Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon has already created a couple of pop culture icons with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and now he’s gearing up to revive a classic character with his big screen version of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman. Now Playing magazine chatted with Whedon yesterday, and during the conversation the writer-director-producer gave us a status report on the Amazonian princess. For starters, he says that the film will be set in the modern world - despite previous TV and comic incarnations that have placed the character in the past.

“It goes back to World War II,” he says of the source material. “This will be in the modern day, but Wonder Woman herself will never be in the modern day.”

The implication of the above statement is that the immortal Paradise Island denizen will be a fish out of water in the 21st century - perhaps like a good guy, hot version of the Judge from Buffy? (You remember - the Judge was that ancient villain who didn’t know what a rocket launcher was.) As for who will play the part of Princess Diana, Whedon says that he hasn’t even begun to think about that yet as he’s still busy finishing up his feature debut as a director, Serenity.

“[Casting] is the last thing on my mind and I’m happy to say it’s the last thing on Warner Bros.’ and [producer] Joel [Silver’s] mind too,” he says. “We’re like, ‘Let’s write the part! Then we’ll have a better idea of who’s good for it.’ And we’ve talked about whether it should be someone famous or an unknown. Ultimately there are advantages to both, so nobody’s thinking about that... except everybody.”

Whedon also sees Wonder Woman as being quite different from most of the other big screen superheroes.

“She doesn’t have a villain as recognizable as [a Lex Luthor],” he explains. “In fact, she doesn’t have a lot of things as recognizable as a lot of the other heroes have, but that’s not a problem simply because she’s basically based on Greek mythology, which opens up a world of interesting possibilities. She’s very different from anybody who might have been bitten by a spider or had his parents killed in an alley.”

But as enthusiastic as he is about the project, Whedon also points out that he hasn’t even started writing it. With Serenity, which is based on his short-lived Fox sci-fi series Firefly, blasting towards a September 30 release date, Whedon wants to fully concentrate on that project before diving into Wonder Woman. Which isn’t to say that he isn’t already thinking about where he’ll take the Amazonian once he does officially start working on her script.

“There hasn’t even actually been a whole deal signed and everything [for Wonder Woman],” he says. “I’m working on it in the way that I always work on everything which is that I think about it while I’m doing other things, but right now we’re in the final stages of wrapping up Serenity and that’s where my focus is. The reason I was able to take the Wonder Woman gig was that they don’t have a release date and they don’t have a schedule, and that means I have time to sit back and get it right. It will happen, but it’s not like ‘Bang, you’re ten weeks under the gun.’ The starting gun has not fired but I always jump the gun anyway. When you have a product that rich you can’t help but think of ideas for it, the same way I think of ideas for the Serenity sequel that may never happen. We don’t turn it off.”