joss whedon quotes
from The Monster Book
from Entertainment Weekly
from The Watcher's Guide #1
from That Girl's Got Bite
from the Bronze
from other sources
Quotes from The Monster Book:
On Mythology and Influences
“The show is designed to…work on the mythic structure of a hero’s journey. Just to reframe that as the growth of an adolescent girl. The things she has to go through – losing her virginity, dying and coming back to life – are meant to be mythic, and yet they’re meant to be extremely personal.”
“As a child, I was afraid of a lot of stuff. I’ve always been attracted to horror. There is an element of being a child within it that I can’t get away from. Grown-up horror is different. That’s something I’m just learning about as I gradually and all to slowly become a grown-up. There’s something about the way a child experiences pure horror – the innocence and yet the almost unseemly attraction children have to that – that is, to me, the most primal and interesting. Where there’s horror, I tend to find youth and growth.”
“I think there’s a lot of people out there who say we must not have horror in any form, we must not say scary things to children because it will make them evil and disturbed… That offends me deeply, because the world is a scary and horrifying place, and everyone’s going to get old and die, it they’re that lucky. To set children up to think that everything is sunshine and roses is doing them a great disservice. Children need horror because there are things they don’t understand. It helps them to codify it if it is mythologized, if it’s put into the context of a story, whether the story has a happy ending or not. If it scares them and shows them a little bit of the dark side of the world that is there and always will be, it’s helping them out when they have to face it as adults.”
“In terms of the monsters, there is no one absolute.”
“We refer to Ted as The Stepfather-Terminator-Collector.”
“For me, all movies should be The Matrix. The Matrix is the beginning and end of all films.”
On Demons
“Demons, in their pure state, roamed the earth in evil fashion. When mammals, humans, and whatnot started to evolve, the demons got pushed out. Some of them fled. Some of them stayed but evolved into a more human form. Those are all lesser demons.”
“We don’t think of it as hell, exactly. It’s a demon dimension, and we talk about more than one. The place Buffy went to was a demon dimension that [certain characters] referred to as hell because that was their belief system. Lily thought she was in hell because that was where she thought she deserved to go. The demon Ken was just playing off that. It wasn’t a Christian hell, per se. It was just a really, really shitty place.” – referring to where the demons fled to
“There are no pure demons left on earth. But in the demon dimensions, there are bundles, just waiting to get out. We’re beginning to see that there are some who are purer than others. They war amongst themselves; they look down upon each other. Some of them are actually okay. Some have integrated themselves into human society. There’s definitely a hierarchy here, or at least, there are different races, and racism.”
When asked if there is more than one hellmouth: “Yes.”
Seeing another one: “We might address it, but again, the thing with Buffy is that we don’t tend to get into the broader scope of the more fantastical issues unless it services a very personal story. It’s not built like many fantasy shows. There are a hundred cool concepts and great twists and fun ideas and intense milieus that we’ll never use because they don’t relate to the personal experience of growing up and going to college. It’s not designed like most fantasy shows. A lot of avenues we’re just not going to take, even though we spend our own time talking about what does this mean and how does it work and isn’t this cool.”
“The concept of the First, along with the concept of whatever redemptive power saved Angel [in Amends] – which we refer to on Angel a lot as the Powers That Be – is being broached more and more. If [the First] does show up again, it will probably be on Angel. Just because that show deals with the more fantastical, Gothic themes of good and evil, and Buffy tends to deal more with the here and now and the everyday.”
“I would not say that the Powers That Be is God, but I would say that some people would interpret it as God. That’s just as valid as whatever interpretation they can come up with. We keep it vague for a reason. If people want to believe it’s God, we’re not going to say it’s not any more than we’re going to say it is.”
“We probably won’t see him. We could, if we think of a cool story involving him. But at this point we don’t have any big plans in that direction.” -Referring to Whistler
“He was fun. I designed him, too. That reptile spine on the head for a Mohawk was cool. We wanted specifically [for him to be part of] a clan, because we talked about him as a warrior, a brave. ‘I hunt with my knives. Yes, they come out of my forearm.’ He’s more of a traditional fellow. He was a lot of fun.” –referring to Kulak
On Vampires
“The mythology expands with every show we write. With Angel, it’s expanding a lot.”
“Vampires were created when a demon fed off a human and possessed him. More than any other demon, they’re sort of the half-breeds. They need a human host to live in. Plus, there are burrowing demons that live in human shells. But vampires are half demon and half human, which makes them sort of losers of the demon set.”
“As far as how many vampires there are, I have no idea. They’re working as busboys in the demon restaurant.”
“They do form attachments and groups an even communities in a human way. But we tend to think of them as backward and sort of feudal. They could never actually build an entire city. They’re too selfish and strange. They could never actually be a real working community. They exist in these little pockets.”
On Magic Users
“Willow and Tara’s relationship is definitely romantic. Thorny subject; the writers and I have had long [talks] about how to deal with the subject responsibly, without writing a story that sounds like people spent a long time discussing how to deal with it responsibly. To me it feels just right. All the relationships on the sow are sort of romantic and this feels like the natural next step for [Willow]…We’re not going to do an Ally [McBeal] or Party of Five in which we promote the hell out of a same-sex relationship for exploitation value that we take back by the end of the [episode]…I just know there’s a sweet story there, that would become very complicated if Oz were to show up again.”
On The Walking Dead
“For me, it’s all Romero. Night of the Living Dead, the trilogy. They’re dead; they eat the flesh of the living. It’s simple, it’s horrifying, it gets done.”
“We don’t have them eating the flesh of the living, ‘cause quite frankly, eeeew. But that is the look and style of movement we go for.”
“Early on, one of the first [episode ideas] I had was a guy raising zombies and having to explain that they don’t eat the flesh of the living; that they got a bad rap ‘cause of the damn movies.”
“Zombie is a relative term.” – (on buffy)
On Bogeymen
“The things that terrify me [as an adult] are people.”
“We’ve been having more fun than fear. At the end of the day, they’re just slimy things for Buffy to kill.” – referring to the monsters on the show
“I’m about to design a new batch for an episode I’m doing. I want to get back to that creepy sort of silent-movie Nosferatu kind of fear. Nosferatu is definitely big. I loved that movie when I was a kid. That guy resonates with me as both creepy and hypnotic. So I’m looking at designing some things that are, again, a little bit more fairy tale, childhood creepy, instead of just big, brawny stuntmen with scales.”
“I’m actually a really big fan of the Kindestod. The Kindestod scared people more than any monster we had made [up to that point]. Very specifically, he was designed that way. I drew a picture of him. I can’t stress how bad [the drawing] was, but I had a very specific thing in mind for him.”
“A lot of our demons are built in the fantasy mode. They’re not scary; they’re just kind of cool looking. [With der Kindestod] I wanted to get into that real childhood Grimms’ fairy tale fear, and so I designed a guy in the classic mode with the beak nose and the dark hat and the big scary old man kind of monster. A lot of people just wigged.”
“What’s scary about the Kindestod is that there’s just one. When you say ‘race’ you get into science fiction. That’s not to say there couldn’t be another. But you don’t think, ‘The bogeyman and his bogeymen clan are coming.’ You think of the bogeyman, that thing that embodies my fear. To say there’s a race of them makes it less scary, as opposed to saying there’s a thing that wants to hurt me and I’m a child. We wanted something …scary, on the level of childhood fantasy.”
On Human Monsters
“I’ve always been afraid of witches. Scary old ladies. The seminal movie that scared the shit out of me was Horror Hotel, and it’s not monsters. It’s just people in cowls and foggy old graveyards, chanting. For me, that’s just the scariest anything needs to be. People are scarier than creatures every time out of the gate. Creatures are fun.”
Quotes from Entertainment Weekly:
"We’re the only manic-depressive show on TV. Some of the recent episodes, Sam Beckett is watching them going ‘Jeez, this is depressing!’ Then the next minute, it’s all laughing. We do that deliberately because the writers have very short attention spans.”
“The jokes work because they’re in the context of drama. And the drama works because the guy who’s saying ‘I love you, Mommy!’ is sprouting horns.”
“The mythology just evolves – the more we do, the more we fill in the blanks. We don’t want to say, ‘It must be thus!’ unless it helps our story. Because 35 episodes later we’ll be like, ‘Well, what if we did…’ ‘No, we said it must be thus!’”
Quotes from The Watcher’s Guide Volume #1:
“[Buffy] is the most personal work I’ve ever done. Which is funny. The opportunity to mythologize my crappy high school experience makes it extremely personal, but also sort of exorcises it. It isn’t just reliving it, it’s sort of reinventing it, so it moves me more than anything I’ve ever done. The opportunity to keep developing the characters and finding out what’s going to happen to them and how they’re going to grow apart or together is…the more it goes on, the more personal it gets.”
“My high school years were not all terrible. There was that Thursday…No, I did have a couple of friends, and I had a lot of good times, but all the bad high school stuff definitely went down. This lets me come to peace with that. But really, I’m at enough of a distance, and it’s not like ‘That girl, and I’ll get her…’ There’s nobody I harbor any particular malice toward from high school. I think that’s part of why I like doing the show so much. I’m able to look at high school and say, ‘There’s the dumb jock who was mean to me. Well, what’s his perspective? He’s going through something, too. There’s the teacher who flunked me.’ I suppose in that sense, it is sort of revelatory. It’s nice because I can go to the pain, but at the same time, I have a much more pleasant view of it, because I am seeing it from a bit of a distance.”
“When we realized how much we could really live these characters’ lives, we found that we could go to that dark place. I made a joke that, ‘The key to the show is to make Buffy suffer.’ Sarah said, ‘Why do you do this to me? Another crying scene? Do you know what I go through here?’ and I said, ‘America needs to see you suffer, because you do it really well.’”
“We’re doing these sort of mythic-hero journeys in our minds. A lot of times, the story doesn’t make sense until we figure out who’s suffering and why. Including the bad guy. If the bad guy’s not hurting, not relating to her, then it’s just a cardboard guy to knock down. And the same thing goes for the audience. If they’re not feeling it, if her relationship to what’s going on isn’t personal, and if ours isn’t then it’s just guys with horns running around and some good jokes, but it’s not going to resonate.”
“I had never thought of doing it myself, but I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s sort of neat!’ And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how many stories there were to tell and how excited I was. I was pretty much out of TV completely at that point, and my agent asked me, ‘Now, come on, really, what do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I’m already writing scenes for this in my head,’ and he said, ‘Fine, I’ll make the deal’ I did not expect it to take over my life like this. I did not expect it to move me as much as it did.” – on being approached for the series
“I love invoking all those [old horror] movies, but at the same time, the core of this series, emotionally, is a very safe place. These people who care about one another and when their world is upset, you care about it. Whatever horror is out there is not as black and terrible as what is already within and between us. A lot of my friends never watch horror, and they get scared and don’t like that part. But they respond to the show.”
“I’m a frustrated writer, I’m a frustrated actor. I’m frustrated at everything I don’t do. But that is why I love this so much, I get to everything, including some set dressing and some costume work. That is the fun thing about producing television, you’re doing all of that.”
“I have a lot of influences. So many, in fact, that I can’t even think of them all. I’ve sort of hodge-podged together my favorite bits of everything. I take what I need for the series. For example, vampires look like vampires part of the time, because I want to see demons so you don’t have a high school girl just stabbing people. At the same time, I want her to see people that [the viewer] doesn’t know if they’re vampires or not. They turn to dust because it’s cool, but also so we don’t have to have twenty minutes of body-cleaning-up at the end of every show.”
Quotes from That Girl's Got Bite
“To me, high school was a horror movie. And that idea can sustain a TV show for years.”
“For the series, we’ve broadened it out. This one community happens to be situated on a Hellmouth, which is a mystical portal, and all kinds of bad things like monsters, demons, and giant insects gravitate toward it. It’s not a very good place to go to school.”
“When it’s somebody’s parent of friend who turns into something horrible, it brings up issues that are real and therefore very scary. Then there’s also everyday terrors like death, maiming and life in general.”
About the movie:
“The idea behind Buffy was to take someone who is living a normal life, put them in an abnormal situation, and see if they rise to the occasion. My idea of the film was that no matter how ill-equipped someone may appear to be to handle their own life, there comes a time when they must take charge of their fate.”
“Yeah, this movie was my response to all the horror movies I had ever seen where some girl walks into a dark room and gets killed. So I decided to make a movie where a blonde girl walks into a dark room and kicks butt instead.”
About turning it into a television show
“In the movie, the director took an action/horror/comedy script and went only with the comedy. In the television show, we’re keeping to the original formula. We take our horror genre seriously. We are not doing a spoof. It’s larger than life, but we are very much involved with these characters. This is not Clueless or Party Girl. The description I like best is ‘My So-called Life meets The X-Files.’”
“I thought about it for a while then decided that I was interested because it would be very different from the movie. I thought there was an idea in the ‘high school horror show’ that would sustain a television show and keep it going for years. If you look at movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, you’ll see this combination of teen angst and horror has been going on for a long time. So it was a very appealing idea to me for a show, but one I honestly hadn’t thought of until they brought it to me.”
“My agent begged me not to do it.”
“I really hated what they had done to my original script. To me, making a movie is like buying a lotto ticket – the writer is just not that important. Being a screenwriter in Hollywood is not all it’s cracked up to be. People blow their noses on you. When I went on the set of Alien, people are nice enough but I’m standing in a corner. On Buffy, I’m telling these stories. Not only am I telling them, I’m telling them every eight days.”
“The movies I write, if they even get made, take several thousand years. But television is a writer’s medium so there’s a better chance things will come out the way you originally envisioned them. With television, it’s like getting to make an independent movie every week. Besides, it was a way to get back at everyone I went to school with.”
“We set up the premise that the town is located on a Hellmouth, so it would be understood that our characters know what is going on, know that Buffy is a vampire slayer, and would understand that mystical and strange things will happen in Sunnydale.”
“There was no second place. We read tons of people and several were staggeringly untalented. Buffy is a tough part; it is a character actress in the body of a leading lady. She’s an eccentric. This girl has to look the part of a blonde bimbo who dies in reel two but turns out to be anything but that. You don’t find those qualities very often in young actresses who also happen to be beautiful, but Sarah gave us a perfect reading. And then she says, ‘By the way, I’m also a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do. Is that good?’”
“I took a bunch of pieces and put them on a page and when these guys came in, they not only got them exactly, but since we’ve been doing a show together, have shaped them. So right now, the characters are a real hybrid with everybody bringing something to their character that wasn’t there before. Although the characters started off with me, now they belong to the actors and I just write to them. What Sarah brings to the part is her intelligence. At the same time, she’s got that hormonal goofiness that makes Buffy not just the Terminator. I’m very fond of everyone in this cast and I’ve worked with plenty of people I can’t say that about. It’s not easy to find the right balance – people who are mature enough to do the hard work, but who still have that youthful energy that’s genuine. It’s not easy, but we got ‘em.”
“We’re not going to get terribly or overtly issue-oriented. The horror isn’t just, monsters attack and we fight them. The horror and the stories have to come from the characters, from their relationships and fears – otherwise, it won’t really be interesting…What I want to get at is the incredibly operatic reactions to small emotional things, to get into the characters’ interior lives, even though it’s a show with big, horned demons. As I’ve said before, there will never be a Very Special Episode of Buffy.”
“The thing that ends up scaring me the most is people. I think the best stuff happens not just by having a monster show up, but when we remember the sort of human relationships people have that are really twisted and scary, and then extend them into horror stories. That’s when things really disturb me – when it’s somebody’s parent or somebody’s friend who is turning into something horrible – because it brings up issues that are real, and therefore, very scary.”
“In the series, we have taken real-life situations that reflect a grotesque parody. When I get together with my writing team, I ask them, ‘What is your favorite horror movie? What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you? Now how can we combine the two?’”
“What’s fun about the show is that we never know from scene to scene which way it’s going to go. A scene that starts out very dramatically could end up quite funny, or something truly horrible could happen in it. We don’t do, ‘Okay, now here’s the funny part and now here’s the scary part.’ We never really know what’s going to highlighted until it’s over.”
“Not that we feel we have to kill someone every week, but we like to let people wonder. We like to show people that the peril here is real, that the horror is real and there’s something at stake.”
“I have no doubt Buffy would have gotten on the air whenever it was pitched. I think horror shows have an important place. People need horror stories. They need the Big Bad Wolf and they need something to hold on to, something to project their fears onto. Life’s horrible. It’s scarier than ever. We are never going to live forever, there is no God…so we’ll always need these stories for an outlet. But horror had disappeared somewhat in movies which is why it is showing up on television. And it hadn’t been on television for a long time, either. It was The X-Files that sort of brought it back again.”
About the move to UPN
“It makes me so angry to see this show belittled. I was just so turned around by the whole thing.”
“The show will run as long as it is good. It is possible that maybe the show stops after seven years. What I do know is that these guys are capable of so much, and the writers have so many ideas, that the show potentially could run for a way, way long time. Eventually there will come a burnout where creatively we’ll just be too tired. But right now we’re feeling more creative than we have been, so contracts really aren’t the point. Contracts get resolved or they don’t. People move on or they don’t. What matters is that I have another hundred stories to tell, and the people I want to tell them with.”
About himself
“Yes, I was a strange, unlovable child. I was afraid of the dark and had a very vivid imagination. A lot of things scare me. Actually, everything scares me. I think the thing I was most afraid of was my big brother. So if you see big brothers being eviscerated in some show of mine, you’ll know where that came from.”
“The truth is, I like monsters. The thing I like best is when the monsters jump out of the closet or when there are demons with horns. If it’s a cheesy horror film, I’ve probably seen it.”
“A lot of kids get into comic books, but with me it was deeper, more consuming than with other children. While they were outside playing, I’d be tucked away inside the house with a stack of comic books to read.”
“Girls wouldn’t so much as poke me with a stick.”
“I started quoting Monty Python routines and they accepted me. Actually, I studied the classics and saw a lot of movies.”
“College rocked. I mean, I was miserable most of the time, but in a party way.”
“Writing is the thing I understand best.”
“Actually, my father didn’t want me to be a writer but after college he suggested I write a TV script so I could earn enough money to move out of the house.”
“I wrote a sickening number of scripts, most of which were returned to me. The rejection notes usually said something like, ‘Very charming. I do not wish to have it.’ But the thing is, the only way to get a career is to do a lot of it. You have to do the hard work and create the spec scripts. You have to write as many as you can and send them around, even if it takes a large number.”
“I literally went from working at a video store on a Friday to working on Roseanne on Monday.”
“Mutant enemy was the name I gave to my very first typewriter. I named it after a song by the group Yes, and that’s why the company is called that.”
“It’s really sweet when people react like that, and I love praise, but to me, what they’re getting emotional about is the show. And that’s the best feeling in the world. There’s nothing creepy about it. I feel like there’s a religion in narrative, and I feel the same way they do. I feel like we’re both paying homage to something else; they’re not paying homage to me. I designed the show to create that strong reaction. I designed Buffy to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can’t be loved.”
Quotes from the Bronze:
“At the last minute I dragged my assistant Diego in to read it. He’s Mexican, speaks a little French and he was reading off a script so it may not have sounded perfect to some but the effect was just great for the dream. Now y’know.” – concerning the french in Xander’s dream in restless
“The cheese man means nothing. He is the only thing in the show that means nothing. I needed something like that, something that couldn’t be explained, because dreams always have that one element that is just ridiculous. Thus, man of chees. Plus funny, (to me).” – concerning the cheese man in restless
“It’s not physics, it’s metaphysics.” – concerning why vamps cast no reflection
“The idea is that the older they get, the more animalistic – but not necessarily the same animal. They devolve. That’s my theory.” – about why the Master and Kakistos look different than regular vamps
“He was not in hell long enough. As for demon dimensions, the one Buffy was in was not the same one Angel was in, time moves differently in each.” – why angel doesn’t look like animalistic
Quotes from other sources:
“Giles was not invited before because he was a rebel. He’s not invited now ‘cause he’s too busy. There are Watchers all over the world because although there are potential Slayers all over the world, it is never known until the last one dies which one will be called. Sometimes a Watcher can find a potential an train her, sometimes they cannot interfere in her life – sometimes they don’t find them until after the other has died.”
– referring to the Watcher’s Retreat
