Joss Whedon: The Biography (65 page)

The news that he was on Joss’s list came as something of a surprise to Ruffalo. (Not that it should have—Louis Leterrier had originally wanted him for the lead in
The Incredible Hulk
, but he and Marvel went with the more well-known Norton instead.) “Joss said, ‘I’m excited by what I think you’ll do with it, and I think you’ll bring a humility and a sense of humor,’” Ruffalo remembers. He’d wanted to play the character since Ang Lee was casting the earlier adaptation
Hulk
(2003), and he was disappointed when Eric Bana won the part instead.

The Avengers
was different, however, as Banner would be not the lead character but rather a member of an entire team of larger-than-life heroes—and a reluctant member at that. “For me, it’s a tough part, because you’re trying to watch a guy that doesn’t want to be there in the movie scenario; that could be deadly, you know. It’s a tough nut to crack, to watch a movie about a guy who doesn’t want to be there.” Before agreeing to the role, Ruffalo reached out to his good friend Norton to ask for his blessing. “The way I see it is that Ed has bequeathed this part to me,” he said. “I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”

Joss also helped pave the way for his friend Cobie Smulders to join the cast as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill, a character from the comic books making her cinematic debut. When Smulders was considering whether to audition, the role was still somewhat vague; “It was like ‘Female Agent #12,’” she says. “But it was a significant amount of dialogue where it wasn’t just reading lines about protocol. There was an emotional arc within the scene. I knew this person has a story in this ginormous action movie instead of just giving information to the audience,” she says. “So I went in. And I did it. Joss wanted to see me.”

But she was in New York, and Joss wanted to see her the next day in L.A. Smulders offered to make an audition tape and send it to him. That won her a screen test with Samuel L. Jackson. “Sam Jackson’s there, sitting in the corner dressed as Nick Fury. I’ve screen tested for many shows. But it just has the feeling of such a big project. Like, what could this mean for me? And it’s like you’re at that level,” she explains. “We did it three or four times. And Joss, every time, came up with great notes and great advice. I left not knowing if it was good or not.”

Apparently, it was: Joss called her forty-five minutes later to deliver the good news. “I said, ‘Thank you so much for thinking of me and giving me this opportunity. And I hope I don’t let you down. And I’m going to work really hard,’” Smulders says. “And he was like, ‘You know, I don’t do favors. So you should know that. I’m not doing this because we’re friends. It’s because you were the best.’ It’s so cool for him to say.”

The complexity of the casting, particularly coordinating the schedules of so much high-level talent, necessitated some changes throughout the writing process. “I wrote an entire draft with a new character [Wasp]
because we thought we weren’t going to have [Scarlett Johansson],” Joss explains. “And then that didn’t happen, so then I had to go back and write another draft with that person back in it. That was a bit of a rigamarole…. But, you know, it all comes out in the wash.”

After several drafts that were nixed by Marvel, Joss finally had one that was ready to send to the cast. Even with five previous films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to build on, Joss had approached the story as the first part of an Avengers narrative rather than a continuation of all the storylines from the earlier movies. After all, Marvel had plans to make
The Avengers
into its own movie franchise, so it needed to work independently of any previous projects. Joss felt strongly that it also needed to work independently of any
future
projects; he thought that too many studios tried to kick off franchises with stories that were all setup and no conclusion. “Even though
The Empire Strikes Back
is better, in innumerable ways, than
Star Wars
,” he said, “
Star Wars
wins because you can’t end a movie with Han frozen in Carbonite. That’s not a movie, it’s an episode.”

As a standalone origin story, Joss’s script had to introduce each character as if he or she is brand new to the viewer. It does so via S.H.I.E.L.D. head Nick Fury, who must assemble a group of heroes to save the world. The threat harks back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first
Avengers
comic book from 1963: resentful god Loki comes to Earth to obtain the Tesseract, a powerful energy source that he can use to obtain an extraterrestrial army, conquer and rule the Earth, and take revenge on his brother Thor. When Loki attacks the research facility holding the Tesseract, Fury reactivates the “Avengers Initiative” to head off the catastrophic battle he sees coming. Black Widow goes to Calcutta, India, in order to recruit Dr. Bruce Banner, Agent Coulson enlists Tony Stark, and Fury seeks out the first Avenger, Captain America. Thor later joins them after first fighting with Iron Man over the custody of the captured Loki—who makes his escape from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Helicarrier when the group is manipulated into fighting one another. The Avengers must get past their egos and assemble into a proper team to defeat Loki and his alien army.

Clark Gregg describes the cast’s reaction to the first distributed draft: “[The script] was funny and still tongue-in-cheek and really got the tone, the Tony Stark tone of the Marvel universe, and still furthered and explored each one of those characters and those relationships. I found out later from other people involved that had the same reaction—like,
oh, wow. Oh, wow. Everybody gets to play. Everybody gets to play, and it’s going to be better than anything we reasonably hoped for.” He adds, “To me, Joss seemed like the perfect guy for
The Avengers
, because he had perhaps the deepest, most comprehensive grasp and history with the various characters in
The Avengers
. He seems like he grew up steeped in the Marvel comic book universe.”

Tom Hiddleston was so incredibly moved by the first draft of the script he saw that he shot off an e-mail to Joss as soon as he was able to process the storyline he’d been given:

Joss,

I am so excited I can hardly speak.

The first time I read it I grabbed at it like Charlie Bucket snatching for a golden ticket somewhere behind the chocolate in the wrapper of a Wonka Bar. I didn’t know where to start. Like a classic actor I jumped in looking for LOKI on every page, jumping back and forth, reading words in no particular order, utterances imprinting themselves like flash-cuts of newspaper headlines in my mind: “real menace”; “field of obeisance”; “discontented, nothing is enough”; “his smile is nothing but
a glimpse of his skull”;
“Puny god” …

… Thank you for writing me my Hans Gruber. But a Hans Gruber with super-magic powers. As played by James Mason…. It’s high operatic villainy alongside detached throwaway tongue-in-cheek; plus the “real menace” and his closely guarded suitcase of pain. It’s grand and epic and majestic and poetic and lyrical and wicked and rich and badass and might possibly be the most gloriously fun part I’ve ever stared down the barrel of playing. It is just so
juicy
.

I love how throughout you continue to put Loki on some kind of pedestal of regal magnificence and then consistently tear him down. He gets battered, punched, blasted, side-swiped, roared at, sent tumbling on his back, and every time he gets up smiling, wickedly, never for a second losing his eloquence, style, wit, self-aggrandisement or grandeur, and you never send him up or deny him his real intelligence…. That he loves to make an entrance; that he has a taste for the grand gesture, the big speech, the spectacle. I might be biased, but I do feel as though you have written me the coolest part.

… But really I’m just sending you a transatlantic shout-out and fist-bump, things that traditionally British actors probably don’t do. It’s epic.

Joss responded in kind:

Tom, this is one of those emails you keep forever. Thanks so much. It’s more articulate (and possibly longer) than the script. I couldn’t be more pleased at your reaction, but I’ll also tell you I’m still working on it…. Thank you again. I’m so glad you’re pleased. Absurd fun to ensue.

Best, (including uncharacteristic fist bump), joss.

Despite the grand scale of the film, Joss was able to bring past experiences to bear on the project. “You know, ironically, I said this last week—doing a super-giant budget movie is more like doing an Internet musical than anything else,” he explained in May 2011. “Having everything and having nothing are very similar. I’ve had no rehearsal time with my actors. I had none on
Dr. Horrible
because we were so under the gun. I have none now because they’re all so famous and they’re all busy making movies.”

While Joss was working on the
Avengers
script, another big announcement rocked the Whedonverse. In November 2010, Warner Bros. Pictures and Atlas Entertainment announced plans to reboot the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
franchise with a new feature film. The
Buffy
reboot would not be written, directed, or produced by Joss Whedon. In fact, it would have no involvement from any of the behind-the-scenes or on-camera talent previously affiliated with the television series.

The project had originated a year earlier, when Fran and Kaz Kuzui decided to capitalize on the vampire craze that was in full swing thanks to the success of
Twilight
. As the director and producer of the 1992
Buffy
movie, the Kuzuis retained the film rights to the property, so they partnered with Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment to develop a new version of
Buffy
for the big screen, in the hopes of creating a new blockbuster franchise. Joss was actually offered a role in the project, but with so much else on his plate, he declined. So did 20th Century Fox, the studio that produced the first film and the television series—most likely because they were not interested in reworking one of their biggest cult hits without its creator, with whom they’d had a long relationship.

Without Joss or Fox on board, the new film would have very few if any connections with the
Buffy
TV series. The Kuzuis owned only the rights to the original film’s characters and story. They’d licensed those rights to Fox for the television series, which meant that Fox held the rights for anything new created for the show. Gone would be Willow, Xander, Giles, and Sunnydale, replaced with new characters and settings.

Whit Anderson, a writer with no feature writing credits—much like Joss when he created the original film—signed on to tell the story. She had grown up watching the
Buffy
series in its original run, passing each
high school benchmark the same year the Slayer did. She wanted to balance her reinvention of the mythology with what she found so compelling about Buffy’s emotional arc, “the deep struggle she had with duty and destiny, that tug between what you’re supposed to be doing and what you
want
to be doing,” Anderson told the
Los Angeles Times
. “The fate of the world is on her shoulders, but some days she wakes up, and she just doesn’t want to do it. And are we doomed and destined to love someone? That conflict was very interesting to me.”

Her pitch won over the Vertigo producers, and with Warner Bros. signed on, the press release went out on November 22, 2010. The response from fans and media critics was immediate, intense outrage.

Genre reboots are nothing new. Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman have all been reimagined numerous times for both the big and the small screen, generally with little input from previous producers. But the prospect of rebooting a television series that had averaged only 4.5 million viewers over its seven-year run on two small, often-struggling networks, a series that itself was a reboot of a poorly received film, was widely considered unthinkable. The uproar was covered by mainstream media outlets that wouldn’t have bothered with
Buffy
when it premiered on the WB in 1997. That reaction was a testament to the passionate following that Joss Whedon had cultivated over the past thirteen years.

Fans doubted that a newcomer with no connection to Joss would be able to capture the spirit that had defined the
Buffy
universe. Even Tim Minear, who earned Joss’s utmost trust in writing his characters, had felt uncomfortable when faced with writing Buffy Summers herself.

Reaction from the
Buffy
actors was unanimously negative. Back when the first reboot rumors trickled out in 2009, Alyson Hannigan had said it was a very big mistake, that without Joss, it was just a story that shared the same title. After the official announcement, Anthony Stewart Head called the reboot “a hideous idea,” while David Boreanaz posted his reaction to the news on Twitter: a picture of himself pouting. Charisma Carpenter felt that it was an “opportunity to take something that was loved and cherished and lucrative and franchise it—and make more money from it.”

“There’s no public outcry for a remake of
Buffy
, there’s only the opportunity in pop culture where vampires are very popular,” Seth Green said. “If Joss came out and said, ‘I want to make a new Buffy movie,’ even if he said, ‘I want to do it like the reboot of Spider-Man. I want to put
Buffy back in high school and I want to tell a different story with this character,’ I think people would go with that. But the fact that people who are not connected to it and were not connected to the show or any of the mythology that was created going back to the movie—which everyone kind of agreed wasn’t a perfect version of its potential—you know, I think that really confuses people. It confuses the audience. They’re like, ‘How am I supposed to feel about this?’”