Joss Whedon
Joss Whedon
Joseph Hill "Joss" Whedonis an American screenwriter, film and television director, film and television producer, comic book author, and composer. He is the founder of Mutant Enemy Productions and co-founder of Bellwether Pictures, and is best known as the creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouseand Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D....
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth23 June 1964
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.
It's only recently women got to be action heroes on TV. Progress is slow, and often non-existent. There's plenty of cool comics with female characters... But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.
Limitations are something that I latch onto - like working in genre, or if you're writing TV, there are act breaks, there's a length of time it's supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it's very hard to make things feel real and lived in.
Making 'The Avengers' was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous. 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.
I was not popular in school, and I was definitely not a ladies' man. And I had a very painful adolescence, because it was all very strange to me. It wasn't like I got beat up, but the humiliation and isolation, and the existential 'God, I exist, and nobody cares' of being a teenager were extremely pronounced for me.
If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It's like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention.
I'm never interested in movies where you don't care about the people you're watching, and that's my biggest quibble about horror, that kids have gotten stupider and stupider.
Time for some thrillin' heroics.
People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in 'Firefly?' Because I don't know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.
I don't want to create responsible shows with lawyers in them. I want to invade people's dreams.
I've seen plenty of films where the projector broke. The problems that we have in the digital age are exactly the same as we had. Instead of, 'There's a hair in the gate,' it's, 'The computer ate the footage.' There will always be things like that going on. Nothing is perfect.
I think to an extent every human being needs to be redeemed somewhat or at least needs to look at themselves and say, 'I've made mistakes, I'm off course, I need to change.' Which is probably the hardest thing for a human being to do, and maybe that's why it interests me so.
If you can't run, you crawl. If you can't crawl-- you find someone to carry you.
If I kill you, you'll be awake, you'll be facing me, and you'll be armed.