Joss Whedon does the Melbourne Town Hall

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL: Joss Whedon  

A guy appears with all-over head fluff, you know the hair and the stubble out-competing each other. Below the waist he wears black jeans, old trainers, above a grey-ish long sleeve tee, shoulders in the permanent-over-the-computer roll. He walks onto a large stage to mighty applause, whoops and whistles of some 3,000 ah.. well yeah..nerds. Who else could do that but Joss Whedon?

The second of a double bill of Key Note Addresses to open the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday night, it was a session that had sold out in less than half an hour. It’s a huge coup for Festival Director, Steve Grimwade and the smile on his face as he introduced Whedon and Sue Turnbull was ear to ear. It’s Whedon only appearance in Melbourne, as he’s quickly whisked to Sydney for another talk at the Opera House (29 August) thanks to their MWF/SOH doing a nifty partnering.

Chair Sue Turnbull opened the discussion by recalling a friend of her’s had breathlessly said, ‘You know God is coming to Melbourne?’ Did that make her the Angel Gabrielle she wondered.‘Joss, how does it feel to be God?’

“Well, when I made the mountains,’ Whedon drawled to appreciative laughter, ‘…they’re good but….., um..[changing voice] I don’t believe in me…which is awkward..’ More laughter, yes it was a love-in.

'Wasn’t becoming a screenwriter a bid for God-dom?' Turnbull quizzed,

Whedon’s response: ‘Um I think it was a bid for obscurity and pain; a successful one.’ Audience, in palm of his hand.

His pain I get. The obscurity? It’s hard to comprehend that not everyone knows who he is.

Of course, not everyone does. Saying, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel? Like Firefly!’ doesn’t always bring the light of understanding to people’s eyes. Yes, this is the guy who created all of those iconic cult TV shows and they were cool. His movies have included Toy Story, Parenthood, Speed, Alien Resurrection and the film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was what led to the series. For the past few years he’s produced a musical internet series, Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which received an Emmy for ‘Outstanding Special Class Short-Format – Live Action Entertainment Program'. That seems like a bit to be getting on with.

So important have his shows been to television Turnbull suggested, with the authority of the academic, they changed the way people viewed television. Whedon along with Chris Carter of X-Files fame, she said largely gave rise to television becoming an authored form. This was also thanks to the simultaneous rise of the internet, they both agreed, with the popularity of Buffy creating online communities, fan groups and a dialogue with the show Whedon, that sustained the show where perhaps the raw numbers on an obscure network wouldn’t have.

But for this crowd all that background was so well known, Turnbull didn’t feel it was worth going over, much. It was a session needing some sort of a narrative to get it beyond just a fan-fest and the course of his career helped shape that. So Whedon talked about his first ambition, to make independent films. It was to be a step he believed along the road toward making blockbuster sci-fi genre films. ‘I’m a Star Wars fan he says, and the audience whoops again. ‘Other people have seen this obscure art film? Street Cred for mentioning that.’

Wheldon’s father and grandfather were screenwriters, but he ‘thought television was a bad thing for dumb people’. ‘I was a huge snob about TV,’ he said. ‘In fact my best friend in college would always say I was going to be a third generation television writer, he’d be like 3G TV, that’s what he called me.’ But the indie-film making thing quickly shifted to a need to get paid, and when he sat down to write television he knew that he had found the ‘great love of his life’.

His writing process seems incredible, circling an idea ‘like a dove’ or 'an eagle', until it all comes together in his head, only then putting words on the page. Whedon described writing the moment he’s dying to have first and then the next moment that his dying to have. ‘I always eat dessert first.’ When he’s done enough of that he can move back to fill in the gaps and do the expositional work because he has the big pieces.

Whedon explained that part of the joy of television was the collaborative nature of it. For him, the actors were always informing their roles. ‘I was always listening to my actors. Willow got sexier, Giles got hipper, Anya got stranger, Alexander got wider. Oh that’s so mean.’ But television offers something that can’t be achieved anywhere else. ’Living with a story in a collaborative fashion, with the writers and the actors; to keep investigating the same thing, turning over the same rock and seeing it in a new way; it’s something I adore,’

However, Turnbull and Whedon joked, television turned its back on him, or did he turn his back on TV?

‘Television broke up with me,’ Whedon sobbed theatrically. ‘It said we could still be friends. But that it wanted to see other people.’

Back in 2002, Whedon had, Buffy, Angel, Firefly in production, comic books, his wife was pregnant, and then two of his show writers left at the same time and Firefly was cancelled. He’s described that as one of the biggest tragedies of his career. ‘Every day I think about episodes I was going to make [of Firefly] and how cool they were going to be.’ Most shows he said, take a while to find themselves stylistically but Firefly from the very first was itself – a really awesome funny space western.

The collaboration may not be there but the cool stuff Whedon still gets a little through writing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, apparently he can still ‘hear the voices’? The next big excitement for him and certainly for the audience, is his return to the big screen. He is writing and directing the film adaptation of The Avengers, another of the comics he was passionately reading when he was a kid. Robert Downey Jnr will be joining an ‘incredible’ line up of talented actors, so Whedon’ll finally get his summer blockbuster in 2012.

You might have expected the questions at a session like this to be excruciating, of the ‘I’ll take that as a comment’ variety. But in fact they were mostly concise and thought out, although far more people had questions than could possibly be answered. At least twenty people were lined up at the four mikes around the Town Hall within a minute of the lights going up. They ranged from: whether he paired characters to mediums (books, movies, tv) or vice verus (not really), corporate power (yes they’re evil), there was some ‘much respect’ to his activities during the US Writers strike (thanks), what work of other people would he wish to work on (Glee.. oh wait.. Battlestar Gallactica), did he imagined he’d get such a cult following (he did), and how can we be like you? – Er get a time machine. No really. Send your grandfather back in time and get him to write TV.

If you want to be a writer, Whedon said, it’s something you absolutely ‘need’ to be. When people say to him, ‘I’m thinking about becoming a writer’, he wants to say ‘give it away now’. It takes passion, even obsession, you’re unable to be anything else. And if you really desperately want to see your show made – 'Make it,' Whedon shrugged. The technology, the capacity, is there, just do it.

It used to be, he said: ‘God, I hope they like it. God, I hope they buy it. God, I hope they make it. God, I hope they don’t f#@k it up.’

Now, 'the worst it can be is great practice.’

So says the Lord our God. Amen to that.

And the applause that followed him off the stage was deafening.

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL
27 August to 5 September

Keynote Address 2
An Evening with Joss Whedon: From Buffy to Dr Horrible, Infinity and Beyond
Friday 27 August @ 9.30pm
Melbourne Town Hall

For further information and ticketing go to www.mwf.com.au
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