Joss Whedon: The Biography (68 page)

With two cameras on him, Hiddleston was lying in the trench and trying to produce the highest pitch at the quietest volume imaginable without moving. It was a challenge to stay so still and also deliver this very specific squeal—all the while holding a look of inconceivable shock and terror. And behind the camera, Joss got the giggles.

“I could hear him chuckling by the monitor—he has a laugh that is not loud, but it’s not quiet,” Hiddleston says. “I could see his shoulders shaking. As soon as I realized that he was laughing, I started laughing, and then it’s one of those things where I couldn’t get it back. We were both gone.

“I remember that moment really fondly. Because we’re shooting this incredible, enormously expensive superhero film—there is so much pressure on both of our shoulders, and both of us are in fits of hysterics,” he says. “And possibly unable to complete the day because we’re having so much fun.”

Kevin Feige credits Joss with encouraging “this collaborative spirit across the whole cast and the whole crew that kept everything running very smoothly. Frankly, on days in which some of the cast weren’t shooting they would come just to watch. Mark Ruffalo would bring his ten-year-old son just to watch Evans and Downey do a scene as Cap and Iron Man. You don’t see that all the time, and that’s a testament to Joss and to the way he ran that set.”

Principal photography wrapped in September 2011, with a two-day shoot for the final battle in New York City. By then, no one would have faulted the cast and director for being exhausted or even a little sick of the film. But the Big Apple brought a new energy to the set, as citygoers gathered all around them, excited to see the Avengers. Parents brought their children, pie-eyed and awed, to meet their favorite superheroes.

A photo of Loki giving a piggyback ride to a five-year-old boy with a Captain America shield became a viral phenomenon. The story behind it is even more charming: The boy, Edison, had seen
Captain America
for the second time in the theater the day before. When he and his mom happened upon the set, he was excited to see Nick Fury’s car, and it was Hiddleston who asked if he could put Edison on his shoulders. Later, Chris Evans’s mom beckoned an uncostumed Captain America over so he could meet him, and the two discussed proper techniques for shield handling and enemy fighting. Then Joss interrupted the two because they had a shot to get. He turned to Edison and, fully understanding the moment, said, “Sorry, little buddy, I need Captain America for a minute.”

Another youngster had the experience of a lifetime: Mark Ruffalo’s son, Keen, who was about the same age Joss was when he fell in love with superheroes. Keen came to set often, and it was as if everything he saw was the most incredibly awesome thing that anyone could ever have conceived of. Especially Hiddleston as Loki. After every take, the boy would gush over the actor.

“Like, ‘Tom, that was so awesome, you have no idea!’” Hiddleston says, emphatically reenacting the boy’s reaction. “And then he would tell me exactly what had happened in the scene as if I didn’t know,” he laughs. “ ‘And then you said this, and then Hulk comes in and he does this, and then what happens …’ He was just reliving it in his own mind, it was so wonderful.

“I remember so clearly, like it was yesterday, the excitement of watching Christopher Reeve as Superman, the feeling of watching
Indiana Jones
films.” Hiddleston pauses. “He just was extraordinary, young Keen Ruffalo. He reminded me why I was doing it in a way—not that I needed reminding, ’cause the kid in me is alive and well. He was so honest, and so pure, and it was so inspiring to have that response. It made me feel so warm and fuzzy to be at work.”

Kai visited Joss in New York as he finished his last week of shooting. He had a break coming up between the end of principal photography and an intense postproduction phase. And still more work lay ahead: in July, Lionsgate had announced that it had obtained the worldwide distribution
rights to
The Cabin in the Woods
, slating it for an April 2012 release. That would put it out just weeks before
The Avengers
was set to bow in May.

So it made sense for Joss to take a moment to breathe while he could. One idea was to head over to Venice, Italy. (“Not for a month like it says on the Internet—yeah, that’s a dream. I have children,” Kai cracks.) Joss also discussed hosting another Shakespeare reading; Kai suggested that he film it, as they had discussed in the past. For years, they had wanted to do a Sundays with Shakespeare series—they could film readings in their home, then distribute the videos to high schools to help inspire more students’ interest in the Bard.

From there, suddenly, the idea evolved into producing a full Shakespeare movie. It was Kai’s contention that Joss didn’t need to get away physically so much as mentally. “He told me all he remembers is me saying, like, ‘Why don’t we do it instead of going to Venice? Venice isn’t sinking that fast,’” Kai says.

After shooting a multimillion-dollar blockbuster and spending months away from their loved ones, most people would take a break to decompress—maybe run away for some decadent vacation. Most people wouldn’t decide to fund and shoot an independent film in their home in about thirty days. Joss Whedon isn’t most people.

The incredible success of
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
had inspired Joss and Kai to seriously pursue the possibility of establishing a small-scale “digital studio” that would allow them to make what they wanted, how they wanted, with their own money. But the very week they were to begin consulting with their financial manager on the logistics of opening such a studio, Joss signed on to direct
The Avengers
. Still, the endeavor continued; while Joss was away directing the blockbuster, Kai was working on producing another one of his scripts,
In Your Eyes
. They planned for it to be the first film from Bellwether Pictures, named for Lee’s unpublished novel.

Now, however, with principal photography on
The Avengers
completed, another small-scale project began to take precedence. When he returned home, Joss reached out to his friend and fellow Shakespeare buff Alexis Denisof. “I think he was mourning for a passion project, so by the time he got to my house having said he wanted to chat about something, he had already decided that he wanted to do a full-blown movie shoot,” Denisof says. “He proposed to me that we shoot
Much Ado About Nothing
at his house on a super-low budget. The lines would be memorized and he’d make a lot of cuts [to Shakespeare’s text], and he had his own ideas about the style of it. We talked about the style, the interpretation, and we got extremely excited about it, and it just went from there.”

After more than a decade, Joss’s unofficial repertory company was still mounting its private Shakespeare readings, although in recent years, they’d been a bit fewer and further between, due to everyone’s family and other commitments.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was a hot commodity
in the later years. In one performance, Fran Kranz played Francis Flute and Alan Tudyk was Bottom. “[Within that,] we had to go up and perform
Pyramus and Thisbe
,” Kranz recalls. “I was Thisbe, [Alan] was my Pyramus, and Alexis Denisof was the wall [that the two characters speak through]—it was hilarious.”

Amy Acker had played Helena, one of the young lovers, in one of their readings of the play, and
Dollhouse
’s Olivia Williams assumed the same role in another. “I begged to play Helena, as I am now too old to play her on stage and I wanted to play it before I die,” she says. Williams’s performance in a reading of
Hamlet
may even have had an influence on her
Dollhouse
character. “I have always believed that Gertrude [Hamlet’s mother] has a drink problem, so I played her drunk at his house, aided by a rather fine bottle of Grgich Hills [wine], and in the following [
Dollhouse
] episode it emerged that Adelle was no stranger to the gin.”

Colbie Smulders, however, learned the hard way that Joss was very serious about these readings. Joss told her about an upcoming reading that was scheduled to start at two o’clock, and she said she might not be able to make it until six. “I never heard back from him,” she laughs. “I was so jealous when Alexis and Alyson [Hannigan] would go or tell me about it. Alexis trained at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), and I went to LAMDA for a summer semester, so I like to think that I would be able to hold [my own, but] I’d probably totally embarrass myself.”

Joss and Kai had to move extremely quickly from talking about a
Much Ado About Nothing
film to taking it seriously to coming up with a team to make it happen, and the process was never without doubt. After all, Joss only had a short window of time to write, cast, and shoot before he needed to dive into editing for
The Avengers
.

“I said to her, ‘There’s no way I can adapt the text and prep the movie and get a cast together in one month,’” Joss remembered. “And she was like, ‘Really? Because November doesn’t work for us.’” But what concerned him more than the time crunch was that he didn’t have a personal take on the play. “A production, let alone a movie, without a point of view is inevitably soggy,” he said.

Much Ado About Nothing
had long been a favorite of Joss’s and his cast of merry players, ever since the performance one Sunday with Alexis Denisof as Benedick and Amy Acker as Beatrice. It is a play about the power of wordsmithery, how it can be used for anything from the bickering that covers up mutual desire to the false rumors that can break spirits and ruin reputations. Yet while Joss loved the text, it was not one of the many plays he’d studied in depth at Winchester, and he didn’t feel as strong a pull toward it as he had toward some of Shakespeare’s other works. Plus, he had enjoyed Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version and didn’t know what else he had to say “about a movie where half of the title says ‘About Nothing,’ since I tend to like things that are about something.”

His vision of the story was also colored by the first live performance he’d seen of the play, which was broadly comedic. While living in England, Joss had gone to a performance at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and returned two more times because he was “floored” by the absurd and “over the top” hilarity. It was difficult for him to embrace the idea that this play could be more than just a comedy.

“I was interested in a slightly darker vision of it,” Joss says, “noir in the sense that these people are basically espionage agents or spies, and they spend all of their time just making up schemes—some of them are hilarious, some of them are disastrous—and tricking each other, and not understanding each other, and lying to each other, and lying to themselves. There’s so much manipulation and there’s so much of taking what we assume to be romantic behavior for granted or turning it on its head and saying this is actually not in the least bit romantic.” That’s when Joss suddenly realized that he didn’t feel the play was about nothing—that the love the squabbling Beatrice and Benedick finally discover for one another is arrived at through “the process of maturing past all of our ideas about how we’re supposed to behave when we’re in love.”