Joss Whedon Explains Why He Left TV For Film

"It’s time to do something else."

November 28th, 2010

Last Monday we heard the HORRID news that plans are moving forward to reboot Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Joss Whedon‘s support, input or blessing. A day later, Whedon himself went on the record to voice his displeasure at hearing the Buffy reboot news and reiterate how much he is AGAINST plans for a new Buffy movie. Today we get to hear from Joss again but this new interview with SciFiNow magazine has NOTHING at all to do with the Buffy reboot, instead he talks about his other creations Firefly and Dollhouse and he explains why he’s no longer (at least for now) interested in working in TV:

On Dollhouse and Firefly: “The situation with Firefly was that I always knew exactly what I was doing and Fox was ignorant… The situation with Dollhouse was that Fox was trying to get it, but we had come at two different shows, we had done that accidentally, and it got to a point where I didn’t know what I was trying to accomplish, and you can’t go into a story room with that feeling, because it’s already really hard. I remember thinking this is the difference between this and Firefly, because with Firefly, I knew, and here, now I’m not even sure. I was just thinking, ‘I’m writing a shoot-out on a dock – I’m a whore.’ They’re like, ‘No, that doesn’t make you a whore,’ and I’m, like, ‘I’m fairly certain it does!’ They explained that, actually, having sex for money makes you a whore. But I also did that.”
On Dollhouse in retrospect: “It accomplished some of the things I wanted to accomplish. The questions of identity and humanity I thought were out there front and centre, and I’ve heard people respond really well to that, and I’ve heard people say the show even helped them. I never conceived of a more pure journey from helplessness to power, which is what I always write about, and in that sense I feel we accomplished a lot of it. I do feel that part of what we tried to get at kind of got taken out at the beginning – and it really was more important to how the show would work than I even realised when they took it out – which was sex. The show was supposed to be, on some level, a celebration of perversion, as something that makes us unique. Sort of our hidden selves … I feel when we had to take sex out of the equation, it became kind of a joke or almost unsettling. Because we couldn’t hit it head on – and so much of our identity is wrapped up in our sexuality, and this is something Eliza [Dushku] was talking to me about, as something she wanted to examine before I even came up with the idea, and to have that sort of excised and marginalised and sanitised, and not to be able to hit on the head what they were doing, made the show a little bit limited and a little bit creepy at times. I think we still did some fairly out-there stuff, and I’m proud of what we did, given the circumstances, but with those circumstances, it was never really going to happen the way it should have.”

I can’t even imagine how awesome a Joss Whedon project would be on TV if the powers that be would actually let him do the things he wants to do unfettered and uncensored … but, alas, we may never find out. Whedon‘s interview goes on to discuss why he’s not really interested in working on TV anymore. Read those excerpts, after the jump …

On leaving television for The Avengers: “I think I already had left television. The plan had been to dive into the world of self-produced, internet, tiny stuff, which my wife was very excited about – I mean it, she said, ‘I’ve been waiting my entire life for you to do this’ – and then I turned around and said, ‘I’m doing the opposite’ and she said, ‘Great, okay!’ She’s good that way. Obviously there were basically two roads we talked about – one was a huge project that needs a total re-write that you can walk into and make, but there’s no reason to think that that would ever happen. And the other is self-producing stuff, either having something really big or really small, but not trying to truck down the middle road where you have all the interference of a big project, and the feeling of a small project. It’s more about doing it by the seat of your pants, but definitely one or the other. It doesn’t mean I won’t be doing TV forever, it just means it’s time to do something else.”

I really REALLY want Joss Whedon to have huge success with The Avengers because it sounds like he’s got a lot of license to do exactly what he wants to do with the story. If Whedon can prove to be a box office hit then it *may* give him more clout to tell his stories, his way in any medium he chooses. I just love his work … Buffy the Vampire Slayer, most of all (which is why the reboot angers me so much but I shant get into that again right now). With mega success comes power … I would LOVE for Joss to attain the kind of power that would allow him to bless us with his genius in his own way … here’s hoping. Whedon‘s full interview with SciFiNow magazine is available in Issue No. 46 (which, I believe, is only available in the UK) — check it out if you can.

Source - Pink is the New Blog