Joss Whedon

Galaxy quest

JOSS WHEDON is an unlikely star. Balding and a little on the chubby side, he is in his 40s and admits that the highlight of his week is when he gets his new comics, which he does every Wednesday without fail. But everywhere this unprepossessing American goes, hundreds of fans turn out to greet him, calling his name and clamouring for autographs.

Whedon is a writer - for films, for television and occasionally for comics. His new film, Serenity, is a big-screen version of the American television series Firefly. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Firefly - it was cancelled halfway through its first and only season. But it quickly acquired such an intense cult following and sold so many copies on DVD that Universal Pictures agreed to finance a 40 million feature-film version.

We are talking sci-fi here. And, as a race, sci-fi fans make Klingons seem like regular, laid-back guys, only better-looking and often with clearer complexions. History, however, shows that Whedon’s appeal can stretch beyond the intergalactic anorak and reach a much wider audience. Showbiz is in his genes. His grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1950s and 1960s, while his father was a writer for Benson and The Golden Girls.

In the late 1980s, Whedon III scripted several episodes of Roseanne. Then, in what seemed like a complete change of direction, he wrote the screenplay for a vampire movie, in which the role previously reserved for Peter Cushing was given to an American schoolgirl. It seemed a daft idea and the film did indifferent business at the box office. But Whedon believed the film-makers had failed to realise the true potential in his baby, and five years later he succeeded in reviving it on the small screen - where it became one of the cult classics of the 1990s.

A brilliant combination of horror and high-school soap, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is built around the adventures of a group of students at Sunnydale High, which just happens to have been built on top of the gateway to Hell. It is up to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) to keep the vampires and demons, werewolves and monsters at bay, which she did throughout seven successful seasons. There was also a spin-off series, Angel, which featured a reformed vampire who looked like a male model. The television version was witty, and rarely resorted to the low-brow comedy of the film. Whedon employed all the characterisation skills he had honed on American sitcoms and he fused them with a real sense of danger.

When he came to the Edinburgh International Film Festival for the world première of Serenity last month, tickets sold out immediately, as they did for several extra screenings, and many fans had to be satisfied with just a glimpse of Whedon as he made his way into Cineworld in Fountainbridge. One critic, writing on www.iofilm.co.uk, sums up his appearance concisely. "Without Joss Whedon, there would be no Charmed, Scrubs or OC to make weekends worth getting excited about. Buffy changed the face of modern pop culture. Joss Whedon understands irony, and he writes the best female characters on telly."

With Serenity, Whedon is attempting to do much the same as he did with Buffy, but in reverse, this time taking a show that failed on television and turning it into a hit movie. And the early indications are good. The film, which combines the action of a Star Wars movie with the intellect of Star Trek, adds a wit and humour that are pure Whedon.

Asked for his primary influences, however, Whedon cites neither Lucas nor Roddenberry. Instead, he plumps for the Wild West stories that were a staple of books, television and cinema while he was growing up. "Stories of American frontier life fascinate me. I was reading an account of the Battle of Gettysburg that was very detailed, and all about the minutiae of how people lived before the age of convenience, before everything could be delivered or beamed to your house. So I thought that I should do something similar on a spaceship." His fans like that unpredictability, that quantum leap in logic.

Whedon’s spaceship, the Serenity of the title, is not one of those fancy, shiny, warp-drive models that whoosh across the universe in nanoseconds; it’s more your intergalactic old banger, like Harrison Ford’s Millennium Falcon - the space equivalent of a wagon lumbering across the prairie, forever in danger of shedding a wheel.

The Serenity is manned by a crew of social misfits, including a female engineer, and is skippered by Mal Reynolds, who fought on the losing side in a galactic civil war and now earns a crust any way he can, living not by the law, but by his own principles. Nathan Fillion, the actor who plays him, makes no bones about it: this is no homage to Han Solo, but rather a straightforward copy.

Sean Maher, who plays the ship’s doctor, admits that he was put off by the science-fiction tag when he first heard about Firefly. "But now I feel like Firefly and Serenity are their own genre. It’s not science-fiction so much as it’s about humanity and characters and dynamics between people."

Whedon is nevertheless clearly hoping for a whole series of films that will fill the cinematic vacuum created by the completion of Luke Skywalker’s journey to the Dark Side and Captain Kirk’s voyage to the nursing home, and which, like Star Wars and Star Trek, will reach beyond the hard-core sci-fi and fantasy audience to the more lucrative mainstream.

Star Trek was not a huge hit when it first appeared on television in the 1960s, and it was cancelled after just three seasons. It got a new lease of life and reached a new audience through repeats and then a string of feature films and a spin-off series.

Cinemas are full of remakes of television series. Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Bewitched and The Dukes of Hazzard will in due course be followed by The A-Team, Baywatch and Wonder Woman - which is currently being written by none other than Whedon (who promises "a feminine feminist").

It is, however, no surprise that many of the big-screen adaptations we have seen so far have been below average, because the shows on which they were based were unimaginative, formulaic rubbish in the first place. Most came not from any golden age of television, but from the decade that taste forgot, or the 1980s. But they were at least hits. Whedon is attempting to take a television show that was cancelled in the middle of its first season and turn it into a hit film, just three years later.

The first point to make here is that Firefly was not exactly a ratings disaster. "The Fox network just had a different show in mind," says Whedon’s executive producer, Chris Buchanan. "They wanted something that Firefly wasn’t."

Firefly was an adventure series set 500 years in the future, in a planetary system that has been populated by humans and which has just emerged from a civil war. The Alliance has brought peace to most places, but the outlying planets remain beyond its control, hence the most obvious comparison with the Wild West. It is here that Reynolds and his crew operate. They become a target for the Alliance when they pick up River (Summer Glau), a young psychic, who has been the subject of secret government experiments and is now on the run.

When Fox pulled the plug on the series, Whedon had to break the news to his cast that the show was being cancelled, but he did so with a promise that this was not the end, merely a temporary setback. "It was very clear to me that the story was not done being told," he says, as if the story had a life of its own. (He also says he never knows what the character of Reynolds will say until he has finished writing it, and he talks a lot about love - love of his cast, love of his characters and love being the glue that holds the crew together. It’s the sort of thing that the fans can’t get enough of.)

While he began discussions with Universal about the possible resurrection of the series on the big screen, the fans did their bit to let executives know there was a market here - 14 episodes, including three that Fox had never broadcast, were released as a DVD boxed set in 2003 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Amazingly, they are still in the top 20 two years later.

"In the States the show was on the air a relatively short period of time," says Chris Buchanan, "but millions of people watched it nonetheless. In Britain I think it was only the sci-fi channel, which is great, though it’s a pretty small audience. But I came over for a fan convention and two thousand people showed up. We were overwhelmed. We were like, ’How do you guys even know about the show?’"

Universal decided it was worth another try, and gave Whedon the go-ahead for at least one film, which he would not only write but also direct. The project allowed him to fulfil his promise and reunite the close-knit ensemble cast, but it did present him with a whole series of new challenges and problems. "The whole point of the movie was to make something that somebody who had never seen the show could appreciate," he says. "I had nine characters who had already met, so structuring was very difficult."

What he has chosen to do is a sort of prequel story, explaining how River came to join the crew of the Serenity, with her brother, the doctor, rescuing her from a top-secret government research facility. They are pursued by an Alliance agent, who, while he is a ruthless killer, believes that what he is doing is for the greater good - the Alliance has, after all, brought peace and civilisation to most of the planetary system.

Peace has come at a price, however - the Alliance demands conformity and discourages individual expression. But something terrible has gone wrong, and the Alliance must cover up the truth about its attempts to impose peace on one particular planet and the violent maniacs who now terrorise the outer reaches. River’s psychic powers represent a dangerous threat to the Alliance and its cover-up.

Serenity, like the classic sci-fi films made in the 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, is clearly saying something about the world we live in today, the people who govern us and the dangers we face. It taps into contemporary suspicions of government secrecy and obsessions with conspiracies. There are no aliens here, just an ordinary group of people faced with the sort of extraordinary circumstances that have confronted protagonists for as long as Hollywood has been making movies. "When you hear ’science-fiction’, people tend not to take it seriously," admits Whedon.

But the industry is now having to take the writer very seriously indeed. In a town that likes to keep sentiment on the screen and out of the boardroom, Whedon has already proven that second chances do sometimes make sound business sense. Now Hollywood is waiting to see if Serenity can follow in Buffy’s footsteps and slay audiences all over again.

Serenity opens in cinemas on October 7