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
TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.
It's a question of opening it up, and it's a question of closing it down, ... You know, opening it up in the sense of: We need a giant, epic story that is not the kind of thing these people usually get involved in in a TV series, which is more mundane. You need a reason for this to be a movie. The closing comes in making sure that it is accessible to everybody: that you explain everybody as much as you need to, that you explain the world as much as you need to, that you begin and you end, that you have an arc for the character, as well as a plot that has a question and then an answer.
I took the overreaching arc I was headed toward in the TV show and made that the plot of the movie, ... I had to jettison or streamline plenty of things. It's two totally different mediums, and you've got to respect that. A TV show can kind of meander its way along and find a little piece of something for everybody. A movie is more about the momentum of the main story.
We'll meet a Wonder Woman who is similar to the one from the original comics and from the TV series to an extent. Neither of them are really a template. I've never loved the comics and I didn't watch the television series, but I loved the character very much.
I was a little bit ashamed of American TV because I thought, 'None of the shows my father works on are as funny as my father.'
In TV the attitude is: 'Tell me what we have and we'll build around that,' ... Feature filmmaking seems more like, 'Give me everything and then I'll choose.'
There are many films and TV shows I make where people find themselves in fantastical situations; as often as possible, their reactions to it are very normal.
You can either watch TV or you can make TV.
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.
TV's like whitewater rafting: Without rocks, there wouldn't be rapids, and it wouldn't be as much fun.
In TV, there's so much compromise, it does start to grate a bit. But if you're a writer or an actor, it really is the place to be.
I respect the rules of TV, the rules of keeping things commercial and interesting and pop-y and fun.
The problem for me is that 'Watchmen,' one of the great comics of all time, is a look at superheroes that has gone beyond the concept of or necessity for superheroes.
I've never met a well-adjusted person. It's weird.