Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  By April 13, 2010, Deadline Hollywood was reporting it as all but a done deal, yet official confirmation actually wouldn’t come for another three months. At San Diego Comic-Con, Joss himself confirmed the story, during Entertainment Weekly’s Visionaries panel on July 22, 2010. Sharing the stage with his former WB neighbor J. J. Abrams, Joss told the crowd that “that is not an official thing, because I think Marvel couldn’t afford a press release, so can I just make that an official thing? I’m directing The Avengers.” Two days later, it became extremely official when franchise stars Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson took to the Comic-Con stage to officially introduce the full cast and director of The Avengers.

  On the surface, Joss might have seemed a risky choice to oversee the culmination of a half-dozen blockbuster motion pictures. Marvel had tapped other non-blockbuster directors like Favreau and Branagh, but those filmmakers had a roster of previous films under their belt. Up to this point, Joss had directed just one feature film, Serenity, which starred largely box office unknowns with whom he had already worked on Firefly. But fans were confident in Marvel’s pick. “Oftentimes in the Marvel fan community, there’s a lot of second guessing,” Feige says. “There’s a lot of ‘OK, let’s see—how are you gonna screw it up?’ The more movies we make, the more benefit of the doubt I think they give us. But in the case of the Joss choice, it was unanimously positive for the decision, and I think that extended across the Marvel universe and the Whedon universe equally.”

  One of Joss’s first tasks was to get the script in order. He retained some story elements from previous drafts, sharing “story by” credit with Zak Penn, but Joss would ultimately receive the sole screenplay credit. Nevertheless, the writing of The Avengers was a collaborative process, much like Joss’s work on Toy Story with Pixar. He popped into Marvel headquarters fairly regularly to talk about the essentials of the The Avengers script: structure, narrative, and characters—generally, how exactly to build this blockbuster. The members of the studio’s team were all exceptionally well versed in comic book lore; they and Joss shared the same reference points, which immediately put everyone on the same page. Feige was taken with Joss’s love for the characters in particular. “There’s been much made of superheroes being the myths of our time,” he says. “Joss looks at these characters, as we do, not just as comic book characters but as great literary characters. And he is so well read that he pulls on all of those examples to put them together. He’ll often go to great composers. He always has music running in his office and it’s often film music, often classical music.”

  Joss also contributed a dialogue polish to the Captain America screenplay. It gave him a stronger foundation with the character of Captain America / Steve Rogers, who he felt would be the audience’s connection to world of The Avengers. “I did spend a lot of time with the character, which for me was important, because Steve’s perspective in this world is very much, as much as anybody’s if not more, the audience’s,” Joss said. As a supersoldier from the 1940s who awakens in the modern world at the end of Captain America, Steve Rogers “is looking at this world with fresh eyes and he is not impressed. His feeling of disconnection is something that’s going to be laced throughout [The Avengers]. It’s a film about lonely people, because I’m making it, and my pony only does one trick…. He’s a classic man out of time in the very literal sense and so to have worked on his ’40s incarnation, even a little bit, was a nice introduction to this and kept me grounded in his perspective.”

  In addition, Joss consulted with Kenneth Branagh, who was in the middle of postproduction on Thor. He asked Branagh if he could see a rough cut of the film that laid out the full narrative for villain Loki, because he wanted to know where both he and Thor ended up in the film so he could take off in the right direction in The Avengers. After viewing it, Joss asked the actor playing Loki, Tom Hiddleston, to meet up for a cup of tea and just talk about the character. Hiddleston recalls the e-mail, which, among other things, said, “The motherfucker lives in you, and I want to know it all.”

  Hiddleston had actually met the writer years earlier, when Joss saw him in a production of Othello in his native London. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who played the stoic and menacing Operative in Serenity, starred as the titular Moor, and Hiddleston was his lieutenant, Michael Cassio. As Joss caught up with his friend Ejiofor, he spoke with Hiddleston and was “very sweet” in his appraisal of his performance. They met again in L.A. in 2009 to discuss a possible role in The Cabin in the Woods, but in the end, Joss told him that he’d love to find something for them to do together but he didn’t think there was a part for him in the film. “I was like, ‘Dude, totally fine,’” Hiddleston laughs. “We then disappeared from each other’s lives for a period of 365 days, and the next time I meet him, he had signed on to write and direct The Avengers.”

  They met in Santa Monica, and Hiddleston ran through what he’d done to prepare for and play the character of Loki. He listed the wide variety of research material he’d consulted: all of the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby comics, The Ultimates, comics by J. Michael Straczynski, the Norse myths themselves, the works of Wagner. He discussed how he approached the role of the damaged brother, mentioning several Shakespearean influences: Edmund in King Lear and Cassius in Julius Caesar. “I literally plugged in some kind of USB into his hard drive, and downloaded all of the Loki information—metaphorically,” Hiddleston laughs.

  Joss completely understood where he was coming from. They shared the same references, and the love of villains both classic and pop cultural. “Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard was a landmark moment in my conception of bad guys in the movies. He’s magnetic,” Hiddleston says. “We used to talk a lot about Peter O’Toole, and James Mason. Joss is a huge, huge fan of James Mason and his work. And how long before my time, before Alan Rickman’s time and any of the current crop of British bad guys, the great godfather of British actors playing the roles in Hollywood movies was James Mason. That was such a touchstone for us.”

  After ingesting all there was from Hiddleston’s dissertation on Loki, Joss said, “I want to dive off the deep end…. Because of the way that you’ve established the spiritual origin of the character, I now want to create the Lord of Misrule, the God of Mischief,” Hiddleston remembers. “And in The Avengers, I need you to be more menacing, more feral—and above all enjoy yourself.”

  Hiddleston, of course, wasn’t the only actor to reprise his role from Marvel’s previous superhero films. The Avengers would also feature the return of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, and Chris Hemsworth as Thor. (After Joss cast him in The Cabin in the Woods and then recommended him for Thor, Hemsworth says, “it was funny to come full circle and now be working with him again.”) Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner would reprise their supporting roles as Black Widow from Iron Man 2 and Hawkeye from Thor, respectively, while Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg would continue their string of appearances as Nick Fury and Phil Coulson of the shadowy defense organization S.H.I.E.L.D.

  But one major role would need to be recast. Edward Norton, who played the title character in The Incredible Hulk, had met with Joss to discuss his participation in the film—a meeting that, according to Norton’s agent, went well. But contract negotiations stalled, and in July 2010, Kevin Feige released a statement confirming that Ed Norton would be replaced with a new actor in the role of the Hulk / Bruce Banner. Fan reaction was mixed; many liked Norton’s take on Banner and looked forward to seeing how his character worked in an ensemble piece, while others were soured by his involvement in the media-hyped drama behind the scenes of The Incredible Hulk, in which the actor and the studio clashed over the tone of the film and issues of creative control.

  Joss already knew who he wanted for the new Hulk: indie actor Mark Ruffalo. “Mark was my dream choice and I had my heart set on him,” Joss explained. “I wanted a completely fresh take on the character so I went to Marvel very early on and said, ‘I know the guy who would be a
great Bruce Banner’ and they said, ‘Unless it’s Mark Ruffalo, we really don’t know.’ And I was like ‘What?!’ I just froze and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. You did not just say that,’ and I showed them my list that I had in my wallet with his name at the top and they were completely on board.”

  The news that he was on Joss’s list came as something of a surprise to Ruffalo. (Not that it should have—Louis Leterrier had originally wanted him for the lead in The Incredible Hulk, but he and Marvel went with the more well-known Norton instead.) “Joss said, ‘I’m excited by what I think you’ll do with it, and I think you’ll bring a humility and a sense of humor,’” Ruffalo remembers. He’d wanted to play the character since Ang Lee was casting the earlier adaptation Hulk (2003), and he was disappointed when Eric Bana won the part instead.

  The Avengers was different, however, as Banner would be not the lead character but rather a member of an entire team of larger-than-life heroes—and a reluctant member at that. “For me, it’s a tough part, because you’re trying to watch a guy that doesn’t want to be there in the movie scenario; that could be deadly, you know. It’s a tough nut to crack, to watch a movie about a guy who doesn’t want to be there.” Before agreeing to the role, Ruffalo reached out to his good friend Norton to ask for his blessing. “The way I see it is that Ed has bequeathed this part to me,” he said. “I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”

  Joss also helped pave the way for his friend Cobie Smulders to join the cast as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill, a character from the comic books making her cinematic debut. When Smulders was considering whether to audition, the role was still somewhat vague; “It was like ‘Female Agent #12,’” she says. “But it was a significant amount of dialogue where it wasn’t just reading lines about protocol. There was an emotional arc within the scene. I knew this person has a story in this ginormous action movie instead of just giving information to the audience,” she says. “So I went in. And I did it. Joss wanted to see me.”

  But she was in New York, and Joss wanted to see her the next day in L.A. Smulders offered to make an audition tape and send it to him. That won her a screen test with Samuel L. Jackson. “Sam Jackson’s there, sitting in the corner dressed as Nick Fury. I’ve screen tested for many shows. But it just has the feeling of such a big project. Like, what could this mean for me? And it’s like you’re at that level,” she explains. “We did it three or four times. And Joss, every time, came up with great notes and great advice. I left not knowing if it was good or not.”

  Apparently, it was: Joss called her forty-five minutes later to deliver the good news. “I said, ‘Thank you so much for thinking of me and giving me this opportunity. And I hope I don’t let you down. And I’m going to work really hard,’” Smulders says. “And he was like, ‘You know, I don’t do favors. So you should know that. I’m not doing this because we’re friends. It’s because you were the best.’ It’s so cool for him to say.”

  The complexity of the casting, particularly coordinating the schedules of so much high-level talent, necessitated some changes throughout the writing process. “I wrote an entire draft with a new character [Wasp] because we thought we weren’t going to have [Scarlett Johansson],” Joss explains. “And then that didn’t happen, so then I had to go back and write another draft with that person back in it. That was a bit of a rigamarole…. But, you know, it all comes out in the wash.”

  After several drafts that were nixed by Marvel, Joss finally had one that was ready to send to the cast. Even with five previous films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to build on, Joss had approached the story as the first part of an Avengers narrative rather than a continuation of all the storylines from the earlier movies. After all, Marvel had plans to make The Avengers into its own movie franchise, so it needed to work independently of any previous projects. Joss felt strongly that it also needed to work independently of any future projects; he thought that too many studios tried to kick off franchises with stories that were all setup and no conclusion. “Even though The Empire Strikes Back is better, in innumerable ways, than Star Wars,” he said, “Star Wars wins because you can’t end a movie with Han frozen in Carbonite. That’s not a movie, it’s an episode.”

  As a standalone origin story, Joss’s script had to introduce each character as if he or she is brand new to the viewer. It does so via S.H.I.E.L.D. head Nick Fury, who must assemble a group of heroes to save the world. The threat harks back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first Avengers comic book from 1963: resentful god Loki comes to Earth to obtain the Tesseract, a powerful energy source that he can use to obtain an extraterrestrial army, conquer and rule the Earth, and take revenge on his brother Thor. When Loki attacks the research facility holding the Tesseract, Fury reactivates the “Avengers Initiative” to head off the catastrophic battle he sees coming. Black Widow goes to Calcutta, India, in order to recruit Dr. Bruce Banner, Agent Coulson enlists Tony Stark, and Fury seeks out the first Avenger, Captain America. Thor later joins them after first fighting with Iron Man over the custody of the captured Loki—who makes his escape from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Helicarrier when the group is manipulated into fighting one another. The Avengers must get past their egos and assemble into a proper team to defeat Loki and his alien army.

  Clark Gregg describes the cast’s reaction to the first distributed draft: “[The script] was funny and still tongue-in-cheek and really got the tone, the Tony Stark tone of the Marvel universe, and still furthered and explored each one of those characters and those relationships. I found out later from other people involved that had the same reaction—like, oh, wow. Oh, wow. Everybody gets to play. Everybody gets to play, and it’s going to be better than anything we reasonably hoped for.” He adds, “To me, Joss seemed like the perfect guy for The Avengers, because he had perhaps the deepest, most comprehensive grasp and history with the various characters in The Avengers. He seems like he grew up steeped in the Marvel comic book universe.”

  Tom Hiddleston was so incredibly moved by the first draft of the script he saw that he shot off an e-mail to Joss as soon as he was able to process the storyline he’d been given:

  Joss,

  I am so excited I can hardly speak.

  The first time I read it I grabbed at it like Charlie Bucket snatching for a golden ticket somewhere behind the chocolate in the wrapper of a Wonka Bar. I didn’t know where to start. Like a classic actor I jumped in looking for LOKI on every page, jumping back and forth, reading words in no particular order, utterances imprinting themselves like flash-cuts of newspaper headlines in my mind: “real menace”; “field of obeisance”; “discontented, nothing is enough”; “his smile is nothing but a glimpse of his skull”; “Puny god” …

  … Thank you for writing me my Hans Gruber. But a Hans Gruber with super-magic powers. As played by James Mason…. It’s high operatic villainy alongside detached throwaway tongue-in-cheek; plus the “real menace” and his closely guarded suitcase of pain. It’s grand and epic and majestic and poetic and lyrical and wicked and rich and badass and might possibly be the most gloriously fun part I’ve ever stared down the barrel of playing. It is just so juicy.

  I love how throughout you continue to put Loki on some kind of pedestal of regal magnificence and then consistently tear him down. He gets battered, punched, blasted, side-swiped, roared at, sent tumbling on his back, and every time he gets up smiling, wickedly, never for a second losing his eloquence, style, wit, self-aggrandisement or grandeur, and you never send him up or deny him his real intelligence…. That he loves to make an entrance; that he has a taste for the grand gesture, the big speech, the spectacle. I might be biased, but I do feel as though you have written me the coolest part.

  … But really I’m just sending you a transatlantic shout-out and fist-bump, things that traditionally British actors probably don’t do. It’s epic.

  Joss responded in kind:

  Tom, this is one of those emails you keep forever. Thanks so much. It’s more articulate (and possibly longer) than
the script. I couldn’t be more pleased at your reaction, but I’ll also tell you I’m still working on it…. Thank you again. I’m so glad you’re pleased. Absurd fun to ensue.

  Best, (including uncharacteristic fist bump), joss.

  Despite the grand scale of the film, Joss was able to bring past experiences to bear on the project. “You know, ironically, I said this last week—doing a super-giant budget movie is more like doing an Internet musical than anything else,” he explained in May 2011. “Having everything and having nothing are very similar. I’ve had no rehearsal time with my actors. I had none on Dr. Horrible because we were so under the gun. I have none now because they’re all so famous and they’re all busy making movies.”

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  BUFFY LIVES, AGAIN?

  While Joss was working on the Avengers script, another big announcement rocked the Whedonverse. In November 2010, Warner Bros. Pictures and Atlas Entertainment announced plans to reboot the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise with a new feature film. The Buffy reboot would not be written, directed, or produced by Joss Whedon. In fact, it would have no involvement from any of the behind-the-scenes or on-camera talent previously affiliated with the television series.

  The project had originated a year earlier, when Fran and Kaz Kuzui decided to capitalize on the vampire craze that was in full swing thanks to the success of Twilight. As the director and producer of the 1992 Buffy movie, the Kuzuis retained the film rights to the property, so they partnered with Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment to develop a new version of Buffy for the big screen, in the hopes of creating a new blockbuster franchise. Joss was actually offered a role in the project, but with so much else on his plate, he declined. So did 20th Century Fox, the studio that produced the first film and the television series—most likely because they were not interested in reworking one of their biggest cult hits without its creator, with whom they’d had a long relationship.