Joss Whedon: The Biography (62 page)

Two more roles were cast with television actors: Jesse Williams (
Grey’s Anatomy
) would play the Scholar, grounded new guy Holden, and Kristen Connolly (As
the World Turns
) would be Dana, the essential horror-flick “virgin.” The final two were far harder to cast—the Athlete, Curt the jock, and the Whore, blonde party girl Jules. New Zealand actress Anna Hutchison auditioned for Jules from where she was working in Australia, and locked the role mere days before they were set to shoot.

Goddard found his Jock in another actor from Down Under: the relatively unknown Chris Hemsworth. The Australian actor had filmed a brief but pivotal sequence for J. J. Abrams’s upcoming reboot of
Star Trek
, playing James T. Kirk’s father. “We probably saw over 100 people for [the role of Curt],” Goddard said. “I was looking for actors that can break your heart. These people need to be real, because we go to such unreal places. He just had that. As soon as he walked out of the room I said, ‘That guy’s got the job.’”

With the cast announced on March 10, 2009, production could begin. The original plan was to shoot in California so that Joss and Goddard wouldn’t be far from their families for the several months of production. But right before they planned to shoot, the Canadian dollar dropped; combined with British Columbia’s tax incentives, the production could save a few million dollars by shooting in Vancouver instead. It was too much of a difference to ignore, so they packed up and headed north to the Canadian woods.

Goddard settled into his position as director, with Joss serving as lead producer and second unit director. They both bounded into their new roles with a naïveté that both helped and hindered the production. The first day of principal photography, they were scheduled to do a scene in which our intrepid college students make a stop at an old-fashioned gas station on their way to the cabin. But when the crew arrived at the location, the set was covered in snow—not ideal for a film set in the summer.
It was the first significant moment when Joss and Goddard realized that it was up to them to figure out what to do. They lost half a day out of their schedule resolving the problem, which they kept chasing to get back for the rest of the shoot.

Initially, Joss thought that he’d spend more time on set as the producer, but he quickly realized that it was better for him to stick around Los Angeles to handle the bigger questions and manage day-to-day operations so that Goddard could concentrate on directing. Joss also accepted that while he’d had his moments of wanting to direct the film, it was much better off in Goddard’s bloodied hands. “Drew is a horror aficionado in a way that I am not. If you look at
Buffy
, it’s the least frightening horror show in the history of time and space. I have a problem with dismembering people,” Joss said. “Drew was ready to commit to it in a way that I wasn’t, and was ready to buy the most amount of blood you can purchase in Canada.”

And there was a lot of blood—particularly during the final battle, in which surviving heroes Marty and Dana, having discovered the secret installation beneath the cabin, turn the tables on their tormentors by uncaging the facility’s vast menagerie of monsters. During the shooting of the ultragory battle scenes, the room had to be squeegeed, mopped, scrubbed, and bleached and still needed a couple of days before it was ready again. Just as impressive as the gore is the diversity of the creatures causing it; Joss, Goddard, and their crew developed numerous distinctive monster types: a werewolf, clowns, scarecrows, a dragonbat, a merman, “dismemberment goblins”—and Joss’s favorite, a ballerina whose entire face consists of lamprey-like rings of teeth.

There was great excitement when a new performer arrived on set to take part in the final sequence of the film. In it, Marty and Dana confront the Director, the head of the facility, who explains the purpose of the ritual and the reason why Marty must play the part of the Fool and die to complete it—because otherwise humanity is doomed. Joss and Goddard wrote the part of the Director without specifying the character’s gender, which made it a perfect fit for the actress who had brought so much to another gender-unspecified role, iconic badass Lt. Ripley in
Alien
.

Sigourney Weaver had the strength and authority to convince the audience that even if they still were rooting for Marty and Dana to make it through to the end alive, the Director’s decision to kill the five young people was the proper choice to make. Joss and Goddard discussed many
other people for the role, but ultimately felt that, as Joss put it, “there’s nobody else who should be coming up those stairs.”

Joss knew Weaver from working with her on
Alien: Resurrection
, but Goddard was intimidated by the prospect of working with the legendary actress—until they talked. The first thing she did was to ask him when the werewolf arrived, because she was so excited to work with a werewolf. She told him that they should make sure that the werewolf had someone to sit with at lunch. By the time the cast and crew were shooting the final confrontation, everyone else was burned out by the intensity of the production. When Weaver came in with her bubbly and enthusiastic attitude, it reenergized the set. “A person that has done the things that she has done is still excited about the fun of moviemaking,” Goddard recalled. “There’s something that’s so inspiring about that.”

Filming wrapped in May 2009, and Joss left it to Goddard to oversee the film’s postproduction stage. He’d already found that he was able to let go of his perfectionist tendencies, his need to control all aspects of the production. His more limited role on the film had also given him some flexibility in his schedule, which allowed him, in April at age forty-four, to accept the 2009 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism from Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy and the Secular Society. It was the third time the two groups had bestowed the award, this time given for how Joss’s works consistently deliver the message that to be a good person one need not believe in God but may instead “believe in yourself and in each other.” (The award was inscribed with a quote recommended by Kai: “However you live, / There’s a part of you always standing by, / Mapping out the sky” from Sondheim’s
Sunday in the Park with George
.)

Joss talked about his moment of geeker joy when Barack Obama acknowledged atheists in his 2009 inaugural speech. He compared his feeling of worthiness in that moment to those of gay fans who’d thanked him for his stories that gave them the courage to come out. He discussed how he sees religion as a tool that humanity created, and how religious people have laughed at him and his atheism, thinking that because he doesn’t have a “belief system that they can understand, it means that he doesn’t have a system of belief.” He ended his speech with a plea for people
to embrace education—not because all educated people will come out as nonbelievers, but because they all will learn to question and examine the religious and political rhetoric with which they’ve been indoctrinated.

“The enemy of humanism is not faith,” he said. “The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is what we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.”

His speechifying was not done; he headed back to Wesleyan to be the keynote speaker at the 2009 Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns. The seminar’s focus was almost custom made for Joss: “Defining American Culture: How Movies and TV Get Made.” He spoke to students looking to break into the television industry, telling them that they shouldn’t feel prohibited by the cost of production, because they would have increasing access to high-quality, low-cost equipment. Instead, he felt that their real hurdle would be finding an audience. Joss proposed the idea for a website where writers and producers could collaborate on projects that could be later viewed on the site. He encouraged them to tell their own stories in new ways, like he had with
Dr. Horrible
.

In July, Joss returned to
Dollhouse
with a challenge ahead of him. He knew that the first season had been uneven and he needed to figure out how to right the ship. “About two hours after starting to talk to the writers about story,” he later recalled, “I was back with such a vengeance, and so energized and so pumped because we really understand the show now. We understand what works, and what didn’t work so well or what we weren’t so thrilled about. We don’t have the onus of trying to be a big hit sitting on our shoulders. We can just be ourselves. And so the stories we’re breaking are pure, and exciting, and everybody’s on-board in the room, and it’s never flowed better.”

In its second season,
Dollhouse
moved even further away from realist procedural storylines, embracing an overarching conspiracy narrative with a slightly dystopian bent—an idea closer to Joss’s original pilot. The Big Bad of the series shifts from Alan Tudyk’s Alpha to the Rossum
Corporation itself. Other familiar faces pop up:
Angel
’s Alexis Denisof plays a US senator whom Rossum kidnaps and turns into an Active so as to have a high-ranking government official under its control, and
Firefly
’s Summer Glau is programmer Topher’s counterpart in Rossum’s DC Dollhouse facility, with whom Topher indulges in a bit of hero worship.

The second-season episode “Belonging” also serves as a strong return to the sex trafficking themes that Joss had originally hoped to explore. The episode centers on the Active Sierra, played by Dichen Lachman. It reveals that before she came to the Dollhouse, Sierra was Priya, an artist who was being pursued by a wealthy doctor named Nolan Kinnard. When Priya rejects his advances, Nolan has her committed to his psychiatric hospital and then admitted into the Dollhouse under false pretenses. Once Topher has reprogrammed Priya to become Sierra, Nolan continually enlists her services as a sex worker now that her free will is gone.

“‘Belonging’ is (in a very unpedantic way) a genuinely radical feminist plotline,” Emily Nussbaum wrote for
New York
magazine. Nussbaum called the episode “a truly unsettling metaphor about ‘false consciousness,’ the social condition that results when someone is convinced to crave something they don’t in fact want at all. The moment one
Dollhouse
character shifts from one type of slavery to another is almost too hard to take.” It directly addresses rape from all sides: Sierra the victim, Nolan the attacker, and Topher the enabler—at first unknowingly complicit and then dealing with his guilt over his involvement in Nolan’s ongoing attacks.

Dollhouse
’s second season premiered on September 25, 2009. The viewership was far more consistent each week, but it was roughly half of what the show had garnered during its first year. The series was officially canceled on November 11, while Joss and company were in production on the eleventh episode of its thirteen-episode order. Fox had learned its lesson from
Firefly
—regarding its relationship with both Joss and his fans—and with the announcement the network confirmed that all of the remaining episodes would air to provide Joss “the opportunity to end [the series] in a significant way.” The final episodes ran through January 2010.