Joss Whedon: The Biography (69 page)

He explains: “Every movie about love, to paraphrase Preston Sturges in
Unfaithfully Yours
, questions the necessity of marriage for the first eight reels and then it just happens in the ninth. It just gets to the point where they have to just go, ‘Oh, but you are in love now.’ And any question they may have asked about being in love sort of just falls by the wayside so they can end the movie. As we all know, a lot of what people consider to be romantic comedy behaviors are usually the kind of thing that would land you in jail—or at least the neighbors would be like,
‘Please stop holding that boom box of Peter Gabriel up over your head and waking us all up. Just stop.’”

But with
Much Ado
, he could explore “the idea that love is for grownups and that romantic love as we know it is kind of a construct. That the more mature, married love—basically marriage—is an escape from the sort of whirligig of what we consider to be love. That it is actually a much deeper, more adult, and more interesting kind of love.”

It was an idea very much in keeping with his favorite subjects as a writer—from his long-standing interest in how people treat one another to his more recent fascination with institutional control. Joss had moved beyond the idealized teenage romance of his early work on
Buffy
, replacing the notion of inevitable soulmates with the messier, more authentic idea that love is something two people must deliberately choose to work at despite all obstacles. And those obstacles often include the expectations of their friends and family, as well as of the lovers themselves. “I deal with a lot of societal manipulation or secret government manipulation—how certain things are expected of us in the ways we behave,” Joss says. “This deals with that on a more personal level. It’s a very cynical view that blossoms into something very romantic.”

Joss’s new take on
Much Ado
would also allow him to give equal weight to every character in the play. Other interpretations often focus solely on Beatrice and Benedick, while the play’s other main couple, Hero and Claudio, are considered important only inasmuch as they serve Beatrice and Benedick’s journey. “To me, who Claudio is and who Hero is and what Leonato’s going through and Don Pedro and Margaret … everybody, particularly Borachio, has a part of what this movie is about,” Joss said. “When you give yourself up to them and invest equal weight in all of these characters, you really have something that’s more than the sum of its parts, something that’s dark, something that’s not necessarily as charming as it appears to be, but is ultimately very romantic.”

In adapting the four-hundred-year-old play, Joss also had to decide how to handle a decidedly misogynistic plot point. When Hero is accused of sleeping with another man the night before her wedding, she is attacked by both her intended, Claudio, and her father, Leonato; by no longer being a virgin, she has shamed them and is thus unworthy of marriage. Joss chose to focus on the “night before” aspect of Claudio’s accusation rather than the alleged deflowering. “The story there … isn’t
that Claudio thinks she’s not a virgin, it’s that he thinks she’s cheating on him. It’s jealousy, which is universal and very modern—it’s not about propriety,” Joss said. “When Claudio turns on her at the wedding, it’s because he thinks she’s making a fool of him.” He reinterpreted Leonato’s reaction as well, noting that Hero’s mother is nowhere to be found in the play and postulating that this tight family unit of father and daughter has been shattered by an assumption of betrayal. “There was his humiliation in front of all of his peers, and his betrayal by the most important person in his life,” Joss said. “For her to be lying to him is heartbreaking to him.”

Joss would dedicate the project to the memory of his own late mother, as well as stepfather Stephen Stearns, who passed away in January 2011. Ten months after his death, Joss was ready to do the thing he’d told his stepfather he would never do—make a “grown-up” movie.

While working on
In Your Eyes
, Kai had met with their friend Michael Roiff, a producer whose credits included
Waitress
(which costarred Nathan Fillion), and writer David Rothenberg; together they readied Bellwether Pictures so that everything would be set to go once Joss finished with postproduction on
The Avengers
. The team didn’t expect to sneak in
Much Ado
before
In Your Eyes
, but they managed to do so by repurposing resources—they cut the preproduction timeline by using some line producers, crew members, and caterers who had just wrapped up on a movie Roiff had produced, which allowed for more time to figure out who would shoot and star in
Much Ado
. (
In Your Eyes
would shoot in 2012, with Joss’s script entrusted to director Brin Hill. In April 2014, after the movie’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Joss made a video announcement that it would immediately be released via streaming video.)

Joss knew he wanted Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof to reprise their roles as Beatrice and Benedick. “I talked to them before I even started to try to do the thing. They were available and on board, so that was good,” he says. But he was deliberately furtive when reaching out to other potential cast members. Under the guise of a coming-home celebration of sorts, Joss had a party shortly after getting back from shooting
The Avengers
. He wanted to feel out his potential cast—the actors he brought in would need to be able to handle the intense shooting schedule of “eight pages a day of Elizabethean dialogue with very few stage directions. Your actors
have to be splendid and very on point, because we made this for one-tenth the cost of an episode of television,” he said.

“There were a lot of people at the party that I was like, ‘So, what are you doing in October? Which days exactly?’ without saying why, because I wanted to shake it out, make sure [I had] the right bunch,” he recalls. “I was very cagy with everybody for a while, and then I just dove in.”

Fran Kranz got an e-mail from Joss that simply said he was thinking about doing another Shakespeare reading and this time he might film it—would he be around and what did he think? “Just like that. A real short e-mail. At the time, I was doing a little workshop for a play in New York, and I always want to be there for Joss and I love doing those Shakespeare readings,” Kranz says. “I didn’t want to miss out. I said, ‘I’m in New York and I’ve got these couple things going on, but I’ll be there.’” Joss got back to him a few days later and asked if he’d be interested in playing Claudio. “ ‘I’d love to see him as a temperamental jock and not the whelp he’s usually played as’—those were his words. I was super excited about this cool role, configurative of what I had done before,” Kranz adds. “Basically I was just saying, yes, yes, yes to everything and I’ll deal with it later. But, again, I didn’t know what I was walking into. This is probably naive, but I honestly thought we were just going to be reading the play like we normally do outside and in this little theater, and he might be holding a little handheld camera, like a camcorder, and just filming.”

It wasn’t until he was contacted for costume fittings and his Social Security number that he realized it was much bigger than he’d expected. “I literally wrote back, ‘Wait, am I being paid for this? What is going on?’” They responded that yes, he was being paid—not much, but it was a paid role. Finally, he realized that Joss was taking this project pretty seriously. “It all was so bizarre—I really believed it was just the most casual thing. I always imaged [they would perform it] script in hand, but then Joss was sending e-mails and he was saying, ‘Know your lines, we’re going to be moving really fast.’”

Amy Acker was also surprised once things got under way. “When we showed up for the first day of filming, everyone was like, ‘Oh, a real movie.’ We weren’t sure if it was Joss with a Flip camera,” she explained. “And when we got there, there was a crew and craft service and trucks and lights, so it was for real. Luckily, he only gave us about two weeks’ notice and he didn’t give us enough time to panic and realize, oh, we’re playing
these majorly important and great parts. We just had to learn the lines and do it.”

Alexis Denisof noted the many differences between their informal Shakespeare readings and shooting an actual film. The latter would require a completely different approach to the acting process and a greater sense of commitment—and provoke a higher level of anxiety. “The readings afforded anyone who participated the opportunity to really play and do whatever they wanted in a no-fail situation, because there were no stakes,” Denisof explains. But with
Much Ado
, the actors went from sitting around Joss’s house with scripts in their laps, enjoying cocktails and cheese as they read their dialogue, to rehearsing, learning their lines quickly, and committing their portrayal to film with the idea it would eventually be shown to a larger audience. “On the one hand, it has the excitement of being pressed and relatively unrehearsed,” Denisof says. “But on the other hand, it also has the challenges of being fresh and unrehearsed.”

Anthony Stewart Head, who had last worked with Joss as Giles on
Buffy
, was originally set to play Leonato, Hero’s father. His schedule couldn’t be worked out, however, so to replace him Joss reached out to Clark Gregg, who also just got done shooting
The Avengers
. He explained that he wanted to make a movie version of
Much Ado
at his house—yes, before he finished the
Avengers
edit. Gregg thought Joss was kidding when he explained that the movie would be shot during his vacation from the film; unfortunately, the actor was already booked for another film, but a week later that project was moved.

“I got another call from him saying, ‘Are you available now?’ I said, ‘It’s funny you called. Absolutely, from about three hours ago I am available,’” Gregg recalls. Joss explained there was a part for him but an awful lot of lines for him to learn—and filming started the next day. “The next thing I know, I spent the next ten days completely steeped in trying to learn and act this role in his adaptation of
Much Ado
.”

Fortunately, Gregg was already a great fan of the play. It was the first of Shakespeare’s works he’d ever performed in—he played Benedick in a college production. “Joss’s version was very stripped down, and his interpretation of it wasn’t reverential,” he says. “My first line was walking in with an iPad—I see the message that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina, and I’m reading it off an iPad, and I thought, ‘OK, I’m in. I like this.’”

Nathan Fillion was a bit less eager to take on the role of the constable Dogberry. He had taken part in Shakespeare readings at Joss’s house, but he had never “done Shakespeare” in a professional capacity. So in the week before he was supposed to shoot, he called Joss and tried to back out.

“I was tense. I was trying to work fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-hour days at [my television series]
Castle
, and trying to memorize Shakespeare on the side. I was not having an easy time with it, and I was getting very nervous and very tense. I hadn’t been challenged in a long time,” Fillion says. “Acting is great and fun, and it’s fulfilling, but television is a machine. You’ve got to pump ’em out—you gotta make it happen. Time is a luxury you don’t have, so there’s not a lot to challenge. This was an incredible challenge for me, and I tried to chicken out—Joss would not let me. And I’m so glad.”

Once Fillion got into filming, the experience reminded him of
Dr. Horrible
—once again, it felt like they were just doing a fun project with a bunch of friends. And the new faces quickly became new friends. “Amy Acker was there, Alexis Denisof was there. Some of his kids from
Dollhouse
were there. There’s a fellow from
The Avengers
there,” Fillion says. “When I first moved out to Los Angeles, when they didn’t get a job people would say, ‘Well, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’ And it sounded so dirty and nepotistic and I didn’t like the sound of it.” But his view shifted thanks to projects like
Dr. Horrible
and
Much Ado:
“If you work with people and you know what they’re capable of, and you know what they’re like to work with, what they’re going to bring, and you have them in mind when you’re building a project, why wouldn’t you want to work with someone you knew?” He adds, “When I dream about projects, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Oh, I’d love for this star I’ve never met to be in it.’ I dream of myself saying, ‘Let’s do a project with me and Alan Tudyk, and Sean Maher, Ron Glass. I always dream about people I’ve already worked with.”

Gregg had a similar epiphany when he got to the set. “I walked on and looked around and went, ‘Hey, I know who these people are. These are all the people who have worked in his other stuff—these are his family.’ I’ve always felt like there’s a certain kind of creative person who keeps talented people they’ve worked with in the past close to them.”

Firefly
’s Sean Maher would play the villainous Don John, and the rest of the cast was rounded out with a few people whom Joss greatly admired, like comic actors Brian McElhaney, Nick Kocher, and Riki Lindhome. Joss also tapped Jillian Morgese, an extra in an
Avengers
scene, to play Hero. “I had a feeling about her that she ought to play the cousin of Amy,” Joss says. “I feel that I was right.”