits, little scenes of movies. And they’re spectacular. He’ll put clips together and he’ll say, ‘Shut your eyes,’ because I always shut my eyes until they’re actually on. I’ll be waiting around for a while with my eyes shut, having a drink, and he’ll be fumbling about to get the next piece,” she laughs.

  It started as a way to amuse her, and then grew into both a lovely way to spend the night together and a helpful tool when Joss is working on a character in a script. “Something usually ties them together. But sometimes it’s just certain things he wants to watch. He’s a film buff—you can’t watch five thousand movies every day and have a job and have a life.” If he was working on a villain, he’d make a montage of villains from his favorite movies. For a movie montage of examples of genuine romantic love, he would include scenes from Magnolia (1999) between John C. Reilly and Melora Walters, the handprint scene in Twenty Four Seven (1997), and “absolutely the part in The Remains of the Day (1993) where Anthony Hopkins won’t let Emma Thompson look at his book. That’s just heartbreaking,” Joss explains. “Because he just can’t do it, he just can’t do it and she gives him every opening. The whole scene revolves around the secret of what’s he reading, what’s he reading, and it’s a romance and he’s so embarrassed. I’m gonna start to cry. I’m fine. I’ll be just fine, just leave me alone.”

  “Every once in a while, he’ll do montages for other people,” Kai says, “but it really works better just him and me. He knows I’m not going to judge, he isn’t going to have to impress me, really. So he can be freer doing it.”

  Kai often refers to herself as being spoiled by Joss, explaining that not only does he do most of the cooking, but he also buys all of her clothes, because she hates to shop. One particular purchase led to a very impulsive decision.

  They were at her apartment, where she was trying on a red velvet dress he had just bought her. “I put it on, and he just looked at me and said, ‘Marry me,’” Kai laughs. “I said, ‘Shut up.’ He said, ‘No, I mean it.’”

  The proposal was not planned. In fact, when he started to feel that Kai was “the one” for him, Joss was terrified. Not to mention that this impromptu proposition completely upset his emotional schedule. “I wasn’t supposed to meet my wife when I was twenty-seven. That’s a bit young. I had all sorts of adventures I was going to have first,” he explains. “I’m not sure what those adventures were; I’m sure they involved cockroach racing. This from a man who had stopped dating entirely for a year before I met her.”
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  Kai was equally surprised, as neither one had really thought they’d get married—ever. It was an accidental, out-of-the-blue proposal, quite like their accidental, out-of-the-blue meeting four years earlier. But they’d already checked off “road trip” on Kai’s ways of truly getting to know someone, so “plan a wedding” was just a bonus. That day, they went looking for a house, and they found the home that they’d live in for the next fourteen years. It would also be the place where they’d marry, on June 24, 1995.

  That same year, Fox exec Jorge Saralegui was planning to resurrect a film franchise that was very close to Joss’s heart. Over the course of more than a decade and three films, the Alien series had turned Sigourney Weaver into a science fiction legend as Lt. Ellen Ripley, arguably one of the greatest female protagonists of all time. Ripley wasn’t the damsel in distress, defined by her relationship with the men around her (in fact, the part had originally been written so it could be played by either a woman or a man). Ripley led the charge, and fought the battles, and came out victorious.

  The series began in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s Alien, which had terrified Joss so much as a teenager and which he still considered his favorite horror film. In the movie, Lt. Ripley is a member of the crew of a spaceship returning to Earth from a mission when it receives a distress call from a distant planet. They descend to the planet and inadvertently bring back an alien parasite, which quickly grows into a horrifying creature that proceeds to terrorize the crew.

  For the 1986 sequel, aptly titled Aliens, writing and directing duties passed to James Cameron, fresh off his breakout hit The Terminator. Aliens picks up fifty-seven years after the first film, as Ripley awakes from suspended animation to learn that a human colony has been established on the planet where her crew picked up the alien. When contact with the colony is lost, Ripley and a team of marines embark on an attack-and-recovery mission. They discover that the colonists have been slaughtered by similar alien creatures, but Ripley finds a sole survivor: a little girl named Newt. Taking the girl under her wing, Ripley assumes a beautiful dual role as a nurturing maternal figure and a fiercely protective warrior. Aliens took in more than $85 million in North America and $131 million worldwide, and Weaver was nominated for an Academy Award, only the second time a woman received a nomination for a role in a horror film (after Ellen Burstyn in 1973’s The Exorcist).

  The saga continued with 1992’s Alien 3, directed by David Fincher, but critics and fans—including Joss—felt that it was a misstep in the evolution of the series. The sequel’s path to the big screen was troubled from the beginning; screenplays from two different writers were tossed out before David Twohy was brought on and delivered a story that featured Ripley only briefly, focusing instead on Corporal Hicks, her love interest from Aliens. (Weaver was unhappy with the studio’s changes to Aliens and would only agree to a cameo appearance in the sequel.) But when Fox president Joe Roth read Twohy’s screenplay, he objected to the new direction. “Sigourney Weaver is the centerpiece of the series,” he insisted, and her character was “really the only female warrior we have in our movie mythology.”

  Four more versions, including one set on a “wooden planet” inhabited by monks, were nixed before the twenty-eight-year-old Fincher, a music video director, was hired to helm what would be his first feature film. Ultimately, Weaver agreed to return, but she wanted the movie to be Ripley’s swan song. First, however, it would kill off her supporting characters from the previous film. As the story begins, an escape pod containing Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and the android Bishop crash-lands on a prison planet. She’s believed to be the only survivor—until another alien infiltrates the prison. At the very end of the film, Ripley jumps into an immense furnace to sacrifice herself and kill the alien queen that was about to burst out of her body.

  The audience’s displeasure with Alien 3 was reflected in the box office; the film grossed little more than $53 million in North America and $159.7 million worldwide—less then Aliens’ take when adjusted for inflation. Several of the cast and crew from the franchise would express their open frustration and disappointment; Cameron said that killing several of the previous film’s most essential characters was “a slap in the face” to both him and the fans of Aliens. As for Joss, he complained that that “the fans were robbed…. They actually had a scene where people we didn’t know were being killed by the alien.”

  All of this left Jorge Saralegui wondering if the audience would buy an Alien movie without its leading lady. But Weaver had wanted Ripley killed off and had very little interest in returning to the franchise, so Saralegui decided to bring back Newt, the little girl Ripley saved, instead. Although Newt died at the beginning of Alien 3, Saralegui’s idea was that she would be cloned because of the survival skills she demonstrated in Aliens, and would be used by Ripley’s former employer to track down the alien for their own research. The cloned Newt, in effect, would become a Buffy-like character—a young girl imbued with special skills and strengths to take out a particular enemy.

  After receiving the go-ahead from the studio to develop a treatment, Saralegui reached out to Joss, because the Buffy movie script demonstrated his ability to bring just such a character to life. Joss was incredibly excited and agreed to take on the project. This was the chance of a lifetime—an opportunity to right the path of a favorite franchise that had gone astray.

  After reading their thirty-page film treatment, studio executives told Joss and Saralegui that they found the reboot idea exciting, but they were worried about the success of an Alien film without Ripley. At first, Joss rebelled against the idea of scrapping their Newt concept to revive Ripley. But he was also a longtime fan of the Alien series, and this was his chance to be involved, so he eventually went back to the drawing board. With only the parameters of “Scary like Alien. Exciting like Aliens. Add in Ripley” to guide him, Joss found it much more difficult than his first go-round.

  Joss’s script for Alien: Resurrection takes place two hundred years after Alien 3. Scientists aboard a military spaceship have used a genetic sample from the prison planet to create a clone of Ellen Ripley, in the hopes of harvesting the alien queen that was growing inside of her and breeding more aliens for study. Later, a ragtag crew of mercenaries arrives to deliver human bodies, which the scientists plan to use for the alien incubation. Call, an android with the group, recognizes Ripley and tries to kill her, suspecting the truth about the clone’s purpose. Unfortunately, the queen has already been extracted and the breeding process is underway. When the captive aliens escape and kill most of the military personnel, the ship’s emergency systems kick in, sending the vessel back to Earth. Ripley and the mercenaries struggle to find a way to destroy the ship before the aliens reach Earth.

  Joss knew if he was going to bring such a beloved iconic character back to life and have the audience accept it, he needed the resurrection to feel real, not just like a sci-fi metaphor. Joss had to create “a total identification” between the audience and the Ripley clone; he needed to acknowledge the difficulty viewers would have in accepting the character’s rebirth by making it hard for the character herself to accept. “It’s very important to me that it’s a very torturous, grotesque process so that people will viscerally feel what it’s like to be horribly reborn in a lab,” Joss said. “Is she human? Has she changed? … She was pregnant with an alien…. Is there a little something wrong there?”

  Joss was worried that Weaver would want to see a more likeable Ripley than the one he envisioned. To great relief on both sides, Weaver told Joss she loved his original script and how he made the concept of cloning very personal. She liked how Ripley, sharing both human and alien DNA, faces new questions about where her loyalties lie. She told him to push her character further and asked, “What if I’m even stranger? What if I have more Alien and less human in me?”

  “She created an extraordinary character,” Joss said.

  Foreshadowing a theme that would later be explored in both Buffy and Angel, Ripley’s rebirth c
omes with a big cost. She has to confront the question of why she’s back, and what that means for the rest of her life. Through Ripley’s struggle to accept her rebirth, Joss asked the question of what it meant to have an identity. Ripley identifies with both her former human self and the alien that incubated in her body—which she had in some sense given birth to.

  Ripley’s quest to find an answer to “What am I?” led to Joss’s creation of Call, a robot filled with self-loathing. “When Call, who was played by Winona Ryder, who is very beautiful, says, ‘Look at me. I’m disgusting,’ it hit something that I’d never found before,” Joss said. “I was talking about something that was very personal, that a lot of people go through—and I was doing it with a robot and a clone, so I was in heaven!” Saralegui, too, thought that one of the story’s greatest strengths was that the two most human characters are the two females who are not human. “An android and a clone who’s got alien DNA inside her. They are by far the most human and humanistic characters in that movie,” he says. “Ripley is brutal, but she’s still human. She still has a heart and still does the right thing.” These same connections, at once personal and universally human, would soon inform the rebirth of Joss’s own iconic hero.

  Developing Ripley’s resurrection story was a turning point in Joss’s storytelling. He’s said that as a child he enjoyed spinning yarns, but with Alien: Resurrection he began writing as an “adult.” His new driving force would be to give his audience that “total identification” with his characters, to have their every action be so honest and real that the viewer would always feel that they were on the journey with them.