The Avengers

Joss Whedon has the kind of credibility that only comes from repeated failure. To his intensely devoted fans, Whedon is nothing less than a genius, the hyperliterate auteur who created the cult hit “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and would have minted a half-dozen other self-aware genre franchises by now if it weren’t for the eternal obtuseness of network and studio executives.

Which is why they’re all the more frenzied about this week’s opening of “The Avengers.” After years of treating Whedon like a cog, one of those corporate behemoths — Disney’s Marvel Entertainment — has finally cottoned to the obvious: that there’s no one in Hollywood better cut out to make a superhero flick that hardcore nerds will embrace and civilians won’t be embarrassed to see.

I spoke to Whedon in early April, in the midst of a flurry of activity that was intense even by his standards. Within a span of a couple days, he had finished post-production on “The Avengers”; started post-production on a self-financed adaption of “Much Ado About Nothing”; finished shooting on another self-financed film, “In Your Eyes,” which he wrote; and debuted a documentary about Comicon which he produced and Morgan Spurlock directed. A week after our interview, “Cabin in the Woods,” a horror film he co-wrote and produced, opened.

Whedon hates spoilers, so here’s a spoiler alert: This interview is long. Unlike the suits at Fox, I don’t think I know better than Whedon what form his words ought to take, so I’m presenting them more or less verbatim. Read on if you’re interested in learning

 the secret of multitasking

 Whedon’s advice for would-be filmmakers who aren’t born into screenwriting dynasties like he was

 why he doesn’t use Twitter

 how he feels about the possibility of another director resurrecting “Buffy”

 why you shouldn’t invite Batman to Thanksgiving dinner

 what his favorite superhero movies are

 why “Firefly” and “Dollhouse” were completely different kinds of failures

 why he started a “microbudget” studio of his own

 how he realized that his most famous character is really his own alter ego

 what he plans to do next. (Hint: You haven’t seen the last of Dr. Horrible.)

FORBES: Thanks for making time for this. I know this is an insane period in your life.

JOSS WHEDON: It’s not a sane period. It’s not a period of reflection and learning.

You seem like someone who’s always got a few plates spinning. Is this a heightened version of normal for you or something else?

There comes a point where a heightened version of normal becomes “You need to be institutionalized.” We’re sort of working on five movies right now, so that would be too much.

You’re obviously someone who likes to, for want of a less obnoxious word, multitask. You don’t just completely lose yourself in one thing.

I like both. You have to completely lose yourself in something, even if you have to lose yourself in something else 45 minutes later. If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It’s like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention. The secret to multitasking is that it isn’t actually multitasking. It’s just extreme focus and organization.

Let’s talk about “The Avengers,” which is presumably going to make the biggest splash, given the marketing budget around it.

It’s opening in arthouses in most major cities, so I’m excited.

Is it the biggest thing you’ve ever done?

Well, yes and no. It’s two years, give or take a week of my life, and it felt a lot like when I was running three shows. Those are the two experiences I liken the most of just constant — I am writing while I am filming while I am editing while I am…what’s the not thing? Sleeping. So it’s obviously an enormous project. On the other hand, doing a show for seven years is in some ways bigger. It’s longer. This one’s taller. And it is not small. It’s not small. “The Avengers” and “Cabin in the Woods” have one thing in common, which is they both go insane at the end. They really pour it on. The expression “go big or go home” really applies. For two years I went big, and then I went home.

In their marketing, both “Avengers” and “Cabin” whip potential audiences into a frenzy with the promise of what happens at the end while going to unusual lengths to deprive them of any idea of what happens at the end.

Well, in the case of “Cabin in the Woods” it’s very important to maintain the integrity of how the story unfolds. In the case of “Avengers,” people pretty much know they’re probably gonna fight some guys. The superhero movie has a structure that allows itself to be revealed. What hasn’t been revealed about “Avengers” so much is the journey of the group, not the destination.

It’s often said that the best part of superhero movies is the introduction of the characters, the telling of the backstories. After that it’s usually just a lot of CGI fighting. In this movie, there are a lot of heroes to introduce. Is that a strength?

A strength and a problem. The problem is most of them have already been introduced. The real joy of most superhero movies is that origin story because it’s that moment of “Oh, I have this power. I can do this. I can right this wrong, or stand up for someone.” That glorious moment. I don’t have that. These people have been introduced in the other movies. We may not know that much about them. Hawkeye basically had a few lines in “Thor,” but there isn’t anybody who’s going to be like, “Gosh, what’s this vat of radioactive acid doing here. Oh my gosh! I have superpowers!”

That part of the story is gone. So what I’ve got is a bunch of more or less seasoned professionals: professional soldier, professional billionaire superhero, professional god. It’s an oddly mature movie, and I don’t just mean that it’s thoughtful, though I hope that it is. It’s about grown-ups. There’s an adolescent nature to the origin story that these guys don’t necessarily share. This is more about people who live in the world trying to deal with what they become, not about becoming it — except for the Avengers themselves, the team. It’s the origin of a team.

That makes me think of something like “Watchmen” — a story that starts by saying, in essence, “Let’s fast-forward to the part you haven’t seen.”

The problem for me is that “Watchmen,” one of the great comics of all time, is a look at superheroes that has gone beyond the concept of or necessity for superheroes. It is a very dark deconstruction of the superhero genre, and I feel the movie did not quite — first of all, the comic book should never have been a movie. It was also a comic book about American culture in the 20th century, seen through the lens of comic books. It was a comic about comics designed to be a comic and not a movie.

But I feel also that I’m not ready for that movie because that movies says “We know so much about superheroes, we’ve seen so many great superhero movies. Now let’s tear it apart.” And I’m like, “Whoa! Wait a minute. I haven’t seen that many great superhero movies.” I still want to see the ones that make me feel galvanized and excited and really moved and that make me feel really invested in the people I’m watching. I don’t want to tear them apart yet.

“The Avengers,” because it’s a movie about grown-ups, has a somewhat if not cynical then realistic eye about how much damage these people are capable of and how precarious their relationship with the rest of the world is. But at the end of the day, I still want to go, “Come on, guys! Yay!”

What, in your view, have been the great superhero movies?

I still think the first two “Spideys” were unmatched. I think they captured the comic and found some cinematic extensions of that that were purely cinematic. Again, I think “Watchmen” was slavishly adherent to the comic, and that sometimes is almost as bad as completely ignoring the comic and just using the title. I think “Batman Begins” is certainly my favorite Batman movie I’ve seen.

Huh, not “The Dark Knight”? Most people would say “The Dark Knight.”

“The Dark Knight,” for me, has the same problem that every other “Batman” movie has. It’s not about Batman. I think Heath Ledger is just phenomenal and the character of the Joker is beautifully written. He has a particular philosophy that he carries throughout the movie. He has one of the best bad guy schemes. Bad guy schemes are actually very hard to come up with. I love his movie, but I always feel like Batman gets short shrift. In “Batman Begins,” the pathological, unbalanced, needy, scary person in the movie is Batman. That’s what every “Batman” movie should be.

You pitched a Batman movie at one point. Was that your vision for it?

It was different, but similar in that it had to do with the fact that he’s not okay. He’s not a guy who knows how to live like a person. That’s one of the great things about Batman. Everyone knows don’t invite Batman to Thanksgiving. That guy, he’s gonna be dark and weird. And that’s a great character.

For a writer-director, you have an unusually strong “brand.” You come with a built-in audience with a certain idea of what a Joss Whedon movie is.

Yes, but that built-in audience isn’t actually big enough to register on the scale of what “Avengers” needs to accomplish in the marketplace. The fact is some people really love my work, some people not so much, but at the end of the day I don’t want anybody coming out of the movie thinking about me. I want them thinking about the Avengers. I want to subsume myself in the piece. Tony Stark is enormously fun for me to write because he makes quips and he’s silly and he’s fun and he’s smart. I love writing him. But I don’t want people go, “Ha, that’s a Joss line.” I want them to think, “That’s a Tony line.”

I know you didn’t get to cast Robert Downey Jr., but man, he’s seems like the ideal actor for your dialogue.

We really had fun. We really did. We had a beautiful balance of times when he came in going, “I’m going to want some options. Let’s work through this together,” and times when he came in saying, “I’m just going to say these words you wrote down.” And making both of those things sound so fresh. He has a particular talent for making it sound like he’s thinking of things as he’s saying them and discovering them in the moment. He and I…that worked out just fine. Because if he does want to play, my background is such that I can just fire things off right there on set. “Here’s five different versions of that concept or that line.”

You have a circle of actors that are strongly identified with you — Nathan Fillion, Eliza Dushku, Felicia Day, Alexis Denisof. What attracts you to an actor?

The people I go to again and again are by and large the people I’m friends with, and that’s because they are lovely people. We share a passion for what we do. They show up every day like, “Ah, I’m excited to do this!” And I’m excited to do it with them.

They’re very sharing people. When you’re making a movie, no matter how in control you are, you’re collaborating. When you give somebody something, you want them to give it back to you with more than you gave it to them with. You want people to surprise you while delivering whatever it is you set out to do.

Basically, “Much Ado” stars the Whedon Repertory Company, and they’re all just magical in it. “The Avengers,” all of those actors have that quality. They’re very giving to each other. Some people were worried about, “What if they don’t like each other?” But I was like, “Guess what? I can use that. They’re not going to get along in the movie.” But then it turned out they had to pretend that part.

How different was it doing something on this scale — the tallest thing you’ve ever done?

The big difference is there’s so much you can do that you have to sort of stay ahead of that. We had a release date from the day I took the job a little over two years ago. This thing was in motion. It’s very easy for things to devolve into the generic when they’re being done by the big machine. People said to me, “The machine is so big, you can’t fail.” And I said, “Actually, if the machine makes the movie, I have failed.”

It’s a question of staying ahead of this giant snowball coming down the hill. You’ve got to keep shaping it so that it stays singular, so that not just the lines but the stunts and the visuals have some purpose and panache. But for the first three weeks of shooting, I kept saying, “This is more like making an internet musical than anything I’ve ever done.”

Speaking of which, your three-part musical feature “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” which you shot during the 2007 Writers Guild strike, was one of the first big online-only video hits. Now every big media company is trying to figure out premium web video. What kind of video works on the web?

What works is what’s compelling. It’s very easy to say, “Four minute comedy sketches – that’s all people will watch.” When we made “Dr. Horrible,” the people at my agency had no idea what to do with it. “Well, we could put it on YouTube if we cut it up…” I had watched an episode of “Star Trek: The New Voyages,” that web series that was largely done by fans out of pure love of old “Star Trek.” I watched an episode that was over an hour long, just because it was wonderful. I’m not even a Trekker! There are no rules for that.

I do think “Dr. Horrible” was particularly right for where people were with the internet at that time because it was a little bit more than they were used to, three 12-minute segments, but not so much that they couldn’t make the commitment. And it had songs and superheroes and it was silly. It’s very audience-friendly. And it also had to do with people who are in the culture of the internet. It wasn’t one of those things like “Quarterlife,” which was very much old people pandering. We made a movie about nerd types, Comicon types, because that’s who we are.

In your talk at South By Southwest in March, you said the next thing you plan to do is an internet series.

That’s true. I have a notion that I had and was trying to put together with Warren Ellis right before “Avengers” came in an usurped my life for two years, and that’s what I want to go back to. It’s called “Wastelanders.” It’s riskier than “Dr. Horrible.” There is no soundtrack album. It’s not kid-friendly. It’s kind of a darker piece. But I’m in a position to take some risks and I feel very strongly about the material.

Are you doing that for someone? Do you have a home in mind for it?

I’m doing it for me. My wife and I created [so-called “microbudget” studio] Bellwether last year, right after we finished [production on] “Avengers”. The first thing we shot was “Much Ado,” and “In Your Eyes” is under the same banner, and “Wastelanders” might be as well. At some point I’d like to do more “Dr. Horrible.”

These things are designed to be extremely low budget, financed by me and therefore controlled by me, and later on we figure out where we want to go from there. With “Much Ado,” I’d like to hopefully go to some festivals and find a distributor. With “In Your Eyes,” probably the same thing. But we’re taking each one on a case-by-case basis and not be beholden to anybody.

With “Wastelanders,” my intent is to put it on the internet. That’s the notion, to create an entertainment for people that works as a series and then comes together as a movie. The internet is interesting to me as a destination. A lot of people — including “Quarterlife”; I keep coming back to that — they make these things in order to get them on TV. For me, that’s not a way to play. I don’t write a comic so it can be a movie. I don’t write a TV show so it can be a movie even though one did. I don’t write a movie so it can be a TV show, even though one did and then became a TV show after that. You focus on one goal.

I want to fulfill the promise of creating these things that are not beholden to someone’s release schedule. As soon as you have a distributor, you have someone who’s explaining to you why every weekend is too crowded to open your movie, and that they have to wait for 18 months. That’s frustrating as hell.

Back up — there’s a plan to do more “Dr. Horrible”?

We’re working on it. We haven’t completely cracked it yet. We’ve all been just a little bit busy. But yes, we’ve had it open and on the table for quite some time, and we’d really better close it up before it gets infected.

So the “microbudget” part of Bellwether — that means straight out of your checking account?

It does. We’ve created a particular little account for these things, and we’ll do a couple of them at a time, and if we do enough of them and they all completely fail to make a dent [drops to a whisper] we’ll probably stop. Because that’s our nest egg.

Digital technology has allowed creators like you to seize the means of production, as it were, since it costs so much less to make a great-looking movie and you can reach an audience of millions without a distributor. Did you see this going on all around you and think, Why am I not doing this?

I didn’t see it going on, as a matter of fact, and I thought, Why isn’t everybody doing this? The fact is people are making movies with their phones, and if you can, why wouldn’t you? “Much Ado” cost half of what “Dr. Horrible” cost and it’s twice as long. Now, obviously, it doesn’t have any special effects, but the special effects in “Dr. Horrible,” as I recall, didn’t win a lot of awards. Cameras are so sensitive, and if you have a bounce card and the sun, you can get beautiful images.

Now, we did use lights in places on “Much Ado,” but as minimally as possible. It was really run-and-gun. We shot the whole thing in 12 days. That would be the other thing I require from my troupe of actors: the ability to know their words.

When people ask me “How do I get my start?”, I’m not a great example. I grew up knowing a little about the business, and my dad had an agent so I understood a lot about how you write these things and I had someone to look at it. So it’s hard for me to give advice. But in the last few years, the advice became: If you like something, make it. Don’t write it and try to find a studio. Make it. Because it is very possible, for anybody.

When I did “Buffy” as a show, it was partly because I couldn’t get a gig as a director. So I said, well, I’ll write a show. I’ll hire me. “Buffy” was, unabashedly, seven years of film school for me, with me teaching myself how to direct. The best way to learn is to do it. Get it wrong a couple times.

Speaking of advice, there was a piece recently on io9, the sci-fi blog, offering advice for writers, and one rule was basically: Don’t try to write like Joss Whedon because you’re not Joss Whedon.

[Laughs] I think a lot of people have given me that advice. That’s funny to me. I’ve become a category!

You’re also an adjective: “whedonesque.”

That’s true, although I’m not sure what it means. Some people think, “Yeah! That means it’s gonna be full of pop culture references.” And I’m like, uh, I kind of made “Firefly” almost specifically so it would be impossible to make pop culture references, except for the particular genre we were feeding off.

It’s gratifying to have a voice. It’s gratifying and a danger. The ability to subsume your voice in the characters you’re writing is as important as the ability to be distinct. I’ve written things that belonged to other people. I did a run on “X-Men.” I did a run on “Runaways.” Obviously you’re going to bring your sensibilities to it, but at the end of the day you’re in the service of something that’s bigger than you.

It’s interesting to hear you say that, because your fans — and I know you said there aren’t enough of them to move the needle, but there are quite a few — they freaked out a couple years ago when it was reported that there would be a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” movie with someone else directing and writing it.

Well, yeah. Because they’re my fans. And it’s a bit of an adjustment. For me, the “Spider-Man” reboot is a bit of an adjustment. I realize that Tobey Maguire is in his declining years, and Sam Raimi is obviously too old to direct anything, so it makes sense. Wait, what? Wasn’t that, like, a couple years ago they were still bringing it? I found that incomprehensible. “Buffy” had actually been dormant for a lot longer than “Spider-Man” when that news came out and it still shocked me. But that’s what our culture is. Right now I’m working on the reboot of “Battleship,” because Taylor Kitsch is a little old.

Is the “Buffy” reboot still a possibility or is it fully dead?

Honestly, I’m not really tracking it. My feeling is it’s good and it honors what “Buffy” set out to do, then that’s great, and if it’s bad, then it will probably make me look cooler. So it’s kind of a win-win.

Do you ever delve into the voluminous fan fiction around “Buffy”?

I have delved into it. There’s a bunch. There isn’t a better barometer of the kind of success that I crave, which is that people haven’t only enjoyed the work; they’ve internalized it. I don’t, obviously, spend all my days reading it because that would make me creepy, but it’s a huge, huge thing for me that people have taken it into their lives.

Let’s talk a bit about “Cabin in the Woods.” We discussed the secrecy around it, but we do get a little of what happens from the previews.

Yes, Lionsgate had the unenviable task of trying to market a movie that they didn’t want to show anything from. It’s not that it’s so much a twist as it is a progression, an unfolding, which is the way movies were made before movies sort of became premise movies, where you go in knowing exactly what you’re going to get. It’s very hard to make a movie that really unfolds gradually throughout the movie. “Cabin” isn’t like “Crying Game.” It’s not “The Sixth Sense.” It doesn’t all hinge on one moment. It’s just this lovely journey. “I’m here. Wait a minute, I’m over here?” The element of surprise is something that I protect fiercely on both a philosophical and commercial level.

You don’t hear the word “lovely” applied to horror movies often.

Well, it is. It’s very lovingly made. It’s beautifully shot. We love the characters, we care very much. People have said, “Oh, it’s a deconstruction,” but it’s not a winking one. We don’t break the fourth wall. Everybody in the movie is very invested in what they’re doing.

One thing we can tell from the trailers is this element of surveillance, being watched on closed-circuit TV. That pops up kind of a lot in things you’ve done. What’s up with that?

Yes, this idea that there’s someone controlling and monitoring and experimenting with you, that corporations are big and evil and control our lives and even our attitudes about our lives — I write this stuff, and then sometimes on the side I write science fiction.

Ha. I was going to go with something about how being a director makes you view the world that way.

Well, also, this is at the same time very much a story about storytelling. As somebody who has manipulated the lives and death, the trials and triumphs of other people, you do start to wonder: Why am I doing this? Is this a good thing? It’s no secret that the two characters played by Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins are in many ways just me and Drew [Goddard, director and co-writer].

So this movie is your alternative to therapy.

Yes. “Come, America, and see my issues!” Actually, everything I’ve done has been that. I didn’t realize until after seven seasons of “Buffy” — literally, until after I was done with it — that I was writing about myself. People always say, “Which character is you?” and I’m like, “Well, I feel like I’m Xander because he’s funny and he’s kind of a loser.” And then honestly it wasn’t until I was working on something else that I went, “Oh! I was Buffy, and I was writing about myself the whole time. How could I possibly not have noticed that?”

I have one particular theme, and it ties in with what I was talking about with the corporations, and that’s helplessness. The empowerment of someone who’s helpless. And that has everything to do with how I feel about myself. Buffy was a pretty blond girl of whom nothing was expected, who didn’t try very hard at anything, and then suddenly became the most powerful person around — that theme, whether it’s empowerment or the discovery that one is powerless, that drives everything I do.

You were a go-getter from a pretty young age. Why is helplessness something that resonates so strongly for you?

I guess because I grew up small and afraid of everything, and apart from the fact that I’m no longer small, nothing has changed. Every moment that I love is the moment when a character basically stands up and says “I have the right to exist.” And that’s something I have yet to do as a person. But I can write it quite eloquently.

Your father and grandfather were both screenwriters. Did you pass the gene on to your kids?

Oh, yeah. That’s very possible. First of all, my little brothers are both working in TV. Like me, they tend to be more drama guys who are funny than sitcom guys, and my son and daughter are both born storytellers. Whether they decide to do that for a living or to make an honest living, I can’t yet say.

The last two TV shows you created, “Dollhouse” and “Firefly,” both had short, difficult runs. What’s the difference between the projects you’ve done that have succeeded at a commercial level and those that haven’t?

I would say “Firefly” worked perfectly at a commercial level considering that I hear about it almost more than I do about “Buffy” and it was only on the air for 11 episodes. I don’t think the commercial side of “Firefly” was the problem. I think the people who were in charge of it did not understand the long view. They did not understand what they had. And I’m not very good at selling. I’m not good at explaining that to people. “Dollhouse” and “Firefly” had a similar predicament in that they were at Fox, obviously with different people in charge, and they ended up getting the Friday night death slot and dying the death.

The difference between them is more striking than the similarity. The difference is that, in the case of “Firefly,” I knew exactly what I was doing and never veered from it. In the case of “Dollhouse,” what I was doing sort of of slowly got pulled out from under me so that by the time we were making the show, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I still think we put up some really beautiful stuff, and we got to talk a lot about the mind and relationships and the human condition. I’m extremely proud of my writing staff and my ensemble. But there was an element of it that got yanked out that I never really recovered from. So it was a more civilized execution.

Both of them shared the problem of not being what the network wanted, but in the case of “Dollhouse” I don’t think they knew they didn’t want it, and I didn’t know that I wasn’t fulfilling what it could but until late in the game, when I sort of turned around and said, “Wait a minute. How did this…? What am I…? Why did I…?” It was a different kind of frustration because I’m not used to finding myself in this position. We still did some beautiful work, but every day we came to work we were building around a hole. The heart of it had been taken out.

Is Bellwether a reaction to that experience?

It’s a reaction to all of my scary, eerily long years in the business. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve had so many agonizing frustrations. Everything I’ve done, every movie’s been delayed, every TV show’s been put off till midseason or delayed or shut down. I’ve never had a process that went smoothly, with the exception of “Dr. Horrible,” which was five months from the time I pitched it to the writers to the time we streamed it, because we were in charge. We made our own rules. And we made our own product. We didn’t have anybody saying, “Well you can’t have that.”

Artistic freedom can be dangerous. A lot of times it can lead to very self-indulgent work, but it’s also, if you are aware of your audience and what you’re trying to do, it’s very necessary. If you have been beaten down by the system over and over, and then you have “Dr. Horrible,” which, it has to be noted, however small it was, in terms of percentages is far and away the most profitable thing I’ve ever done. It’s not the same kind of money you get from doing movies or TV, but the amount that we put out versus the amount we brought back in is hilarious.

Can you talk about the numbers?

We made the movie with two budgets: One wherein we make it and we lose all our money, and one wherein we make all the money back and we can actually pay the people who are doing us favors. In addition I created a structure wherein all the writers and leads were all profit participants, partially in reaction to how little we’d gotten out of the strike. I wanted to show a model where I’m the studio, here’s how I work with the people and I still do the best.

The initial investment was about $200,000. The budget with everybody actually being paid was about $450,000. With the movie and the soundtrack and everything we’ve been able to do with it, we made over $3 million with it. Now, $3 million doesn’t get [CBS CEO] Les Moonves out of bed in the morning. But if you look at it in terms of percentages, that’s a very healthy profit. And, more importantly, it continues to make money years after. It’s on a limited basis, but the model is extraordinary. And we’re all getting a piece of it, which is very exciting. And I’m getting the most, because I’m the studio. And that’s very exciting tooooo!

If you can make 500% margins on “Avengers,” the studio will probably be pretty happy.

[Laughs] I might even get that bonus.

You’re not on Twitter, although you do have an account in your name.

I created it because someone was using my name.

So why aren’t you using it?

I think I would find it a little paralyzing. If you tell me I only have 140 characters, that’s like writing a haiku. Shit is hard. Try to write a children’s book and you realize, oh, this is much harder than writing a novel because every word matters. I don’t want to be on Twitter and just go, “That burrito made me gassy.”

I’m not interested in sharing my life with people. And I would feel an obligation, if I were to tweet, to tweet something worth tweeting. And believe me when I say if I could lose four days of work — of page after page of good, solid work of my job of being a writer — to trying to figure out a tweet. Now, eventually, I might throw caution to the wind and dive in and see what happens, but right now I think that would be poor time management for me.

Definitely not something to take up while you’re still so busy.

Well, I’m about to take a break.

What kind of break?

After I do international publicity for “Avengers” and it opens, I’m pretty much a free agent. I’ll be finishing the cut of “Much Ado” and working on the score, and I’ll be working on “Dr. Horrible 2” and “Wastelanders,” and whatever else I can do from home.

So a break for your is only working on three or four things.

That don’t have deadlines.