Amber Benson

Director’s Cut

Interview with Amber Benson
by Dietmar Dath
Dec 7, 2003, Offenbach

Note: During the later stages of the interview, AB’s mother, Diane Benson, was present. Two comments she made are included.

Let’s talk about magic - not Tara’s magic but Chance’s. Anne Sexton said that people are "magic talking to itself". Even agnostics can find that a perfectly reasonable thing to say for an artist - and in your film, although it certainly isn’t overt fantasy, there are a lot of glimpses of this condition: the mesmerism of tofu cheese, the counting of stars on the ceiling, the power of Shakespeare’s lines to reunite an odd couple. How much of this sort of magical realism is realism to you, how much of it is magic?

I choose to live my life with the idea that this sort of ‘magical realism’, if you wish to call it that, is true: magic is out there in some capacity, maybe not as in casting a spell per se but some sort of ability to impact on other people and how you affect change in the world. I grew up reading things like Gabriel Garcia Marquez: you walk in there, it’s real but there’s the element of "what if?". We leave that open, the ‘what if’s. Physics talks about this idea that you have all these worlds on top of each other and everything coexists at the same time. I think that applies in our lives: it all exists, we just have to tap into what we want to tap into.

A story like that may be true even when it’s not actual.

It may not be actual but it’s never false.

Harlan Ellison keeps saying: no good film was ever made from a bad script. Having done "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" which is certainly as writer-centric a visual enterprise as they come (and all the more brilliant for it), who calls the shots in your inner studio - the writer, the director, the actress? Does it switch, is it multitasking?

(Noise from nearby)

It is kind of multi-... it’s hard to concentrate here, my brain is in five different places as it is. Well, coming from Buffy... of course that is very writer-oriented, and there I spent a lot of time hanging out with the writers, with Joss and Marti Noxon, just because I was so intrigued by their brains and how they worked. Joss especially, I mean he’s a very talented fellow. You know it’s a Joss-script when it has this kind of intuitiveness, when’s it’s crazy and interesting: you’re reading it and...

You don’t know what’s going to happen.

Exactly. You feel like it’s happening, it’s as real as possible even if you have all these vampires and magic. It just feels like it could actually happen, because it has this intuitiveness about the human condition. But for me... I get on the set and I’ve written this thing and I’ like to bring as much of what was written to the actual set dealing with actors and crew-people and such, but I find that if you’re not open to compromise and listening to other people you lose a lot. And I think that’s what’s good about “Buffy”: even if Joss was the one who knew what would happen, he still was open to input.

From the actors even?

Everybody. It was an open place. We did go to his house when it was weekend, you know, reading Shakespeare, that kind of stuff. He’d take things you said to him in conversation and put them into the script sometimes, it was very odd.

Just with the character you were supposed to play or...

All the characters, all over the place.

I’ ve been looking at some of your feature film appearances - there’s King of the Hill, and then there was The Prime Gig, where we do not even get a full scene, although you steal one of the scenes with "the grin". Would you care to elaborate on some of the differences between movies and television work?

Well, in films you get more time to rehearse and kind of come up with the character over an extended period of thime whereas with "Buffy" it was like being thrown in. You may need - and even get - three months to get into the space of a film. On "Buffy" I had three years but I was thrown into it, you have to create the character like that (snaps), create the feeling like that (snaps), there was no rehearsal time. You go in and then you do it. It can be overwhelming sometimes. I know a lot of actors who like to prepare and work on it. They can’t do it, because you get the script the night before and there’s no time. I did some other television work, a little bit of stuff, little guest pieces here and there but nothing as intense. "Buffy" is really like making a little movie - without the time. You get eight days. "Buffy" is one of the very few shows that were actually shot on 35mm. Most shows are shot on 16 or High Def. Buffy was shot on 35mm and then transferred to video. That influences the quality, the look, it makes it dark and beautiful and rich.

Current and upcoming feature film projects?

(Meanwhile, since this interview was conducted, a new movie called "Latter Days" starring Gordon-Levitt , Erik Palladino, Rob McElhenney and AB has been released - www.latterdaysmovie.com.)

I just did an independent film called "Held Together" which will be making the independent film circuit. And then we’ re here in pre-production, preparing a film that we will shoot in Manchester in the summer called "Watchful Eyes". It’s a futuristic cop drama, I get to shoot people, it’s very exciting.

Most people who’ve ordered and seen "Chance" are probably aware of the committed way your family supports you. Doesn’t seem very Hollywood. In what ways does this support shape the art itself?

You look at artistry throughout the ages and you see these people that focus on their work. They had, you know, patrons. These patrons would buy their products or give them money or harbor them so they could continue with the creation of art. Now you don’t have that. Now you have people struggling to eke out a living as an artist and having to do other jobs. They’re suffering because they’re not able to financially survive. I have this support system where I get to do what I want and have people around me who act like my patrons.

Like the King of France.

Exactly. My mother, my sister, my dad: my family, they’re the fiefdom of Benson. Having the support of people around you, you’re not tempted. I’ m not tempted to experiment with drugs or alcohol ot other ways of getting away from myself. I have a goal. I don’t need to blow my mind out to be creative. I know what I want, I have support, and I’m not nervous about it or worried about it.

When and how did the career start?

I’ve been doing this since I was a little kid. Theatre, dancing... that’s how I’ve gotten into this. I didn’t like the dancing, I liked the applause. And there was and is a need to create, but all the stuff that goes with the creation process can at first be a bit overwhelming.

"Chance" seems to be one of the very few films, comic books, novels, works of art in general about post-adolescent concerns in which any real attempt is made to incorporate the parents’ experience. Usually they’re just a foil, messing with the heroes’ lives and suchlike...

Because my situation is such that I have good relationship with my family, so many people that I know in Hollywood, they look at me and say: what’s wrong with you that you’re 26 years old and you still live at home, you’re close to your mother and your sister and your father? And I’ m like: this is what it was like for centuries. People lived with their families, there were these huge family units working together to survive. Now you feel like you have to destroy this relationship to be independent. But independence is not just empowering as such, it can make it impossible to do what you want to do because you’re just fighting to survive on your own. There’s no help.

And you can be easily manipulated. You might have to jump through hoops.

[D. Benson: But we raised you to be independent].

Yeah, but it’s not this kind of independence, it’s autonomy, self-reliance. Not having someone else controlling your life, which is not the same as supporting you of course. I don’t have anybody controlling my life. We’re all working together to get the farm going, it’s like communism in reality.

"Communism in reality": sounds like "Magical realism" again.

That exists at our house.

Professionalism and/or/versus Inspiration. From what I hear about Sarah Michelle Gellar, she’s about as professional as you can get - very Jodie Foster. Is that a role model for you, what do you think about professionalism?

Look at Sarah, she’s very analytical, and she admits it. She walks into a set and she knows where her light is, she knows her lines, she has them down cold. She knows where everything is in relation to her, she knows how to get it done so you don’t have to do ten takes. You do two takes and that’s it. Some actors, they don’t know their lines, they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re searching for their marks and it takes forever. Sarah always is on top of things and I’m so respectful of that. That’s how I try to be in a working environment, because you have too many people depending, relying on what you’re doing to goof off. Sarah’s professionalism can be very intimidating to some people. But if they looked at it realistically and would think about why people are that way - because they’re trying to do their job, so they’re not there for twenty hours, which sometimes you could be at "Buffy". We could be there all day.

Non-actors probably can’t imagine what several takes can do to your motiviation. When it’s emotionally wrenching, you don’t want to be on the verge of tears for hours.

Sarah’s amazing, I’m in awe of her. She comes, does good work and then she goes home. I think that’s wonderful, I respect that so much. For me, I’m an amalgamation, I have a little bit of both: I always know my lines, but sometimes I also get lost in the creative side. If you get sucked into the moment, you don’t think analytically. But that can be when people start the journey with you.

When you don’t think of the audience that might be the moment when you’re giving them the most. So what’s artistic control to you - how do you achieve it, how much do you value it?

Well, being an actor you have absolutely no control. The only control you have is over your performance. And even then you don’t, because an editor comes in and can totally change everything you’ve done. As a writer, you have more control because you’re creating the product that everybody else is using, but then again someone can come in and change that: editors, directors, producers. If you are, say, someone who’s producing and writing and directing and also acting in what you’ re doing, the buck stops there. Actually, the buck stops at my mother. She was making sure that I was not going too over budget. We did extensive post production. Everybody was helpful, we edited, we debated, but it always was my vision. We tried to make it what I had seen in my head. That takes time. Obviously, you need post-sound and post-effects, music and everything, it’s very expensive. It was cheaper getting it into the can. The post added so much. We did DAT-tapes. So you have to go and cut and edit the sound. We ended up using a lot of “Buffy”s hardware. David Solomon, who’s one of the producers for the show, gave us access to that. He’s fantastic.

There’s more "Buffy" in there - the club was the Bronze, right?

Yes, and Joss gave us a song - the opening song "Burn it down", Grant wrote the other song. David Solomon let us use his technology to edit. This was during the summer, after the "Buffy"-season was done, so the editing came after, but we shot during "Buffy". Actually, the time when my brain got sucked out by Glory, that was the time we filmed.

So that’s why Simon has Spike’s hair.

We couldn’t do anything about the hair, we took him as is. We were talking about it, the hair isn’t Simon. It also isn’t James, ‘cause he has very dark hair, it’s funny when you see him what his normal hair colour is. It’s like when you meet him for the first time and he speaks in an American accent - like Tony [Head] putting on his Rocky Horror regalia and singing. It’s beautiful and wonderful put you’re thrown for a moment. Reality makes a difference. And Simon, he’s so different from Spike. James is so good at comedy - it’s utilized a little on "Buffy", but not really. He’s so funny, I had no idea. You see the humour in Spike, but it’s very dry, dark humour whereas this is very broad humour. Anyway, back to the story -everyone was very supportive, helped us, gave us breaks, gave us deals during the sound stuff...

And there are cameos, "Buffy"-people pop up. David Fury is there...

Yes, and Nick Brendon’s wife, Tressa Di Figlia. She’s the dead girl. I kept joking with him: I kissed your wife....

Alright, the sex question: how’s Hollywood homophobia? Are we better off since the day Ellen DeGeneres came out?

It’s a tough question. With her it was suddenly: hey, here I am, I’m doing what I’m doing and I don’t care what you think. But it destroyed her career in some respects, for television, for middle America. Not for doing standup or what she’s doing now, but...

There are whole regions of the US where they don’t play Jill Sobule’s "I kissed a girl" on the radio, aren’t there?

The place I’m from, Birmingham, Alabama, wouldn’t show "Ellen"’s coming out episode. It did not get played. I mean, if someone missed the jump there - all of a sudden, she’s gay or what? Who’s that? What’s going on? To me it’s such an odd thing. I was never bothered by "the problem". I always felt kind of blessed that I got to play that character, kick that door down. But it’s not about sensationalism: two people, that was the big thing that Joss and Alyson and me and the whole group talked about - making sure that it wasn’t about sensationalism, or a gimmick, it was about a relationship that two people are having, it could be any gender, any colour, any religion. Two people that love each other, and I really do think that it was the strongest, the best relationship on "Buffy". I mean, they took care of Dawn! The two lesbians raised the kid.

And Dawn was so happy for them when they got back together. Even Spike is affected by that, when he says: The birds are flying again. It gets to everyone, he’s cracking a joke but...

But there’s a truth to every joke. It’s interesting - in retrospect I look back and it kind of did hurt me as an actor. Not that they type-cast me per se, but it hurts you when people want to cast you for other things and then they say: Oh, gosh, we can’t show middle America this person anymore because, you know... It’s very pavlovian. They associate you with being a gay character, all of a sudden that is what you are. And you can’t be pitched to middle America, all they associate you with is “Buffy” and being a lesbian.

A lesbian witch, even.

Yeah. On top of that. But on the other hand, it’s better than it ever was. And I’ m going to continue to do what I need to do.

So back to the control thing: when you watch the career of directors, it seems that artistic progress lies in the direction of more and more creative control. The later Kubrick could do anything: replace Tom Cruise with a broomstick, if he felt like it.

And then spend three years getting the broomstick to do what he wanted it to do.

Is that something you aspire to, more control?

Yeah, definitely. Well, let’s see: Woody Allen. He doesn’t have to kow-tow to to anybody. He can do what he wants: you need me, I don’t need you. But on the other hand, sometimes that breeds complacency. It’s like you don’t have to work anymore. Woody Allen’s work, it’s hit-and-miss, some things are wonderful, some things are just terrible. And you notice, it’s because no one’s telling him: this is sucky, you shouldn’t do this. I want to maintain that, I think Bergman has the right idea: he has this group of people that he works with, and he goes back and forth between theatre and film and I’d like to do something like that, where I have control but it’s not close-minded. The minute you have a figurehead, the minute one person is too powerful and they don’t know how to be co-operative, the creative process dies on the vine. To me it’s like I have these people - not just family, my friends- people that I like to work with, some "Buffy"-people. You just collect people as you go, you find people that click with you and you work with them again and again, because they get what you do. It’s very difficult to maintain openness sometimes though, when you’re a writer, especially when you’re writing comedy. Because comedy is a specific thing: you have to say things a specific way in order to push the joke. If you don’t deliver a line correctly it falls flat, there’s no joke anymore. So for me watching "Chance" being performed, really the only time I was adamant that a thing had to be said a particular way was when there was a joke involved. It needed the delivery. Other than that, it’s really: let the actors do their thing. Sometimes that’s tough, because you’re like: Oh, gosh, that’s not how I imagined it. It sounds different, but ever so often you find that it was better. If I tried to force what I thought, that wouldn’t help.

The rhythm of the film is very elaborate - at first it keeps you on your toes, you don’t know what to expect. I thought to myself: is this a comedy, is it trying to scare me? The moment it fell into place was the scene in the car: someone forces their feelings on you and it’s claustrophobic, a frontal attack on the viewer, and you just have to laugh at that. Not in a mean way, not in a "these are idiots" sense, but: Oh yeah, I know that, when you’re stuck in the elevator with someone, emotionally speaking.

And you just can’t. Get. Out. It’s really quite funny though, because when I originally wrote it, I first of all did not write it for me to be in. I wrote it kind of thinking of other people because, you know, she’s so alien to how I go about my life. I’ m nothing like her. I’ m much more Simon. Simon is me. Like with all the counting - I’m an obsessive counter, the ceiling dots, it makes me feel connected and nice and safe to count. The countdown thing, while he waits in front of the micro-wave oven: I get bored, so it gives me something to do. And I’m constantly going: uh, do I smell funny? All the little quirks of Simon. He’s me. James is me. He really did a nice job there being me. I felt: That’s me, yeah.

And that got inserted even: The swapping of identities...

Mmh-hm, uh-huh. It was kind of weird, wasn’t it, how that worked out. I originally worked it into the script as kind of a darker moment. We just sort of did it - everything was in the script. But on the whole set, there was an air of: we’re just going to try different things. Everybody tried things. I wanted very much to stick to the script, because I love dialogue. To me, it is the most important thing in a film.

Talking is the real action to relate to, not shootouts or... how many car chases does the average person get into?

I’ ve never been in a car chase, so that’s not my experience. Well, it was really intended to be a dark comedy. It was supposed to be very dark, and then when we started filming for some reason I casted all these people - they’re not edgy and dark, they’re very real and kind of... the characters took over. It became something completely... we started watching the dailies and people were laughing and I’ m like: hmmm. It was supposed to be funny, but not laugh-out-loud-funny, I was really shocked. You know, when you get someone like Christine Estabrook who went to Yale and comes from a very absurdist school of theatre - when you get someone like that involved, the woman is a comedic genius, and then she crawled under the couch. It was her thing. It was not in the script. People do that kind of thing: you hide, whenever something’s so overwhelming, you try to get away. You go into your cup of coffee.

What happens on the set in that moment, when someone improvises like that?

We all thought we would die. People were hitting themselves: don’t laugh, don’t laugh now. And then when it was over, we were all hysterical, because here is this woman, this adult woman crawling into the couch. And then to go from that to the scene where she is crying and upset... she watched it in the rough cut and she said: Oh no, it slows the whole thing down, I shouldn’t have been so emotional, and I’m like: what are you talking about, it’s the moment we really connect with Chance and see what she’s all about. That moment and the one with the bugs at the end, those are the two real moments when we actually have a break from the funny and get a real moment. These amazing comedic people came in and took over, and it became what I never would have envisioned, this whole sort of slapsticky thing.

Into which the Shakespeare episode fits absolutely, it’ gorgeous. That was improvised as well, I read. Because Shakespeare has this aura of classicism, but...

Yeah, it was meant for lower classes, it’s all very farcical and you know, it’s highbrow now but it was for the penny droolers in the front row to begin with.

Like Dickens.

He was serialized.

Like "Buffy". Did you know that not only is there Dickens in "Buffy" but Buffy in Dickens? The name plays a political role.

Does it?

It’s in "Bleak House", a politician’s name: the right honourable William Buffy, M.P.

I wouldn’t be surprised. Joss is an avid reader. His whole house is full of books - when I came there, it was: can I borrow that, please?

What do you like to read?

Oh God. Well, I like Dostoevsky a lot. I like the whole russian high tragedy. It’s also funny sometimes, and there’s magic and fate. The Double and all that... But I love "The Idiot". It’s the messiah story - he comes forward and is destroyed and has to go down, they’re not ready to accept anything. I love Thomas Hardy and "Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe, it’s a wonderful book, magic and realism yet again. Of course Magical Realism in the narrow sense just applies to this South American group of writers - that stems from catholicism of course, the whole saint thing, where you have the saint who can do these miracles, and it is really a marriage of religion and superstition, the establishment’s idea and the people’s idea of what it’s all about. Hermann Hesse is another favourite. Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian. And then of course I love Harry Potter. I love kid’s books: The Chronicles of Narnia, that stuff. Those open the door to worlds upon worlds.

And when you read Lewis, it’s impressive how religion is not... they say it’s apologetic, but it’s really not. It’s story, not propaganda.

It’s allegorical. You take the moral with you, it’s imbedded into you brain but you know... Joseph Campbell was on PBS, they recorded him talking on Skywalker Ranch, it was like six hours and we sat there, watching that and I just thought: I wanna be a mythologist. He talks about the journey of the character, of the hero, and it’s in the Narnia Books of course. But then I realized that it was not the myths that I liked, it was the stories. All the stories are interconnected. There’s really just a handful of stories, and then come the variations, your perceptions of that particular story or this one.

And whatever the medium - well, you did comic books as well, collaborated with Christopher Golden.

Chris, he’s great. I’ve learned so much from him.

How do you collaborate?

Well, we get together and... not literally mostly, because he’s on one end of the United States and I’m on the other, so we talk on the phone or e-mail, and we kind of come up with this flow. He’s very much... He sees ideas. I see minutiae. So we complement each other. Chris will have an idea, or I’ll have an idea, and then we hammer it out. He’ ll help me to get that idea into shape. Like with "Ghosts of Albion", the animated thing on the BBC. Basically, he’ ll write the outline or I’ll write the outline and we go back and forth. I was never one for the outline, I always hated outlining but Chris did show me how to do it in a way that is appealing and not like...

Telling yourself a joke.

Exactly, and then you’re bored, at least after the first fifteen times of looking at it. And then we’ll break it into pieces and he’ll take the first two pieces and I’ll take the second two pieces. We just go back and forth and we give notes on the piece that the other person wrote, strange things, things to fix. We’re writing a script that we’d like to shoot in Ireland next year, a horror film. And we’re doing two Ghosts of Albion novels for Del Rey which I’m really nervous about because the only prose I’d written was these twenty pages for Ghosts of Albion. I love dialogue, I love all of it, descriptions, too, but I’m impatient. I think I was put on this planet to learn patience. So writing novels... it takes, you can’t just do it. When you write screenplays, it’s the one medium where actually my brain is working as fast as my hands. Whereas with novels you have to think about all these descriptive things, you have to ask yourself: how does that sound? I read very quickly and writing it takes so much longer...

And it’s like lying consistently for months. OK, two questions on music. The first one is lame: what do you like to listen to, privately, or when you work?

Well, I love music. When I write, I have to set the tone so when I’m writing something scary, or something science-fictional, I listen to a contemporary composer named Arvo Pärt, he wrote this piece called "Te Deum" and it is just beautiful and scary, I can scare myself listening to it. Then there’s this Gary Jules song, "Mad World", from the "Donnie Darko"-Soundtrack. I love that song. And then Wilco, and I love Jeff Buckley, he’s my all-time favorite.

Second musical question, maybe not so lame. "Buffy" is famous, among other things, for the way that it appropriates, assimilates, even produces musical works. With "Chance", you seem to have put a lot of thought into playing with music’s ubiquitousness in the lives of these people that the film is about. You know, the bits that are like music videos and...

There’s a movie called "A Lucky Man" by Lindsey Anderson, with Malcolm McDowell, great movie, bizarre movie, very odd. Part of that whole sixties, seventies genre of English films, kind of absurdist, "Clockwork Orange" fits in there... and in that film, as transitions, the actually cut into it these musicians playing the soundtrack for the film, and it cuts back and forth between the events and that. It’s one of our favourite movies. That was sort of the inspiration for what we did, because it was not in the script. And so we talked to Grant Langston who wrote the songs for the film, and it was like: we should just have him in it.

And so he becomes sort of an alternate narrator, a counterpoint to Chance’s own voice.

He is narrating and gives you what’s going on, it’s call and answer. It says: let’s think about it. And yet we’re not teaching, we’re expressing it creatively, because we don’t want you to feel like you’re being talked down to, that is specifically to be avoided. When we started editing I realized how much we influence people with music - you realize someone’s going to get killed, someone’s going to have sex because of the music. Spielberg does this a lot. He tells you what you’re supposed to think. It’s like looking at it and saying, my audience is not very bright. I have more faith. I think they’re thoughtful human beings and they should walk away with something. So the music should show not tell. We did not want to tell you what you were supposed to feel. And then this guy Aaron Fruchtman did the soundtrack, it’s so unintrusive.

When you watch it for the first time, you concentrate on the songs and probably don’t even realize that there’s more music there.

That’s the whole point. It doesn’t interfere but it adds something. I mean the claustrophobic a-tonality of the hospital stuff - you don’t evenrealize it’s there. And then the second time you watch it: what is that? Some bizarre composition, temporary strangeness. And "Chance" is the first thing he scored. He’stwenty-one.

[DB: Now he’s going back to UCLA he’s taking this really intense course on composition.]

He’s a friend’s cousin. And we had these amazing jazz musicians that came in and recorded it. It cost us more money to record that than a lot of other things, it was worth it.

And it’s not artsy Sting jazz as in "Leaving Las Vegas". Not to put anybody down, but...did you see that thing?

I didn’t care for it - the movie or the music.

Oh, thank you very much. It’s pretentious.

Yeah, well, it was interesting, and the thing with the hooker, it’s so stupid. The whole outlook says "let me show you how intelligent I am". Again, I do not want to be talked down to. I can go and pick up some pretentious book if I wanna waste my time. But Mike Figgis is interesting - I’ve never been a fan of his, but then there was this interview... it was on public radio, I didn’t know who it was until they said it afterwards, I just heard the voice, and he was talking about digital video and why things aren’t being shot digitally yet because the thing hasn’t caught up to itself yet and there’s not the one technology that everybody can agree on to use, things are still evolving. So he thinks about his craft in relation to other things, it’s not complete self-indulgence. And then he did "The Browning Version" and it’s good. I liked it. There is something there. Maybe the problem is just that he gets too involved in his A-R-T sometimes.