Joss Whedon: The Biography (17 page)

Joss knew if he was going to bring such a beloved iconic character back to life and have the audience accept it, he needed the resurrection to feel real, not just like a sci-fi metaphor. Joss had to create “a total identification” between the audience and the Ripley clone; he needed to acknowledge the difficulty viewers would have in accepting the character’s rebirth by making it hard for the character herself to accept. “It’s very important to me that it’s a very torturous, grotesque process so that people will viscerally feel what it’s like to be horribly reborn in a lab,” Joss said. “Is she human? Has she changed? … She was pregnant with an alien…. Is there a little something wrong there?”

Joss was worried that Weaver would want to see a more likeable Ripley than the one he envisioned. To great relief on both sides, Weaver told Joss she loved his original script and how he made the concept of cloning very personal. She liked how Ripley, sharing both human and alien DNA, faces new questions about where her loyalties lie. She told him to push her character further and asked, “What if I’m even stranger? What if I have more Alien and less human in me?”

“She created an extraordinary character,” Joss said.

Foreshadowing a theme that would later be explored in both
Buffy
and
Angel
, Ripley’s rebirth comes with a big cost. She has to confront the question of
why
she’s back, and what that means for the rest of her life. Through Ripley’s struggle to accept her rebirth, Joss asked the question of what it meant to have an identity. Ripley identifies with both her former human self and the alien that incubated in her body—which she had in some sense given birth to.

Ripley’s quest to find an answer to “What am I?” led to Joss’s creation of Call, a robot filled with self-loathing. “When Call, who was played by Winona Ryder, who is very beautiful, says, ‘Look at me. I’m disgusting,’ it hit something that I’d never found before,” Joss said. “I was talking about something that was very personal, that a lot of people go through
—and
I was doing it with a robot and a clone, so I was in heaven!” Saralegui, too, thought that one of the story’s greatest strengths was that the two most human characters are the two females who are not human. “An android and a clone who’s got alien DNA inside her. They are by far the most human and humanistic characters in that movie,” he says. “Ripley is brutal, but she’s still human. She still has a heart and still does the right thing.” These same connections, at once personal and universally human, would soon inform the rebirth of Joss’s own iconic hero.

Developing Ripley’s resurrection story was a turning point in Joss’s storytelling. He’s said that as a child he enjoyed spinning yarns, but with
Alien: Resurrection
he began writing as an “adult.” His new driving force would be to give his audience that “total identification” with his characters, to have their every action be so honest and real that the viewer would always feel that they were on the journey with them.

Unlike on the
Buffy
movie, Joss wasn’t involved with much of the actual production of
Alien: Resurrection
. Filming took place from October 1996 through February 1997 on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. While it was nearby, Joss was deeply involved with a new project, also produced by Fox. In addition, he didn’t feel that he had connected with the movie’s director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French filmmaker who had previously helmed the black comedy
Delicatessen
and the fantasy drama
The City of Lost Children
. Nor did he agree with Jeunet’s casting and directing choices. Despite his concerns, however, he was completely unprepared for what awaited him when he saw the director’s cut at the studio screening.

Joss started to cry, heartbroken that Jeunet’s vision for
Alien: Resurrection
did not match his own. “Then I put on a brave face because Fox is my home … but I can say with impunity that I was shattered by how crappy it was.”

The story hadn’t changed much from Joss’s script. But Joss felt that Jeunet’s direction “highlighted” all the problems with his script while “squashing” the strongest elements, like the final battle with the alien. The previous three films had ended with huge, dramatic battles between Ripley and an alien, but this time around, the expense of the alien and other special effects ballooned the budget, costs had to be cut, and Joss had to script several endings. “The first one was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard,” Joss said. “The third one was in a maternity ward. And the fourth one was in the desert.” Each one was cheaper to film than the last, but each one further blunted the emotional impact he wanted the ending to have. The finished film wraps up with a
fifth
ending, in which the alien is sucked out through a small hole in the spaceship’s window as it enters Earth’s atmosphere. A similar scene appeared in Joss’s first draft as an earlier confrontation between the alien and a soldier, but it seemed anticlimactic as the final scene of Ripley’s battle with the creature.

More than the ending, Joss’s disappointment came from the fact that what was on the screen was so far from the vision he’d had in his head. “It was mostly a matter of doing everything
wrong
. They said the lines …
mostly
… but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do,” Joss explained. “There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script … but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.”

One visual element that he took great issue with was the art direction of the alien itself. Starting with H. R. Giger’s surrealist, nightmarish design in the first film, aliens had been truly terrifying creatures, often black or bronze with a skeletal, biomechanical appearance. They had blade-tipped tails that would slash anyone to pieces and highly acidic blood that corroded anything on contact.
Alien: Resurrection
’s alien has been modified with Ripley’s DNA, and so some evolutionary change is to be expected. But “I don’t remember writing, ‘A withered, granny-lookin’ Pumpkinhead-kinda-thing makes out with Ripley,’” Joss said. “Pretty sure that stage direction never existed in any of my drafts.”

After the screening, Joss called up Saralegui, prefacing his comments with “Listen, I don’t want to be a jerk, but …” before launching into his problems with the film. Saralegui understood, but he didn’t fully agree. The exec would admit that the cool and funny details that were a trademark of Jeunet’s films felt like forced quirkiness in the
Alien
universe. But they didn’t bother him as much as they did Joss, possibly because he’d been worried about the film since he started seeing the dailies footage during shooting. “I think the biggest problem with that movie is something that we—literally every single person involved in that movie—didn’t foresee,” Saralegui says. “You’ve seen
Alien
too many times already. And by that, I’m saying in your life. You’ve seen
Alien, Aliens
, and
Alien 3
. And now here they are again.

“I had that sick realization one day watching dailies when we were seeing [the alien] for the first time—one of those classic shots where the alien grins and all that drool spills out of its mouth, which you’ve seen in every movie. I see it for the first time in this one, and I go, ‘Oh, cool,’” he remembers. “And then I’m thinking, ‘You didn’t think that was cool when you first saw it. It scared the shit out of you.’” Whether it was franchise fatigue, tonal issues, or the disappointment of a scaled-back final battle,
Alien: Resurrection
did not resonate with fans as they’d hoped. Yet, while not the most critically lauded of the
Alien
franchise,
Resurrection
pulled in just over $161 million worldwide after its release in November 1997.

For Joss, the experience was the
Buffy
movie all over again. Again, he felt as if a director with a drastically different vision had undone the film he set out to make. “It was the final crappy humiliation of my crappy film career,” he said. But if he’d given up on filmmaking, it’s only because he’d found another medium in which he could finally enjoy the creative control he’d always craved.

In the mid-1990s, few could have predicted that the next teen series phenomenon would come wrapped up in the title
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. The adolescent fare of the time tended to be more limited in scope, more rigidly compartmentalized. ABC’s “TGIF” programming block of family-friendly sitcoms included series such as
Boy Meets World
, which told tales of growing up yet shied away from the more dramatic issues to be found in day-to-day high school life. For drama, the few options for teenagers aired on the fledgling Fox network, where
Beverly Hills, 90210
was still going strong after pretty much launching the teenage soap opera genre in 1990. The series had quickly jettisoned the fish-out-of-water drama of a midwestern brother and sister transplanted to Southern California for more provocative storylines—losing one’s virginity, drug abuse, rape, alcoholism, absentee parents, and, of course, the classic love triangles among the young and pretty characters.

Still, there were signs that audiences were ready for series that reflected a grittier, more realistic view of life from a teenage perspective. In 1994, Fox had introduced
Party of Five
, a more sober youth-oriented series than
90210
, which followed a clan of five orphans adjusting to a new life after the sudden deaths of their parents. ABC broke further ground the same year with
My So-Called Life
, which featured newcomer Claire Danes as Angela Chase, a young woman just beginning to maneuver through her relationships with high school friends, her parents, and the cute bad boy. Angela Chase was an icon with whom teens could truly relate—for starters, unlike the characters on
90210
, she was actually played by a teenage actress. And where
90210
took a glamorized look at well-off kids in Beverly Hills, Angela’s story focused on the raw emotional trials of trying to figure out who you are at fifteen, and how each decision you make affects your friends and family.

Both series were critically acclaimed yet fell victim to low ratings; only
Party of Five
would make it past the first season. Joss loved them both, calling
Party of Five
“a brilliant show, [which] often made me cry uncontrollably” and saying that “no show on TV has ever come close to capturing as truly the lovely pain of teendom as well as
My So-Called Life
. And yes, I’m including my own.”

Mass audiences might still have needed convincing, but by this point there was a passionate niche market of viewers who were waiting, almost aching, to see their own emotions reflected on TV. “I’d been waiting and waiting, too,” Joss says. “It was in the zeitgeist.
My So-Called Life
came along and did it perfectly, and
90210
came along and did it dreadfully. I had tried to get the rights to [the movie]
Pump Up the Volume
(1990) and make a series out of it—a soap opera with a DJ as a sort of MC in
Cabaret
motif. Because teenagers needed a soap opera—nobody takes themselves more seriously. I couldn’t make it happen. So then
Buffy
came along, and I said, ‘Here’s the dramatic portion of it, here’s the soap opera.’”

Buffy
would also respond to another need that was in the air at the time. The mid-1990s saw the rise of women of action on the small screen, in particular FBI Special Agent Dana Scully of Fox’s sci-fi series
The X-Files
(1993–2002) and Xena of the syndicated fantasies
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
(1995–99) and the upcoming
Xena: Warrior Princess
(1995–2001). Both Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Xena (Lucy Lawless) became celebrated role models for women, but both Scully and Xena were adults; television hadn’t really provided a teenage heroine in the same vein. In fact, few series of the era featured a young female lead of any kind; there was Angela of
My So-Called Life
, which was quickly canceled, the title character of the NBC sitcom
Blossom
, which signed off the air in May 1995, and not much else.