DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
The transformation of Angel from good guy to bad guy was hard for me, both personally and professionally. I was in tune with Good Angel, but I wasn’t coming home for Evil Guy. I think if you’ve played a character long enough, you subconsciously carry that character with you into your private life. You can shut it off to an extent, but there’s a part of you that still consciously lives with it. On the set, it was particularly hard doing scenes with Sarah, because she didn’t see Angel as an evil type and all of a sudden there he was.
DAVID GREENWALT
Sarah was so good at this stuff. The scenes where she’s saying, she can’t believe how he’s behaving. And he’s saying, “Yeah it was all right. You were OK, you know a little inexperienced.” My favorite thing was where Buffy’s father comes and needs to talk to her and really the whole reason the marriage broke up was because of her. That and Angel turning into an asshole were really two of my favorite things in the series, because it was so emotional and your worst fear coming true in the case of Buffy and her father, and then with Angel that great sexual metaphor. It drove season two. I remember when I first watched it and how shocked I was at how much power it brought, because he was so good at being the evil Angelus. Your heart just broke for Buffy. It was unbelievable.
JOSS WHEDON
“Innocence” was the show where everything really fell into place with Buffy going through a hero’s mythic journey, being couched in the terms of losing your virginity and your boyfriend doesn’t call. It really felt like we hit both levels at once; it speaks to people about their experience and elevates it to something bigger.
DAVID BOREANAZ
For the most part, the relationship between Buffy and Angel had been almost a Beauty and the Beast type of thing. Buffy knew what Angel was, but she still loved him. Then the transition came, and it was hard for her, and also for me, to adjust. To help Sarah with the transition, after each scene I made it a point to confirm to her that, “I’m here for you. I’m not here against you. This is not who I am.” I believe there has to be a coming-down period where you hug the other actor or help the other person, and even help yourself get out of the turmoil that’s been created, instead of being submerged in it. As harrowing as that can be sometimes, it’s part of the acting process, and one that I would never even think of giving up.
DAVID GREENWALT
David [Boreanaz] was cool with it. When I did Profit, in which the leading man [Adrian Pasdar] kills his own father in the pilot with a syringe, he said, “You’re sure you want to do this on screen, because a lot of people are going to freak out.” No, it absolutely had to be done. I never heard anything from David about it. I think he loved it. It was fun and most actors love it if they can play some opposite version of their character if they can justify it. You knew it had to swing back. You couldn’t do it forever, though. Once you got all the emotion out of it, it was time for him to suffer like a son of a bitch.
JOSS WHEDON
The first time when I wrote Angel turns evil because he and Buffy made the beast, I wrote the scene where he basically pretends that he just doesn’t care about her and just acts like a dick. I didn’t drop my pen, but I actually looked at it and was, like, “Oh my God, I had no idea I was such a dick.” Like, I accessed this terrible person and I was just so happy that I had this darkness in me that was just appalling, and this has been happening with this script just over and over and over. Probably too much.
DAVID GREENWALT
The great thing I like about Joss is that he would really go there. He wouldn’t protect the audience. He used to say, “You have to give an audience not so much what it wants, but what it needs.” He would really go to these places where you can’t believe what you’re seeing. It really would change up the game. Doing that takes enormous balls and it’s what made the show really good. People responded. People loved it. His stuff feels like real life, a little bit heightened, but it feels so real to people.
MARTI NOXON
(executive producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
For me, personally, the emotional substance of Buffy is very real. I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment, either. The killing off of [Giles’s girlfriend and Sunnydale High teacher] Jenny Calendar was one of those surprises that we keep coming up with to keep our viewers on their toes. In one of the episodes I wrote, coincidentally titled “Surprise,” Jenny turns out to be a gypsy with a vendetta against Angel.
That was an idea that just grew on its own; it wasn’t something that Joss, David, and I were purposely planning on. I don’t think we even thought, at the outset, that Jenny was going to be connected to Angel in any way, but it soon became obvious that she was. That’s the wonderful thing about learning from Joss. His mind is completely open to do things that are unexpected. When Joss told us Angel was going to murder Jenny, I stood up and said, “No! You can’t do that to us!”
Joss was so pleased, because that was just the reaction he was looking for—you know, something strong and emotional. So our characters are always turning out to be involved in stuff that I didn’t think they were going to be involved in. But it’s not always by design. A lot of times, as with “Gypsy Jenny,” we went, “Oooh, wouldn’t that be cool? Let’s do it.”
JAMES MARSTERS
Initially, it was that Angel and Buffy were going to at some point have sex, at which point Angel goes evil as many boyfriends do in real life. And Angel would kill Spike, thus becoming the Big Bad and take up with Drusilla so that Buffy would get her heart broken. That was the original plan. And they kept most of that but then didn’t kill me off.
It let Joss kind of explore Spike as the sidekick—as the jealous little brother, rather than the Big Bad that originally came to Sunnydale. Once you decide not to kill Spike off, the problem is how do you get him up off that ladder of cool and back down to earth so he can actually be explored as a three-dimensional, interesting character? That was one of the big ways to do it. I think ultimately what Joss came to with Spike was that Spike was the most successful poser in the history of the world. Like most people who want to seem tougher than they are, they just buy some leather pants and the right car or whatever. But Spike actually was made into a vampire so that he could get away with posing. Because he was super strong now and he could heal quickly and all of that stuff, he actually could pose and get away with it. That’s really interesting. The beginning of that was just to show him as the jealous little sidekick of the much cooler Angel. And luckily art imitated life enough that I was thoroughly jealous of David Boreanaz. I hated David Boreanaz for a while . . . to my shame, because he was nice to me from day one.
My girlfriend at the time, became jealous of Drusilla and I, who struck up a close friendship. We never became romantic in real life, but we became quite close as collaborators and as friends. My then girlfriend just couldn’t stand that. So she told me that she had a crush on David. And so that’s all she wrote. I was, like, “f—you, David.”
And so, as jealous as Spike was of Angel on the show, I was jealous of David in real life. I kept it to myself. And, truly, David was supportive of me from day one and kept telling me to keep doing what I’m doing, because he started out on the show exactly where I was. He kept telling me how positive people’s reaction to the character were and that I should not lose hope and that I would probably become a large part of the show. He was just my biggest supporter from day one, and I was just blinded by jealousy for a long time.
DAVID FURY
When they finally said we’re going to put “Go Fish” at the end of the second season when the whole season was coming to a climax with Spike and Drusilla and Angel killed Jenny, it was tough to have emotional grounding to an episode that was meant to be a funny lark, and it felt out of place. The fact was that Joss and David were thrilled with it and that’s all we cared about at that time.
When they called, they called gleefully from the trailer. They were jumping up and down wi
th happiness. That was the greatest feeling to know we nailed the first hour of television we had ever written, having only done sitcoms and animated series prior to that. It was a big deal for us and it was really exciting, and so we had that to hang on to. Even as a lot of fans trashed it.
On its own merits, it’s a fun episode. But I’m with the fans when I say that’s the last thing you want to see when all this great stuff is happening on the show and you really want to bring it to the climax and you get this little side trip where Angel has one tiny scene in the episode and it’s inconsequential. People are just going, “What is this episode we’re watching? We want to see Angel and Buffy.” And we weren’t seeing it.
Another surprise for viewers as well as the staff was Whedon’s decision to have Xander and Cordelia become a couple only to have Xander cheat on her with Willow, who had long endured an unrequited crush on him, breaking Cordelia’s heart.
DAVID FURY
It was the couple that you would never have thought would happen and it happens so quickly. And it’s smart, because it brought Cordelia into the mix as opposed to always standing outside the gang making snarky comments at Buffy. It was a way of bringing her in. Every move they made was so smart. I kind of held my breath.
Joss lives in the pain. He taught all of us that that’s where the best stories live. He really did. Coming from genres that don’t convey that kind of depth of human emotion and pain and anguish and suddenly you’re writing it, I thought, Why haven’t I been writing this all along? Why haven’t I been trying to strive for this in everything I do?
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
As the show got more popular, they had to rely on servicing the ancillary characters more, and that served the show in a great way. I wasn’t in the writers’ room, but that might have been the cause of exploring those characters, bringing in Oz, being forced to build story lines for Willow. And I think that created a lot. I felt like there was a big difference between season one and two.
We learned that Cordelia’s heart is broken when she sees Xander cheat on her, and that was the first time we see Cordy vulnerable and heartbroken. That changed a lot about the way audiences saw Cordelia; seeing her in a new light they could identify with her, because it’s a universal theme. You see this woman who is so acerbic and vain get sad, and that made it even more powerful.
MARTI NOXON
I can venture to say that I used my experience to punch up the relationship between Xander and Cordelia. It’s kind of pathetic in a way because their constant feuding, then making up, is very close to how my own romantic life was. Joss often said to me, “Marti, if you had had a happier teenager-hood, you wouldn’t be here.”
The justly lauded teenage metaphors of the series were never more ubiquitous and potent than in the second season of the show, all thanks to wisdom of Whedon, who was learning to become a show runner while producing some of the most meaningful television the medium had ever seen for a generation of adolescents.
JOSS WHEDON
I didn’t read Robert McKee. I didn’t do any of the things you were supposed to do. I was raised by an angry pack of comedy writers. Structure is always hard and it’s the most important thing. Structure is work, it’s math, it’s graphs.
JOSE MOLINA
(former assistant to Howard Gordon)
Joss is pretty easily the best writer I’ve ever encountered. He is so fast and he thinks so differently. It’s something that I learned from him as a writer that there’s a way of telling a story that is the traditional way. You go from point A to point B. Well, you know, once you’ve been writing for more than a minute, you learn, well, what if I do that backward? What if I just flip it? And what if I do B to A? And what I learned from Joss is, don’t turn it around, turn it sideways. Flip it in some unexpected way. Can you go from A to Q or from R to C? What is the thing that you didn’t see coming? And do that not just in episodes, but in scenes and in line to line to line; where you might expect a person to ask a question and get an answer, what if a person asks a question and gets another question? OK, that’s simple: What if a person asks a question and gets a recipe for french fries? OK, I didn’t see that coming, now what does that mean? That’s what he has an incredible facility with. He can see that strange, off-kilter, unexpected way of approaching a moment or a scene or a story. I still aspire to that level of it. When I have to work on it. When I have time to think about it, I need to twist this scene and then I can put myself in that kind of head. But to him, it’s just natural.
JOSS WHEDON
I will do color charts for everything that looks like I’m doing a PowerPoint presentation. This is where it’s scary, this is where it’s funny, and everything has got to find its flow and intersect. That can be appallingly hard, but the act of writing, the macro and the micro, which is having ideas and then actually writing scenes once you figure out what they need to be, is perfect bliss. It is the greatest thing anybody got paid to do. I’ll never capture that feeling in any other way and I don’t need to. Characters are the reason I’m there and they’re the most fun to think up. It’s very easy to go, “You know what would be really cool . . .” Even a premise is not a movie—although that’s something in American cinema that people have forgotten sometimes. So, structure is an absolute.
DAVID GREENWALT
He’s a really good fucking writer. Joss’s scripts generally start a little slow and you just think you’re in real life. Sometimes even just the first ten or eleven pages of one of the TV scripts we wrote or he wrote or we wrote together would almost start to get a little boring, and then some incredible twist happens and you’re off and running. It’s emotional, it’s funny, it has a point.
JOSS WHEDON
Two times in my life I have had an idea that had a third act in the idea. And one of them was the biggest spec sale I ever made, and I knew it would be the moment I thought of it. The other one was Cabin in the Woods, which we wrote in a weekend. You have to know where you’re going. Now, some people can write a different way and I wrote a couple of episodes where I didn’t, but there was enough structure around them like the dream episode of Buffy [“Restless”], where I was, like, I know enough that I can just sort of let this flow like poetry. But almost without exception, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never getting anywhere. And it doesn’t’ matter how cool the idea is and how cool the characters are. You’ve got to figure out that reason why there’s a whole movie about it. So structure, structure, structure.
DAVID GREENWALT
The trick with Joss Whedon is not just that he is a genius, the trick is he works harder than anybody else. Maybe he’s a genius with that Jeff Katzenberg work ethic. At least in those days, but as you get older and the family becomes more important it’s harder. Writing a story with him was like watching Mozart play, because you would work and work and work and then wait and wait and wait. Then eventually he’d just go to the board and start writing these beats and you’d go, “Oh, they’re perfect.” They’re inevitable, but they’re surprising, they’re emotionally connected. He always says, “I’d rather have a moment than a move. I’ll sacrifice a move if I can have a moment.” Our stuff was very emotional. We were crappy detectives and, you know, our detective work probably left a little to be desired, but that wasn’t what we were interested in. We were interested in the emotional journeys of the people.
JAMES MARSTERS
The writing, especially as far as dialogue is concerned, is something that you’d have to go back to the films of Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges to match. Really, something kind of interesting or pleasing happens every five seconds. It’ll be a turn of phrase or an event that happens, some joke that happens with such frequency that it starts to froth. Usually a movie will give you something interesting happening every three minutes or so. I feel a little weird comparing him to Billy Wilder, because that’s like comparing him to Shakespeare, but Wilder never had to crank this stuff out every week.
JOSS WHEDON
What ends up connecting with people is that if you’re not writing about yourself, why are you writing? For me if you’re not telling a story, spinning a yarn is fine and there are some people who are great at it. And they are great at things that I’m not great at. You know, like intricate heist plots and things that I admire and envy, but if you’re sitting down to write something or make something that’s going to take three years out of your life, why would you not want to tell people something that is important to you to say? I don’t mean a moral, I mean an examination of the human condition.
You want to be able to talk about the politics of personality. That’s something it took me a while to find. I started to find it on Alien: Resurrection, which is the last thing I wrote before Buffy, before the show. That was the first time I went, “Oooohh, this is a metaphor” and the only way this works is if I feel the way she feels, and that was sort of like the beginning of becoming a storyteller instead of a yarn spinner. To me, if I can’t do that, if I can’t make that connection, then I’m wasting people’s time. As much as I may look back at anything I’ve made and go, “flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, embarrassing, embarrassing,” I never feel like I wasted somebody’s time.
HOWARD GORDON
I learned the importance, and it may be self-evident, of the architecture of each season. Joss sort of knew the story he wanted to tell, didn’t quite know how he wanted to tell it. As a show runner, it’s become increasingly important—you have to know how to ask the right questions. You may not always have the answers, but you have to know how to ask the right questions and that’s what Joss is particularly good at. Joss was truly a great show runner. It wasn’t always easy. I don’t think I learned it from Joss, but certainly along my path I saw how important it is, when you see something and your staff doesn’t always see it, so it’s about having the patience and wherewithal to communicate something that you’re not always entirely capable of understanding yet in its entirety, but keeping the conversation going. Keeping them invested in it. Giving them ownership of it. And everyone did feel ownership in that show. It’s not an accident that so many people stayed with that show through the whole run or moved over to Angel.
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