Joss Whedon is a man of many talents. He’s written and directed some of my favourite TV shows and films of all time, with his latest film, Much Ado About Nothing, opening over the weekend on our shores. So when the possibility arose to attend BAFTA’s Joss Whedon: A Life in Pictures on Friday night, I naturally jumped at the opportunity.
Of all of the people in the industry, Whedon’s work has had the greatest influence on me. I grew up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and have had nothing but love for everything I’ve seen Whedon do since then.
Talking to a sold-out audience at BAFTA’s Princess Anne Theatre in Piccadilly, interviewed by the BBC’s Francine Stock, the evening started at the beginning, with his childhood.
Both his parents and his grandfather were writers, with his father and grandfather writers for television as he would go on to become. And coming from a family of writers, he spoke about always know he’d wanted to do something in the arts; something creative. It wasn’t always necessarily going to be writing, so long as it was in the arts. But he confesses now that, above all else, he would have ‘Writer’ engraved on his tombstone.
With time as a very limited factor, he covered a little about his public school experience (private school for anyone reading this across the Atlantic) here in the UK at Winchester College, before going to Wesleyan University back in the States in the mid-’80s. From there, he got work writing for the likes of Roseanne, before making his feature debut as a writer on the frequently-forgotten film, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Even amongst Whedon fans, the original movie is often forgotten, in large part because Whedon himself seems to lament the fact that the finished product wasn’t what he’d set out when he wrote the film. Thankfully, that was of course not the end of the character, and when the small screen came calling a few years later, we were given one of the greatest and most influential TV shows in recent memory. But that’s skipping ahead slightly.
Like the original Buffy movie, one of Whedon’s lesser-known credits is his work penning the first Toy Story movie. He spoke of working on a daily basis alongside the likes of Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter, who have gone on to become some of the biggest names at Pixar, and the brilliant, mutually-beneficial experience he had with them, teaching them about crafting story and being taught by them about the art side of the film.
From there, the evening continued chronologically from one of Whedon’s works to the next, with a handful of well-chosen clips from his films and TV series to help illustrate a handful of points.
The clip from Buffy, taken from Tabula Rasa (Season 6 Episode 8, which Whedon knew off the top of his head – ‘Yeah, I’m a nerd.’), perfectly highlights the biggest takeaway from the whole night: Whedon gives everything to his art. He wants it to be the best it can possibly be.
With Tabula Rasa, Whedon and his crew were following the show’s renowned musical episode, Once More, with Feeling. The episode has gone on to become a real fan-favourite, and now makes an annual appearance screened at Comic-Con.
He recalls the desire to have the follow-up episode raise the bar even further than the musical, to show that this was a programme which didn’t have a single episode that wasn’t worth watching. They wanted to come out swinging, showing strength after strength. And, naturally, they succeeded.
What struck me most whilst listening to Whedon talking about his career is a single phrase that he used – ‘incredible intent’. He wants everything he does to mean something, whether it be a TV show, a film, a comic, a song, or an online miniseries. And when he says it, you really get the feeling that this isn’t just a generic soundbite; this is a sentiment that drives and focuses his creative passion.
When talking about Serenity, the film that followed the unjustly short-lived Firefly, he spoke about the necessity to not tell the same story again. In Firefly, he’d shown how these characters had met. And when writing the film, he had to assume that no one had seen the original series, but find a way to do it without repeating anything. And, again, he did it perfectly. And, like most things Whedon has done, the film has gone on to gain incredible cult status (and rightfully so). This was the film with which Whedon finally made his feature directorial debut, and it is by far one of my favourite films of all time.
BAFTA were on hand to film the event, and so I’m very much hoping that it will be released, in full, in the coming weeks, both on television and online, because this is certainly an interview with Whedon worth watching. It’s not often that your favourite writer-director sits down for a full ninety-plus minutes to talk about their career in detail.
Bearing that in mind, I’ve left off a number of highlights from the evening, to keep things interesting for when the interview does surface in full – Whedon discussing things like giving Angel his own TV show, his writing process on The Cabin in the Woods with Drew Goddard, coming to The Avengers and Much Ado About Nothing to write characters who already exist, and much, much more. All of it is absolutely fascinating, and fans of Whedon’s work will definitely do well to seek out the interview when it is released.
It’s to BAFTA’s credit that they host evenings like Joss Whedon: A Life in Pictures, and all of the other filmmakers with whom they sit down to discuss their lives. Few and far between are the opportunities for people to watch people whose films they love to watch discuss their careers in great depth. For me, Joss Whedon is a true king among men. Above all, I see him as an incredibly talented writer, who has left his mark not only on many films and TV shows he has made, but also on pop culture itself.
In the years since the end of Dollhouse, there has been a big Whedon-shaped hole on the small screen, and I cannot wait for it to be filled by the upcoming Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And from there, we move boldly towards 2015’s The Avengers 2, which is guaranteed to be another epic blockbuster. I’m more than convinced that Whedon’s desire to not tell the same story twice will ensure that the film avoids the pitfalls of many sequels, and will bring us something once more genuinely original to fall in love with in two summers’ time.
To find out more about previous and upcoming events, you can head over to the BAFTA Guru website. (Ron Howard is sitting down for a Life in Pictures event next month, which has already sold out, and is sure to make for another amazing evening.)
[UPDATE] You can view the full transcript through the BAFTA site here, with the site set to host a ‘podcast’ soon, along with an edit of the film as soon as it’s put together.
Images Credit: BAFTA / Jamie Simonds.
