Dollhouse

Joss Whedon: Welcome to the Dollhouse

Joss Whedon is no stranger to success. After the phenomenally successfully Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, Whedon has treated viewers to the short-lived but well regarded Firefly (and subsequent movie Serenity) and the musical superhero spoof Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. His latest project is Dollhouse, which paints a future where “Actives” (or dolls) have their personalities wiped and reprogrammed in order to carry out different assignments. Abbie Bernstein caught up with Whedon to find out how the show came about.

What’s Dollhouse about?

It’s about a girl trying to figure out who she is, while she’s imprinted with every personality you can imagine. It’s about acting, living, being a woman, being everything. Let me put it this way – when I thought it up and launched it at Eliza [Dushku, who executive produces with Whedon and plays main character Echo], the first thing she said was, “Oh, my God, it’s my life!” And she meant mostly as an actress, but then we realized it didn’t just mean that.

It’s a metaphor for everybody. If it isn’t, you’re missing something. The idea is, we all have certain assumptions about who we are, based on what we were told when we were little and what we think we’re supposed to do. And we have a lot of assumptions about what is good, and what about us is not good, and what’s sinful and what’s saintly, and we’re often wrong about all of them. Dollhouse is basically about breaking all that down and exploring it and finding out what it really means to be a human being.

How did Dollhouse come into being?

To me, Eliza is like watching a meteor shower. I’m just amazed. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’ve known her for 10 years. She’s always been a star. But being a star and being a human being are two very different things. And over the 10 years, we’ve spent time becoming friends, but I’ve also watched her deliberately and painfully take control of her career and the way in which it’s going, the things she is portraying, and you don’t see that a lot.

I see it with Felicia Day doing The Guild on the internet, saying, “Nobody’s going to make my way, so I’ll make my own way,” and Felicia is smart enough to pull that off. The two of them share that. Eliza – when I first sat her down, years ago, to say, “Stop making bad movies!” she said, “We don’t set out to make them bad – I don’t know what to tell you.” But we talked about her agency, her choices. And it was a bleak landscape.

I seem to be the guy who spends his life saying how hard it is for beautiful young women – but it is hard to be an ingénue in this town. We got together a few years later, [but the people around her] insisted she do the big-budget thing, so nobody wanted to know what Eliza thought, except Eliza.

And when we got together for lunch this time, she was like, “I’ve made a deal, I don’t expect to write or control a show, but I do need to control the quality of what I’m doing and the image of what I am, and I want to make meaningful, decent, political, feminist, real, fun, sexy, interesting TV.” Those were all on her list. And I said, “There’s only one man for that job!” [laughs]

In the course of the conversation, the idea of Echo came to me from that exact thing. The story of Dollhouse is the story of somebody trying to figure out who she is while everybody tells her what they want her to be. That is the story of Eliza Dushku, and watching Eliza do that has been one of the great joys of my career. She’s always been an intellectual equal. She’s always been a seeker. I’m still trying to figure myself out.

That’s another point of the show, is that the people who control the Actives, the dolls, are just as much in need of understanding what they are as the dolls.

When you and the writing staff are creating personas for Echo, do you think, “Boy, this would be a really cool identity, but who on Earth would want them to do this and why?”

”Who would want them to do this and why?” is sort of what keeps it interesting every week. Sometimes it’s somebody extraordinarily nefarious and sometimes it’s somebody very decent, but usually, it’s all the way in between. I mean, as long as nobody gets hurt, as long as the Actives are not harmed, everything’s good, everything is game. Some people would abuse that and some people need it.

Ultimately, you’ll find the one thing that every episode has in common is that Echo is the person you need at that point in your life to either turn your life around, to give you the moment you thought you’d never have, or to pull you out of a place you think you can’t get out of. Or to rob the bank. Whatever it is, she’s a kind of life coach, without even meaning to be. She’s always the perfect person for whatever it is you need.

Sometimes there will be B stories – we’ll always see the workings of the Dollhouse, but we’ll also see other Actives on other engagements, and sometimes they’ll just be B stories, sometimes they’ll cross over or sometimes they’ll just connect thematically.

How did you determine who the other characters around Echo should be?

The first thing I said to Eliza, before I’d even created the show, was, “You need an ensemble. You can’t be in every scene – it’ll make you nuts. You need a genre show and you need a big ensemble. You need a premise that’s bigger than just you, so that if you need to stand down and get some rest, you can maintain after a certain time.”

To that end, there was more than one Active. Then you work out the idea of the place [the Dollhouse]. You need a programmer, you need someone who runs it, you need someone to back her up, her handler, and you need somebody to save her, who’s trying to find her.

Then Dr. Saunders, who’s played by Amy Acker, was created after I pitched the show. It was, “We need this voice in the Dollhouse, to counteract Topher the programmer.” So it was all very organic. It was just the obvious people that would be in Echo’s life. It wasn’t like, “I need my wacky sidekick.” There was nothing cynical about the way they came in – they were all just what they needed to be, and then I found the actors who had that same quality. I feel again that same thing I had on Firefly of, “These guys have always been doing this, nobody else could’ve.”

There’s a lot of anticipation about Dollhouse in the online fan community…

Sometimes there’s a backlash against fans – “Oh, they’re going to make everybody else not watch.” Well, that’s not the case. The only person who can really do that is me. If people come, if they give it a fair shake, I will do my best to entertain them. And everything else will fall by the wayside.

Can you say anything about Cabin in the Woods, the feature film you’re producing that Drew Goddard will direct?

It’s a horror movie. Some teenagers may meet with violence!

Dollhouse starts airing on Fox in February 2009.