Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon comes in singing. Not pop, hip-hop, anything that shows he’s got his finger on the pulse of teenage cool, but a snatch of a showtune. That’s because the man who created the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly has a curious admission to make - he loves good, old-fashioned musicals.

Even so, Brigadoon is an unusual film to rave about. Lerner and Loewe’s fantastical romantic tale revolves around two sophisticated New Yorkers (Gene Kelly and Van Johnson) who get lost on a shooting trip in Scotland. When the mist clears, they find themselves in Brigadoon, a town under a spell that comes alive for just one day every 100 years, and there Kelly falls in love with Cyd Charisse.

"Brigadoon gets a bad rap," says Whedon. "Vincente Minnelli was supposed to shoot it in Scotland, but couldn’t, so it’s all very Hollywood and unbearably twee. But I love the fake background and I think that is where Brigadoon should be - it should be in Hollywood, not in Scotland. When they started taking musicals out to real locations, you lost something very beautiful and poetic and totally controlled."

The film didn’t grab him hard the first time he saw it. "It wasn’t like I saw Brigadoon and the world flew open for me, the way it did when I saw Once Upon a Time in the West and I couldn’t speak," he recalls. "But I was intrigued and delighted, and I keep coming back to it. I think there’s a lot more going on in that movie than people give it credit for."

Whedon has a lot of time for Minnelli as a director. "He was a master of the controlled mise-en-scène - he absolutely knew where to put the camera, when to move it, when to let it sit. The Waitin’ for My Dearie number that Cyd Charisse sings is, to me, a great teaching tool, because there are nine or more girls singing and dancing in a very small space, yet the scene has an enormous amount of very beautiful choreography, grace and style. It’s a prime example of how to do everything with almost nothing, of how to tell the truth emotionally with a musical number. In its quiet way, it taught me an enormous amount."

Although Whedon has never made a musical himself, the hour-long episode of Buffy that was conducted entirely in song and dance was, "without a single rival, the most enjoyable one". And his knowledge of choreography in tight spaces stood him in good stead while making Serenity (now available on DVD), a sci-fi action-adventure film set on a claustrophobic spaceship.

But perhaps the key to Whedon’s love of Brigadoon is the clever way in which the film helps the audience to suspend its disbelief in musicals and magical, disappearing towns. "I would say that the most important part of Brigadoon is Van Johnson’s character," he says. "This is a movie that, while completely venerating the classic Hollywood romantic love story, completely deconstructs it at the same time. Johnson is constantly telling you there’s no such thing as a musical, that people don’t really break into song.

"That basic idea of having something that is hiding its intelligence in song and dance and hiding its romanticism in cynicism is to me very difficult but very dazzling. If the movie was all sunshine and roses and heather on the hill, even I would be like, OK, forget it. But in fact there’s an unrelenting darkness about it."

Whedon has a theory that every movie aspires to the state of the musical. "You can take any genre and say these horror bits, these action bits, these are the musical numbers - these are the moments where we are uplifted. The shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, the Neo and Agent Smith fight in The Matrix - those are the big closing numbers. The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don’t have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead."