Joss Whedon: The Biography Read online

  “It’s almost like Kai designed the house for this movie to be shot in,” Jay Hunter says. “I don’t think anybody who watches the movie is going to think this is Joss’s house unless they’ve heard that. Because it feels like the location was chosen for the movie—it feels very appropriate. But when you first hear, ‘Oh, we shot the movie in my house,’ it sounds like it was just a matter of convenience. It was, but then also it fit it so well. It was a perfect location.”

  It was also the most practical choice, because there was no way that they could have gotten a location and permits to shoot in the short amount of time Joss had away from The Avengers. Plus, Kai said, “It was also a great way to finally get me to clean the basement. I had been putting that off for a year and we used it for Dogberry and Verges’ interrogation room.”

  The Whedons opened up nearly their entire house for the film, both to the cast and crew and to the viewers who would ultimately see it immortalized on screen. It was a whole new level of intimacy even for a man who had been deeply connected to his fans for years. “We struggled with that a little bit, especially when hiring extras,” Joss says. “But, at the end of the day, love the space, and it remains in its own way anonymous. It’s performing a part; it’s slightly in disguise. [The movie] isn’t a tour of the house—it is sort of nether space, and the fact that it’s black and white too takes it apart from our day-to-day life.”

  Being in Joss’s home also changed the tone of shooting slightly. “If we had been shooting this in some other location, I’m sure more things would have been broken or something, or more holes would have been hit through the wall by mistake,” Hunter explains. “Everyone knew that ‘Hey, this is the man’s house. Let’s walk on eggshells and be very delicate.’”

  Yet the home wasn’t in a bubble, and real life kept intruding. At times it was charming, like seeing Arden and Squire come down for their breakfast at 6 AM as everyone else was arriving for the day’s shoot. More often it came with stress, like when demolition started on the house next door the day before shooting began. That sent Joss into a state of panic, but Kai simply went into producer mode and convinced the workers to take a break when they were shooting. That same day, the sewer went out and the toilets backed up, and the entire sewer line needed to be redone. Then the people across the street decided to sand their floors. And suddenly Kai became aware that her home, which had seemed like the quietest place, was under the flight path of a number of airplanes and helicopters every day.

  Kai had checked with the police and found out that she didn’t need a permit to shoot on her own property, but she later found out when an officer showed up that the streets were city property and people couldn’t park there. He had actually come by to respond to a neighbor’s complaint, and he shut down their production when he learned that they didn’t have any permits. Joss suggested that they take a break as Kai quickly headed off to recheck the permit situation, but Clark Gregg pushed him to continue shooting. They had been filming the wedding scene, in which Claudio announces that Hero slept with someone the night before and Leonato, shamed, verbally attacks his daughter. When Joss called “action,” Gregg started “yelling at his daughter [even louder] than he had before,” the director recalled. “And I, of course, was filled with terror that this was going to get us all thrown in the Big House…. We made Shakespeare against the law. We fought Johnny Law for art.”

  Strangely, working on a blockbuster film with A-list actors who had strong opinions about their characters set Joss up well to shoot a low-budget film in a short time frame. His infamous determination to have everything how he wanted it—from costumes to line readings—had to give way to a necessary flexibility when logistics didn’t match up with desire.

  One scene, in particular, posed a huge obstacle: Joss and Hunter had discussed the setting of a scene with Beatrice and Benedick, one that Joss felt should be shot in late afternoon. He had many stills of the actors that he’d taken in rehearsals, when the light was hitting the staircase and his courtyard in such a beautiful way. He wanted to capture that look in the scene; it was the first thing about the film for which he declared, “This is how I want it to be.”

  With about five days left before production ended, Hunter had spent an entire day observing light patterns at the house, determining how they shifted and changed throughout the day. They would use his observations to inform the shooting order of scenes—to ensure that, among other things, they had the ideal natural lighting for the scene in question. So of course on the day they shot it, the sky was completely overcast. With such a small budget, there was no big lighting crew to simulate the sun. Nor did they have enough money and time to save the scene for another day. They had no choice but to just roll with the visual hand they were dealt.

  Instead of the “backlit, golden sunlight kind of elements” they had planned, “this fog rolled in as the scene progressed, and it was kind of creating the opposite mood of what we had originally intended,” Hunter recalls. By the end of that shot, Joss realized that Hero’s funeral procession, which was to follow this Beatrice and Benedick scene, had been shot a couple of days earlier and then, too, there had been a crazy amount of fog. So Joss ultimately shifted the order of the scenes, setting a melancholy tone as the fog rolls in and around the marchers, then gradually lightening the mood as Benedick scripts a sonnet for Beatrice while on her staircase and the fog seems to recede.

  “It’s like a wild, magical moment,” Hunter explains. “Some directors and DPs would probably have lost their minds, because if you have this [image] set and then the film gods give you something different, it can be devastating. But Joss decided to just roll with it, and the film gods ended up giving us this huge gift.”

  Joss easily guided his actors into the emotions and actions he wanted, but found that he had certain limitations. “Apart from a basic understanding of what people were saying, I didn’t research the text,” he said. When it came to explaining exactly what Shakespeare meant by a line, he’d summon Denisof over. In addition to studying the Bard at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Denisof had worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so he slipped easily into the role of Shakespeare interpreter.

  The entire film was shot secretly in twelve days, over one week and three weekends. Joss took one short break to support sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen with her “Club Mo” team at the 2011 Walk for Lupus Now in Los Angeles. Along with Felicia Day, Joss helped the team raise over $70,000 for the charity.

  Tancharoen had been diagnosed with lupus as a teenager, and she was dealing with the side effects of the chemotherapy she was on to fight the disease. She wasn’t sure if she’d be physically able to attend the walk, but Joss showed up extra early, arriving only after her two friends who organized the group. “I was worried I wouldn’t get a T-shirt,” he said; Jed had told him that he wasn’t getting one of the limited-edition custom shirts made by Firefly costume designer Shawna Trpcic, because younger brother Zack had raised more money than him. Like showing up on his first day of Roseanne with a hundred no. 2 pencils, he knew it was probably a joke but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Much Ado remained a closely guarded secret until after principal photography had wrapped. On October 24, 2011, Nathan Fillion was the first to announce it by tweeting out a photo of himself, Sean Maher, and Joss with the message “Hey, guys! Let’s make a movie!” Immediately, Whedon fans were abuzz with excitement.

  Fillion also tweeted the link to a website, MuchAdoTheMovie.com. The site was simple, with a photo of Kranz clad in scuba gear and holding a cocktail, standing in an infinity pool. Internet speculation about the project was wild—was it a film, another Web series, something entirely different? Soon a press release was added to the site, explaining that Joss had just wrapped on a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. “Filmed in just 12 days entirely on location in exotic Santa Monica, the film features a stellar cast of beloved (or soon to be beloved) actors … all dedicated to the idea that … the joy of workin
g on a passion project surrounded by dear friends, admired colleagues and an atmosphere of unabashed rapture far outweighs their hilariously miniature paychecks.” The press release also officially announced the establishment of Bellwether Pictures as a micro-studio for “the production of small, independent narratives for all media, embracing a DIY ethos and newer technologies.”

  Joss jumped back into editing The Avengers with a renewed spirit, which he credited to Much Ado. “Making The Avengers was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous,” he said. “I missed my friends and I missed my home, so I decided to throw them all on camera which is the only way I seem to know to relate to people.” Emotionally and mentally renewed, he was able to take a fresh look at the initial assembly of Avengers footage that he’d put together before his sabbatical. It had been running way too long for a feature film, but he’d been having a difficult time finding a way for the story to address everything that it needed to in just over two hours. “When I came back from Much Ado,” he said, “without any rancor or confusion, I was able to cut the film down to length and readily focus on the things that mattered. I think I would have come to that one way or another, but Much Ado sped it up.”

  36

  THE YEAR OF JOSS WHEDON

  As 2012 approached, it was quickly shaping up to be the year of Joss Whedon films. The Avengers was coming out in the spring, Much Ado About Nothing was in postproduction, and The Cabin in the Woods finally had a release date that wasn’t threatened by financial problems or studio tinkering. It was an exciting time for Joss, but also a daunting one—particularly where the Marvel film was concerned.

  The May 4 premiere of The Avengers was set in stone, but much post-production work remained. In addition to finalizing the edit, Joss also had to oversee the film’s conversion to 3-D, as well as the completion of the thousands of special effects shots, which artists had been working on since even before filming began. That included all the scenes involving the Hulk, many of Iron Man’s flight and battle scenes, and many aspects of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. He had help from editor Lisa Lassek, who, like Joss, had developed her skills and keen storytelling sense through more than a decade with the Whedonverse. After starting as an assistant editor on Angel and working on Buffy and Firefly, she’d moved up with Joss on Serenity and The Cabin in the Woods before taking on The Avengers alongside Captain America editor Jeffrey Ford. (Her rise was no doubt an inspiration to Joss’s current assistant and Much Ado coproducer Daniel Kaminsky, who edited Much Ado on his laptop in Joss’s office while the blockbuster was being shaped.)

  Publicity for the film had also begun in earnest. The same month that Joss was filming Much Ado, a New York Comic Con panel wooed fans with Avengers footage. When the first full-length trailer was released on iTunes on October 11, it garnered over ten million downloads in the first twenty-four hours, a new record for trailers on the service.

  It was a lot of hype for Joss to live up to—especially considering he’d never helmed a high-budget blockbuster before—but he still managed to get the job done. “This was a movie that came in on time and under budget in our production period, which is very impressive for a director who hadn’t tackled anything of this scale,” Kevin Feige says. “I think it is, in large part, due to his experience on his own—producing his own shows. And it was great to see him able to manage that while at the same time getting the performances.”

  The Cabin in the Woods, of course, had proceeded less smoothly from script to screen. When Lionsgate bought the film in July 2011, Joss and Drew Goddard had felt battered from being in limbo for so long; they no longer had the energy to protect their film. And ironically, the movie they had written as a critique of modern horror tales was being released by the same studio as the Saw series. But they discovered that Lionsgate truly cared about Cabin, which in turn helped them believe in it again, and reignited the vision and enthusiasm they’d been drained of.

  They also realized that there was a positive side to the film’s delay when Cabin headlined the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2012. So far removed from the struggles of production, SXSW felt like one giant four-day party, where they were just so excited to be out and have people finally see this film they had loved so much. “Usually, by the time you get to the film release, it all feels like business. You have to do these promotional things, and it feels like work,” Goddard says. “Whereas with Cabin, it was sort of like seeing an old friend again that you hadn’t seen in a while. It was like, ‘Oh, let’s just celebrate.’” Their excitement was returned tenfold by the fans, who had been waiting to see it for years and were rewarded for their patience with an engaging new spin on the horror genre.

  The festival audience loved it, and when Cabin was released a month later, on April 13, many critics agreed. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote that “by turning splatter formula on its empty head, Cabin shows you can unleash a fire-breathing horror film without leaving your brain or your heart on the killing floor.” Roger Ebert praised Joss and Goddard for constructing Cabin “almost as a puzzle for horror fans to solve. Which conventions are being toyed with? Which authors and films are being referred to? Is the film itself an act of criticism?”

  Not every reviewer felt that the film’s deconstruction of horror conventions made for a compelling example of the genre. Some thought that Joss and Goddard had fallen short of horror’s traditional thrills by being too enamored of their own gags. The Hollywood Reporter called Cabin “a hollow exercise in self-reflexive cleverness that’s not nearly as ingenious as it seems to think,” and the L.A. Times felt that it was one big “inside joke.”

  But word of mouth about the film was strong, drawing more than just Whedon devotees into movie theaters. In its opening weekend, Cabin grossed $14.7 million domestically, and it would pull in $66 million worldwide by the end of its run. People immediately started asking about Joss and Goddard’s next project—as if The Avengers weren’t taking up enough of Joss’s time. Variety suggested that the two take on Catching Fire, the upcoming sequel to The Hunger Games, an idea that was embraced online by excited fans of that series and the Whedonverse.

  “It’s the nature of it,” Goddard says. “Those games are fun to play, when people ask, ‘What are you doing next?’ But the nice thing I’ve learned from working with Joss is that he always said, ‘Look, I’ve never taken a job for money. I’ve never taken a job just because it pays well. I only take jobs because they speak to me, and I feel like there’s something interesting emotionally to relate to in these jobs.’ And if you just stick to that rule, it ends up guiding your career. And so it sounds so simple, yet it’s difficult to maintain sometimes. Especially when you’re getting offered nice things, like the Hunger Games of the world. But if you just write what speaks to you, it all tends to work out.”

  The Avengers had a splashy Hollywood premiere on April 11, 2012, and the positive buzz kept growing as the film went into wide release a month later. It was hailed as a colossal summer blockbuster with heart—with precisely the kind of emotional touchstones that tend to be lost when comic book lore is translated to the big screen. The story resonated with adults who understood the nuances of the character development, and the children who loved the thrilling superheroics. “I have kids running up to me all the time saying, ‘I’m always angry,’” Mark Ruffalo laughs, quoting Bruce Banner’s signature line before Hulking out.

  “As human beings we want to be superhuman but we know that we’re fallible, and Joss allows us to see ourselves in these superhumans—that’s our touch point to the fantastic,” Ruffalo says. “It’s no different than the stories of the saints and the gods—it’s our modern version. We want to put our stories in context, and he really tapped into that in a way that’s astounding.”

  And it’s quite fitting that many fans connected most strongly to Scarlett Johansson’s turn as Black Widow—a complex, powerful female character. Her role in the film is not a lighthearted one, nor is it a story of redemption,
which is why Joss was so drawn to her. “She doesn’t live in a hero’s world; she lives in a very noir/duplicitous world … and there’s a darkness to her and her past,” he explained. Black Widow is, as Hawkeye says, a spy, not a soldier, yet she readily joins the fight. At no point is she the “token” female of the group; from the moment we meet her—tied to a chair clad in a tight black dress, allowing herself to be interrogated by Russian mobsters while she’s actually pumping them for information—she is clearly in control. Throughout the film, her “superpower” is the way she manipulates people—quite often making them believe that she is weak and easily broken. It’s only when she’s being chased through the bowels of the Helicarrier by the Hulk, the one person she cannot reason with, that she is truly shaken.

  The way that the Hulk overpowers her can be read as Joss’s latest retelling of his childhood terror at the world around him. For many women watching the scene, it’s also a reminder of the lessons life has taught them—that they must be constantly vigilant, because even the “nice guys” can turn into monsters. Black Widow runs for her life, dodging Hulk’s attacks, until he catches up and throws her against a wall. She’s cowed, letting the others take charge in taking the green monster down, and shortly thereafter it takes a moment for her to answer Nick Fury’s summons to the next battle. In writing this scene, Joss imbued her with the spirit of Buffy—empowered to kick ass but aware that defeat is a possibility in every battle. It’s always about getting back up, no matter how slowly one does it.

  The prominence of Black Widow also sparked conversation about the lack of female superheroes in feature films. In the past thirty years, an average of only two superhero movies per decade have centered on a female superhero: Supergirl (1984) and Red Sonja (1985); Tank Girl (1995) and Barb Wire (1996); Catwoman (2004) and Elektra (2005). The disappointing box office receipts of Catwoman, Elektra, and Supergirl in particular are held up in the industry as irrefutable evidence that a female superhero film will never be successful—never mind that those films were just not very good. Joss never found such arguments persuasive. “Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, You see? It can’t be done. It’s stupid,” he said.