Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  Without Joss or Fox on board, the new film would have very few if any connections with the Buffy TV series. The Kuzuis owned only the rights to the original film’s characters and story. They’d licensed those rights to Fox for the television series, which meant that Fox held the rights for anything new created for the show. Gone would be Willow, Xander, Giles, and Sunnydale, replaced with new characters and settings.

  Whit Anderson, a writer with no feature writing credits—much like Joss when he created the original film—signed on to tell the story. She had grown up watching the Buffy series in its original run, passing each high school benchmark the same year the Slayer did. She wanted to balance her reinvention of the mythology with what she found so compelling about Buffy’s emotional arc, “the deep struggle she had with duty and destiny, that tug between what you’re supposed to be doing and what you want to be doing,” Anderson told the Los Angeles Times. “The fate of the world is on her shoulders, but some days she wakes up, and she just doesn’t want to do it. And are we doomed and destined to love someone? That conflict was very interesting to me.”

  Her pitch won over the Vertigo producers, and with Warner Bros. signed on, the press release went out on November 22, 2010. The response from fans and media critics was immediate, intense outrage.

  Genre reboots are nothing new. Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman have all been reimagined numerous times for both the big and the small screen, generally with little input from previous producers. But the prospect of rebooting a television series that had averaged only 4.5 million viewers over its seven-year run on two small, often-struggling networks, a series that itself was a reboot of a poorly received film, was widely considered unthinkable. The uproar was covered by mainstream media outlets that wouldn’t have bothered with Buffy when it premiered on the WB in 1997. That reaction was a testament to the passionate following that Joss Whedon had cultivated over the past thirteen years.

  Fans doubted that a newcomer with no connection to Joss would be able to capture the spirit that had defined the Buffy universe. Even Tim Minear, who earned Joss’s utmost trust in writing his characters, had felt uncomfortable when faced with writing Buffy Summers herself.

  Reaction from the Buffy actors was unanimously negative. Back when the first reboot rumors trickled out in 2009, Alyson Hannigan had said it was a very big mistake, that without Joss, it was just a story that shared the same title. After the official announcement, Anthony Stewart Head called the reboot “a hideous idea,” while David Boreanaz posted his reaction to the news on Twitter: a picture of himself pouting. Charisma Carpenter felt that it was an “opportunity to take something that was loved and cherished and lucrative and franchise it—and make more money from it.”

  “There’s no public outcry for a remake of Buffy, there’s only the opportunity in pop culture where vampires are very popular,” Seth Green said. “If Joss came out and said, ‘I want to make a new Buffy movie,’ even if he said, ‘I want to do it like the reboot of Spider-Man. I want to put Buffy back in high school and I want to tell a different story with this character,’ I think people would go with that. But the fact that people who are not connected to it and were not connected to the show or any of the mythology that was created going back to the movie—which everyone kind of agreed wasn’t a perfect version of its potential—you know, I think that really confuses people. It confuses the audience. They’re like, ‘How am I supposed to feel about this?’”

  Like Green, Sarah Michelle Gellar was not opposed to the idea that the series might one day be reimagined with a different actress in the title role. “I love the Buffy that I played and I’ll always be protective of her,” she says, “but if somebody else does it later on then it’s an honor to the character.” Still, she calls the proposed reboot “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Buffy is Joss.” She adds, “I hate to say this but it was a movie and it didn’t totally work and there was a reason why it didn’t work. You don’t relate with a story of a Valley girl Buffy in two hours. You have to get to know her. And by the way, as Joss says, I’m one of the lone fans of the movie—I love the movie.”

  As soon as the press release went out, Joss himself provided a more measured response:

  This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths—just because they can’t think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself. Obviously I have strong, mixed emotions about something like this…. I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER.

  In a frustrating turn of events, Buffy was getting an unnecessary reboot while The Cabin in the Woods remained on the shelf with no hope of making it to theaters any time soon. MGM’s financial situation continued to get worse, and Mary Parent left the studio as it spiraled down. As with Goners when Parent left Universal, Joss had lost his film’s champion, and things were looking very bleak for the horror tale.

  At least MGM’s issues came after shooting was done and the film was in good shape. Goddard and Joss were frustrated, but they found a little consolation in the idea that if Cabin never saw the light of day through proper channels, they could always leak it. “OK, if worse comes to worst, we can just let this out to our fan base. We’ll get it out,” Goddard laughs. “There was a lot of quoting of Serenity around that time: ‘You can’t stop the signal.’”

  A year later, the Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex would break the news that Whit Anderson’s script for the Buffy reboot had been rejected and the project was on hold until they found a new writer. “If you’re going to bring it back, you have to do it right,” one individual involved in the project said. “[Anderson] came in with some great ideas and she had reinvented some of the lore and it was pretty cool but in the end there just wasn’t enough on the page.”

  This announcement provoked far less of a response than the original press release. Perhaps fans still hoped that the whole thing would be abandoned. In any event, there was no doubt that if a new non-Whedonverse writer stepped up to take Anderson’s place, he or she would face another barrage of attacks.

  Marti Noxon told MTV that she couldn’t see anyone but Joss having success bringing Buffy back to the big screen. “I wouldn’t want to be the person trying to write it. And I worked on the show, but I would not want to be that [person] because the fans are very loyal. They’re excruciatingly loyal.”

  “Unless they hate you,” she added, “in which case they’re excruciating about that too.” Joss agreed: “The people who feel the most strongly about something will turn on you the most vociferously if they feel you’ve let them down…. You don’t get the big praise without getting the big criticism. Because people care. So. Much.”

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  AVENGERS ASSEMBLE

  Although Joss’s screenplay for The Avengers was in good enough shape to distribute to his main cast, that didn’t mean his screenwriting work on the project was at an end. He asked all the actors for their notes on the script and their characters so he could continue to refine things. “At the beginning I’m an open book,” Joss said. “So, ‘Tell me what it is that you don’t want to repeat or you feel like you didn’t explore.’”

  Scarlett Johansson felt the initial draft was a little confusing, because the storylines seemed “cobbled together.” On the other hand, Robert Downey Jr., quite notorious for taking command in his films and doing his own rewrites, was content once the storyline was agreed upon. “It wasn’t broke, so it’s not like we had to fix things,” he said. “With some of the Iron Man movies, I feel like more of a producer … but with this, it is a bit of a relief—it’s nice when the car drives all by itself.”

  Samuel L. Jackson, who’d been donning the mantle of Nick Fury since 2008’s Iron Man, found Joss’s outreach to be a new and welcome experience. “It was the first chance I had to actually be a part of the process in terms of being Nick Fury, understanding what the director was trying to do, what the story was about
,” he says. “A lot of times I don’t even know what the films are about; I just kind of show up and be the connector. But in this instance, Joss and I talked before the film started. He told me what his concept was, what he wanted Nick Fury to do, how he perceived him.”

  The director, in turn, called Jackson’s reaction to his call for feedback “my favorite response.” Joss recalled, “I was like, ‘Is there anything you’re particularly looking for…. Anything you’re looking for or anything you particularly want to avoid?’ [Jackson] was like, ‘Hell no. Thank you for asking. I don’t want to run. Don’t make me run a lot.’ Then on set he pointed to the page, ‘It says “Fury runs.”’ ‘I know, it’s just this one time.’”

  Although limited by his A-list cast’s other commitments, Joss also brought the actors together in smaller groups prior to the start of filming. One such meeting involved Joss, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Jeremy Renner.

  Renner knew Joss from his guest role on Angel back in 2000. Back then, Renner saw him as a Godfather-like character—lurking in the back, making sure that every detail was locked down, under his thumb. “But then I got it. He was such a funny, kind of awkward dude that I got along with right away,” he says. “It’s such a weird connection. Being a generous guy, he kept bringing me in for things always, and he liked me a lot more than I feel like I deserved.”

  The actor was also impressed by Joss’s ability to take in the diverse opinions of his actors without judgment. “Even the craziness of all the different sort of walks of life. It was like The Magnificent Seven—we all kind of just stand and hold our ground,” Renner says. “Joss is able to [be] an observer. Not like in a creepy way.”

  As a new arrival to the franchise, Mark Ruffalo was grateful to Joss for helping him get a handle on the character of the Hulk / Bruce Banner. “We spent a long time talking about the script and where we find Banner, how we find him, what state of mind is he in when we find him, what his journey ultimately becomes—you know, the fifteen minutes of screen time that he’ll have,” Ruffalo explains. “I talked a lot about how Joss would shoot it, and how he really wasn’t interested in doing it unless he kind of could do his own take on it, you know, and that was kind of my feeling too—what could we possibly do that hasn’t already been done with it?”

  Joss began shooting The Avengers on April 25, 2011, with Seamus McGarvey as his director of photography. Marvel had suggested another DP, an experienced action-movie cinematographer who had worked on one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films but was supposed to be “really mean.” “What part of that sentence was supposed to sell me?” Joss asked. He went with “nice Irishman” McGarvey instead. “It’s very important to have people around you who are in the spirit of the thing. And besides being ridiculously talented, Seamus is also quite fast, which is something else that I require on the set.”

  McGarvey’s previous films were smaller, more personal fare like High Fidelity (2000), The Hours (2002), and Atonement (2007), but Joss found his films beautiful and thought his aesthetic worked with his own plans for the film. “Joss and I were keen on having a very visceral and naturalistic quality to the image,” McGarvey said. “We wanted this to feel immersive and did not want a ‘comic book look’ that might distance an audience with the engagement of the film. We moved the camera a lot on Steadicam, cranes and on dollies to create kinetic images; and we chose angles that were dramatic, like low angles for heroic imagery.”

  The initial plan was to shoot in 3-D, which was the format Joss used when he directed a postcredits scene for Thor that teases the Avengers storyline. But after the equipment caused frustrating delays on that shoot, he decided not to use it for the movie itself. Instead, The Avengers would be converted into 3-D in postproduction.

  Like Nick Fury, Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson had appeared in most of the previous films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so Gregg was in an ideal position to compare Joss’s directorial work to that of two other directors in the franchise, Jon Favreau and Kenneth Branagh. Favreau had directed both Iron Man and Iron Man 2, and yet to Gregg those films felt very different from each other. “I feel like Jon and Robert [Downey Jr.]’s creative process was one that required a certain amount of evolution and improvisation every day,” he says. “They would take the words that were there and evolve them, and out of that chaos Tony Stark and the Iron Man universe came into being.”

  Thor director Kenneth Branagh had a lot of qualities that Favreau had—he was very funny and he loved to work with actors. Yet while he was open to whatever changes and interpretations developed on the day of shooting, Gregg says, “they were very much sticking to the script that was there and trying to be true to a kind of Shakespearian element of Thor’s world and yet keep them tethered to the same kind of version of Earth that was represented in Iron Man and Iron Man 2.”

  To Gregg, Joss compared favorably to his predecessors; he was “hilariously funny, loves actors, and loves what they do and gets what they do.” Gregg adds, “It was interesting to me that he gets what they do in a way just as profoundly as Kenneth and Jon, who are both amazing professional actors.” (Unsurprisingly, Joss might have been even more of a stickler about performing the script as written than Branagh; Samuel L. Jackson calls him a “line policeman.”)

  Mark Ruffalo was also impressed by how well Joss understood the actor’s craft. “Joss came to my rescue on many occasions to get me in the right spot. It’s surprising how giddy he is with actors, considering people write off that genre as just fluff, as just pure entertainment. But he takes his actors through the paces, and he knows how to talk to an actor,” he says. “A lot of directors don’t; they can give you ideas, and they explain it to you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that what they’re telling you is actable, and a lot of times you’ve got to translate what the director’s saying into making that actable. That’s your job, you know; that’s what we get paid for. But Joss knows how to do it—he mainlines it, he always knew exactly what to say to me to get me to where I needed to be, and I appreciated that. That’s not common.

  “I love Banner’s introduction. It’s one of my favorite scenes, and he knew how to play that. Joss had a great bit where there was just a baby cradle there, and Banner says, ‘I don’t always get what I want.’ Joss suggested that maybe he goes to that cradle and he rocks it. It’s just a light thing, but it sort of says a lot. And I just thought that was a really great choice. I was pissed because I didn’t come up with it myself.”

  Cobie Smulders appreciated that Joss “was so protective over me, and he was so protective over Maria Hill. She’s in comic books, but she’s relatively new in the movies. So it was really important for him to give her a voice.”

  As usual, Joss continued to rewrite his script as they were filming. The actors were surprised how quickly he could come up with dialogue that immediately made the scene better. Downey recalled a moment toward the end that brought Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man together. “It needed to say a lot and it needed to also not just be one line but it couldn’t be two pages, so he said, ‘Give me a second’ … It wound up being four lines which included all of us, and he gave us, I think, three pages of options,” he said. “The guy is really just kind of a machine, but it feels organic.”

  Chris Evans agreed. “That’s a great way to put it. He’s just so good as a writer—he’s amazing. The banter is so witty … his set-up lines are seamless, they work, they’re right, so when this great exchange happens, you are like, ‘Man, that is so clever.’ If, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work, he can come up with a new exchange just like that.”

  While Nick Fury and Agent Coulson serve as a through line that unites the various films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was a more important constant on the set of The Avengers. Production spanned the country, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to locations around Ohio to New York City, and actors came and went as the film’s sprawling ensemble format required, but Joss was always there at the center of it all.

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bsp; “Nobody was doing it every day, eighteen hours a day, except Joss,” explains Gregg. “People would come in and work for a couple of weeks. They’d do their combat stuff, their training, their listening, and we got to hang out a couple of times at night, which, I guess, that was the most fun, maybe. They were happy to be there. They had great stuff to do thanks to Joss. It’s a very different experience if the script isn’t that good or if the director has a kind of megalomaniac power streak, which just isn’t Joss’s MO. He runs the ship kind of—to me he was the unseen Avenger. He was part of the gang.”

  Renner noticed Joss’s good-natured dedication as well. “All of us would just pass the baton and come in and do our little bit and get the heck out, while he was there just trudging away every day,” he says. “Every once in a while, I’d pop in and do one of my bits, and I could see, like, oh yeah, it’s starting to wear on him a little bit. But really he never lets it affect anybody else—his professionalism is always right on.”

  “It was grueling, as big shoots are,” says Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige, “but Joss is able to get an atmosphere where everyone’s productive, everyone is pleasant, everyone is about the work,” Feige says. “He’s a self-deprecating guy. It’s fun to sit behind the monitor with him and hear him tear apart his own words or tear apart a shot.”

  Joss even found a way to relax amid his nonstop work—though he might sometimes have tried to resist it. Much of the crew had been with the shoot for the first three months in Albuquerque and the following six weeks in Ohio. As production was nearing a close in Cleveland and moving on to a much smaller shoot with a smaller crew for three days in New York, Tom Hiddleston realized that there wouldn’t be a wrap party with everyone before they left. He wanted to find a way to thank the crew, whom he felt not only had been extremely kind to him, a Brit on foreign shores, but were the unsung heroes of this huge blockbuster.