Joss Whedon

On the importance of the Internet in making Buffy The Vampire Slayer a success: “The Internet happened to sort of come up the same year as we did, and that worked out pretty well. Communities started forming and something started to exist that was bigger than the show, because the show was never very big. It was on a tiny network and it was watched by at most 5 million people which would not keep you alive for three weeks on a major network. I know this. This community and the way people responded to this in building its own zeitgeist made it bigger. And then I also began to communicate with fans and the idea of the show runner as a person that somebody would actually want to speak to or know about became a reality. I’d been around television my whole life and I’d never seen anything like that. [Adopts mock-cool voice] I just took it in my stride: you know, they invented the Internet for me. Now they use it for other stuff too.”

On what inspires his writing: “I’m a Star Wars guy. [Huge cheer from audience] Other people have seen this obscure art film too? Street cred for mentioning that.” (FWIW, anyone else think Lucas isn’t worthy of cleaning Whedon’s shoes?)

On the prospect of further Internet-only content a la Dr Horrible: “I was planning to do something when The Avengers came up. I was actively developing something. I’ve been wanting to do something for a long time. I’ve been trying to set up funding which is very, very difficult because nobody knows how to make money from this unless you’re working at a very low level. I’m perfectly comfortable working at a very low level, but most of the people who invest money in entertainment aren’t. They always look at the big prize. That’s why we get three $100 million movies instead of 30 $10 million movies. I absolutely want to do more there.”

On whether he’ll do another TV series: “I’m never going to turn my back on television. Television has something that you cannot achieve anywhere else, that kind of living with the story for years and years in a collaborative fashion where you’re living with the people who are helping you tell the story, the writers and of course the actors. You just keep turning the same rock over and seeing it in a new way. That is such a gift, it is something you don’t get in movies at all. It is something you just don’t get anywhere else . . . It’s something I adore, and it may be my favourite kind of story-telling, but I’m not going to do it for a while. Ultimately, I’m perfectly happy as long as I’m telling some kind of story. I’ll never turn my back on it, I just have to find a venue where they will let me make it the way that I make it which is a little antithetical to TV.”

When asked “how does it feel to be God?”, Whedon replied: “Well, when I made the mountains, I thought “they’re good”, but [pause and laughter] I don’t believe in me, which is actually awkward.”

On the role of evil corporations in modern life: “It is epidemic. In America, every company is buying every other company. In five years’ time there will be two, maybe. And they’re being given basically licence to become monopolies. And what these corporations do is marginalise the individual so that the corporations can ultimately dictate how the individual lives and keep people poor and keep people dependent and keep people consuming and they do this so they can keep their margin profit where they want it, not where it needs to be in order for them to survive, but wherever the fuck they want it. I very strongly believe that certainly in America the culture of the giant company is here and it is destroying the fabric of our society.” Hmmm, why am I suddenly thinking of Apple?

From Mwfblog.com.au :

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The second Keynote was of course, God, as he was called by the chair Sue Turnbull. Anyway, being the first person in the hall, sitting up the back, I got a got look at the cult of Joss Whedon. Fans strutted in, geeks in coats and lace, with boots and fan shirts, pockets of blue and orange hair. The energy was quite infectious. God strolled in on stage and there were squeals and whoops. Whedon was smart, passionate and funny, and very encouraging to the crowd, telling them everyone can ‘make it’ nowadays. What he meant was, everyone can gain an audience through independent means. Whedon was refreshingly immodest – saying he believed from the beginning he’d make shows with cult followings, because that kept him going. But ‘it wasn’t until I started writing television that I discovered I was a writer’, Whedon said. Buffy was one of the shows in the ’90s that became part of a kind of revolution in TV as a storytelling medium. Whedon loves writing for TV, it’s ‘living with a story for years and years, in a collaborative fashion’. And Whedon admitted, as Buffy took off at the same time as the web, its success was ‘definitely related to the internet’. Whedon interacted, early on, with online fan communities. Whedon and the crowd lamented the end of Firefly and there were such sad whimpers when Whedon says he still thinks of the Firefly episodes he could have made.

Whedon doesn’t set out to write to a particular theme, issue, or to create a franchise, but he walks around with the story a bit, then gets the good bits down, filling in some of the exegetical stuff later. The theme of corporate monopolisation runs through his work, and this just occurs, he says, as it is an issue he’s concerned with. ‘The culture of the giant company is here and it’s destroying the fabric of our society’. Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog was a totally independent venture. And it’s heaps of fun.

Now it’s Saturday and I’m about to rush off to the festival again… See you there!