Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  Hiddleston decided to throw an all-night party at the House of Blues (they had been doing night shoots, so everyone’s body clock was set to stay up all night). But the night of the party was right before they were scheduled to film a big scene, in which Loki crashes a party at an art gallery and flips a man over and takes out his eyeball. Joss sent Hiddleston a note to let him know that he was exhausted and didn’t know if he could make it: “I’ll try and come for half an hour. Salute you, then head back and keep writing, and keep cutting, and keep thinking.”

  “Yeah, he came to the party,” Hiddleston laughs. “And then he was the first person on the dance floor and the last person to leave.”

  It was not the only time during the shoot that Joss used dancing to unwind. He would spend weekend downtime going to dance clubs with the cast. And Joss, Gregg, Renner, and Hiddleston confirmed that there was “some Avengers affinity” for the video game Dance Dance Revolution.

  But Joss had always loved to dance. After all, it’s how he impressed Kai the first time they met. Sister-in-law and Dr. Horrible collaborator Maurissa Tancharoen confirms that Joss “is not just a big dancer. He is a dancing machine. A dancing fiend. Whenever there is music playing, he does not care where he is, he will start dancing. And soon enough, a circle forms around him, and everyone is dancing. Seriously. Anywhere. If he could dance twenty-four seven, he would.”

  Joe Quesada, editor in chief of Marvel Comics, calls Joss “the most enthusiastic white boy dancing fool that I have ever seen in my entire life. He’s that kind of dancer that I wish I could be, which is ‘Hey there’s nobody dancing on the dance floor—I’ll change that!’ He’ll just go out there, and then everybody’s dancing.”

  The most distinctive description came from Eliza Dushku. “He has this crazy-legs dance, and that’s what I lovingly, affectionately call him. His knees are double jointed or something and they pop out to the sides, and nobody can replicate his dance. His crazy-legs dance is a genius creation that only he can demonstrate.” (It sounds remarkably like the “Dance of Joy,” which Joss performed in a cameo as the demon Numfar in the Angel episode “Through the Looking Glass.”) Dushku once joined Joss at a super-trendy club to go dancing. He was decked out in khakis, a button-down shirt, and Reebok sneakers. “Boy just had such swagger, and we danced for like four or five hours. Some people came in and joined our circle, but he was the star of the room.”

  “He’s a grown-ass man, and he takes care of business,” says Clark Gregg, “but like a lot of great creative people, he’s still really deeply in touch with this kind of fantastical, energetic childlike qualities that we really love to play. You really see the joy—that joyous side that a lot of grown-ups lose track of, a kind of Peter Pan side that comes out in his desire to go get bacchanalian at night.” Gregg found a kinship working with Joss and a new inspiration on the dance floor. When his wife asked what he wanted to do for his birthday, Gregg responded, “I think I want to go Joss style. I just want a fantastic party and I just want to dance until I can’t move anymore.”

  Back on the Avengers set, Joss the dancing fiend became Joss the perfectionist. He insisted on being involved in even the seemingly minor details of production. “From my own experience, because he wrote it, he did a part of everything,” Cobie Smulders says. “How my hair is, how I look in my wardrobe, how’s the strap. ‘What about this light here, can we move that?’ ‘I think you need to be a bit tighter here, switch this up a little bit.’ ‘I think this line needs to be dripping a little bit.’ He’s so hands-on, and it’s basically because he cares about the characters.”

  His exactness even carried over to his daily drink orders, which had to be made precisely to his specifications, a combination of distilled water, lemon juice, agave, and cayenne pepper. He would drink eight bottles a day on set. He gave one to Smulders, who found it gave her quite the rush. “I thanked him for it,” she laughs. But she understood the need for both the extra energy and the routine. “That’s the only routine you can have on the set of a crazy movie. That’s the only thing you can hold on to.”

  Jeremy Renner marveled at Joss’s ability to keep so many facets of such a huge production moving. “I don’t know who else could have done The Avengers, by the way. Pulled all those people together,” he says. “In my experience on The Avengers, there’s so many people to appease and to make feel good or to wrangle in, and he tracks everything. He’s just on it, and you just know you’re in good hands when he’s there.”

  “When you’re doing a movie like The Avengers,” explains Kevin Feige, “it basically means you have six A-list stars who are used to starring in their own movies. Every one of our characters and every one of the actors has carried their own films. And people have asked, ‘Well, [is it hard to deal with] all those egos on set?’ And the truth of the matter is, all of the actors we have are as excited as we are about this movie and about putting this together. So if they have egos they certainly have kept them in check. But I do think that Joss led by example in that regard. Joss does not have a giant ego, does not go around beating his chest.”

  Robert Downey Jr. prided himself on his cantankerous attitude while filming movies, often starting each day “refusing to do what [he’d] signed on to do.” He “happily” brought that attitude along to The Avengers. “I just thought ‘How are you gonna put all of us clowns together? He’s wearing a suit, he’s all jacked up, he’s so and so and poor Mark Ruffalo, he’s gonna out do us,’” he said six weeks into production. “And I have to say Joss Whedon is nailing it. He’s so smart and so good. And it’s gonna be great. I can’t believe I just said it, I never could’ve believed this but it’s gonna be great.”

  Chris Evans, who’d previously starred not only in Captain America but also in two Fantastic Four films as the Human Torch, enthused, “Personally, just the stuff I have been able to do on this movie, to date, this has been the most geeked out that I have felt on a movie set. I literally come sometimes and get truly, truly excited about coming to work, and that’s a good feeling.” Reports from the set echoed Evans’s sentiments. The pressure on Joss and the cast to deliver a film that would satisfy the expectations of comic book fans and a blockbuster-hungry studio was balanced with the determination to have fun.

  Joss and Hiddleston, for instance, got to indulge their fanboy love of Die Hard. For every Loki speech, Joss would explain what kind of performance he wanted Hiddleston to give him: vulnerable, complete megalomania, absolutely terrifying—or the Alan Rickman. “When I actually did the Alan Rickman for the first time, the crew didn’t know what was going on,” he laughs. “They burst out laughing—they just loved it.”

  Joss also gave into the absurdity of the moment from time to time. Hiddleston describes one instance while they were shooting the scene at the end of the film in which Loki gets Hulk-smashed. Ruffalo had already taped his motion capture performance for the CGI Hulk at the Industrial Light & Magic studios, so Hiddleston was the only performer on set, throwing himself into the six-foot-by-two-foot trenches that the art department had carved into the floor of Stark Tower. “[I was] literally jumping into the air and hurling myself to the floor,” he says. “Joss had written this wonderful moment where Loki essentially looks like he’s being stunned almost to death—apart from emitting a very quiet, high-pitched squeal.”

  With two cameras on him, Hiddleston was lying in the trench and trying to produce the highest pitch at the quietest volume imaginable without moving. It was a challenge to stay so still and also deliver this very specific squeal—all the while holding a look of inconceivable shock and terror. And behind the camera, Joss got the giggles.

  “I could hear him chuckling by the monitor—he has a laugh that is not loud, but it’s not quiet,” Hiddleston says. “I could see his shoulders shaking. As soon as I realized that he was laughing, I started laughing, and then it’s one of those things where I couldn’t get it back. We were both gone.

  “I remember that moment really fondly. Because we’re sho
oting this incredible, enormously expensive superhero film—there is so much pressure on both of our shoulders, and both of us are in fits of hysterics,” he says. “And possibly unable to complete the day because we’re having so much fun.”

  Kevin Feige credits Joss with encouraging “this collaborative spirit across the whole cast and the whole crew that kept everything running very smoothly. Frankly, on days in which some of the cast weren’t shooting they would come just to watch. Mark Ruffalo would bring his ten-year-old son just to watch Evans and Downey do a scene as Cap and Iron Man. You don’t see that all the time, and that’s a testament to Joss and to the way he ran that set.”

  Principal photography wrapped in September 2011, with a two-day shoot for the final battle in New York City. By then, no one would have faulted the cast and director for being exhausted or even a little sick of the film. But the Big Apple brought a new energy to the set, as citygoers gathered all around them, excited to see the Avengers. Parents brought their children, pie-eyed and awed, to meet their favorite superheroes.

  A photo of Loki giving a piggyback ride to a five-year-old boy with a Captain America shield became a viral phenomenon. The story behind it is even more charming: The boy, Edison, had seen Captain America for the second time in the theater the day before. When he and his mom happened upon the set, he was excited to see Nick Fury’s car, and it was Hiddleston who asked if he could put Edison on his shoulders. Later, Chris Evans’s mom beckoned an uncostumed Captain America over so he could meet him, and the two discussed proper techniques for shield handling and enemy fighting. Then Joss interrupted the two because they had a shot to get. He turned to Edison and, fully understanding the moment, said, “Sorry, little buddy, I need Captain America for a minute.”

  Another youngster had the experience of a lifetime: Mark Ruffalo’s son, Keen, who was about the same age Joss was when he fell in love with superheroes. Keen came to set often, and it was as if everything he saw was the most incredibly awesome thing that anyone could ever have conceived of. Especially Hiddleston as Loki. After every take, the boy would gush over the actor.

  “Like, ‘Tom, that was so awesome, you have no idea!’” Hiddleston says, emphatically reenacting the boy’s reaction. “And then he would tell me exactly what had happened in the scene as if I didn’t know,” he laughs. “ ‘And then you said this, and then Hulk comes in and he does this, and then what happens …’ He was just reliving it in his own mind, it was so wonderful.

  “I remember so clearly, like it was yesterday, the excitement of watching Christopher Reeve as Superman, the feeling of watching Indiana Jones films.” Hiddleston pauses. “He just was extraordinary, young Keen Ruffalo. He reminded me why I was doing it in a way—not that I needed reminding, ’cause the kid in me is alive and well. He was so honest, and so pure, and it was so inspiring to have that response. It made me feel so warm and fuzzy to be at work.”

  Kai visited Joss in New York as he finished his last week of shooting. He had a break coming up between the end of principal photography and an intense postproduction phase. And still more work lay ahead: in July, Lionsgate had announced that it had obtained the worldwide distribution rights to The Cabin in the Woods, slating it for an April 2012 release. That would put it out just weeks before The Avengers was set to bow in May.

  So it made sense for Joss to take a moment to breathe while he could. One idea was to head over to Venice, Italy. (“Not for a month like it says on the Internet—yeah, that’s a dream. I have children,” Kai cracks.) Joss also discussed hosting another Shakespeare reading; Kai suggested that he film it, as they had discussed in the past. For years, they had wanted to do a Sundays with Shakespeare series—they could film readings in their home, then distribute the videos to high schools to help inspire more students’ interest in the Bard.

  From there, suddenly, the idea evolved into producing a full Shakespeare movie. It was Kai’s contention that Joss didn’t need to get away physically so much as mentally. “He told me all he remembers is me saying, like, ‘Why don’t we do it instead of going to Venice? Venice isn’t sinking that fast,’” Kai says.

  After shooting a multimillion-dollar blockbuster and spending months away from their loved ones, most people would take a break to decompress—maybe run away for some decadent vacation. Most people wouldn’t decide to fund and shoot an independent film in their home in about thirty days. Joss Whedon isn’t most people.

  35

  SOMETHING PERSONAL: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

  The incredible success of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog had inspired Joss and Kai to seriously pursue the possibility of establishing a small-scale “digital studio” that would allow them to make what they wanted, how they wanted, with their own money. But the very week they were to begin consulting with their financial manager on the logistics of opening such a studio, Joss signed on to direct The Avengers. Still, the endeavor continued; while Joss was away directing the blockbuster, Kai was working on producing another one of his scripts, In Your Eyes. They planned for it to be the first film from Bellwether Pictures, named for Lee’s unpublished novel.

  Now, however, with principal photography on The Avengers completed, another small-scale project began to take precedence. When he returned home, Joss reached out to his friend and fellow Shakespeare buff Alexis Denisof. “I think he was mourning for a passion project, so by the time he got to my house having said he wanted to chat about something, he had already decided that he wanted to do a full-blown movie shoot,” Denisof says. “He proposed to me that we shoot Much Ado About Nothing at his house on a super-low budget. The lines would be memorized and he’d make a lot of cuts [to Shakespeare’s text], and he had his own ideas about the style of it. We talked about the style, the interpretation, and we got extremely excited about it, and it just went from there.”

  After more than a decade, Joss’s unofficial repertory company was still mounting its private Shakespeare readings, although in recent years, they’d been a bit fewer and further between, due to everyone’s family and other commitments. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a hot commodity in the later years. In one performance, Fran Kranz played Francis Flute and Alan Tudyk was Bottom. “[Within that,] we had to go up and perform Pyramus and Thisbe,” Kranz recalls. “I was Thisbe, [Alan] was my Pyramus, and Alexis Denisof was the wall [that the two characters speak through]—it was hilarious.”

  Amy Acker had played Helena, one of the young lovers, in one of their readings of the play, and Dollhouse’s Olivia Williams assumed the same role in another. “I begged to play Helena, as I am now too old to play her on stage and I wanted to play it before I die,” she says. Williams’s performance in a reading of Hamlet may even have had an influence on her Dollhouse character. “I have always believed that Gertrude [Hamlet’s mother] has a drink problem, so I played her drunk at his house, aided by a rather fine bottle of Grgich Hills [wine], and in the following [Dollhouse] episode it emerged that Adelle was no stranger to the gin.”

  Colbie Smulders, however, learned the hard way that Joss was very serious about these readings. Joss told her about an upcoming reading that was scheduled to start at two o’clock, and she said she might not be able to make it until six. “I never heard back from him,” she laughs. “I was so jealous when Alexis and Alyson [Hannigan] would go or tell me about it. Alexis trained at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), and I went to LAMDA for a summer semester, so I like to think that I would be able to hold [my own, but] I’d probably totally embarrass myself.”

  Joss and Kai had to move extremely quickly from talking about a Much Ado About Nothing film to taking it seriously to coming up with a team to make it happen, and the process was never without doubt. After all, Joss only had a short window of time to write, cast, and shoot before he needed to dive into editing for The Avengers.

  “I said to her, ‘There’s no way I can adapt the text and prep the movie and get a cast together in one month,’” Joss remembered. “And she was like, ‘Really? Be
cause November doesn’t work for us.’” But what concerned him more than the time crunch was that he didn’t have a personal take on the play. “A production, let alone a movie, without a point of view is inevitably soggy,” he said.

  Much Ado About Nothing had long been a favorite of Joss’s and his cast of merry players, ever since the performance one Sunday with Alexis Denisof as Benedick and Amy Acker as Beatrice. It is a play about the power of wordsmithery, how it can be used for anything from the bickering that covers up mutual desire to the false rumors that can break spirits and ruin reputations. Yet while Joss loved the text, it was not one of the many plays he’d studied in depth at Winchester, and he didn’t feel as strong a pull toward it as he had toward some of Shakespeare’s other works. Plus, he had enjoyed Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version and didn’t know what else he had to say “about a movie where half of the title says ‘About Nothing,’ since I tend to like things that are about something.”

  His vision of the story was also colored by the first live performance he’d seen of the play, which was broadly comedic. While living in England, Joss had gone to a performance at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and returned two more times because he was “floored” by the absurd and “over the top” hilarity. It was difficult for him to embrace the idea that this play could be more than just a comedy.