Joss Whedon: The Biography (70 page)

To fill the position of director of photography, Jed Whedon suggested Jay Hunter. Joss and Hunter already had a good working relationship—the cinematographer had been the second unit DP on
Dollhouse
, and second unit was almost always directed by Joss. Hunter was invited to meet with Joss at his house; all he was told prior to the meeting was that Joss had a movie. Was he interested? Hunter was surprised, and he needed to take the pitch in for a minute before he answered: “Of course.”

When he arrived at the Whedon home, he says, “it was, like, six in the morning and I walk in and I was like, ‘Hey, how’s it goin’, haven’t seen you, like, in forever.’ Joss made me some tea and then he said, ‘OK,
Much Ado About Nothing
. I want to shoot it in black and white and handheld. How do you feel about that?’”

Hunter was excited by the idea—he couldn’t think of another example of a Shakespeare film with a black-and-white, handheld approach, but he thought it was a fittingly contemporary way to approach the material, because
Much Ado
felt like a very modern play. “The humor, the issues. I mean, slap some modern dialogue in it and it feels like it’s happening right now,” he says. “Joss and I jelled on this idea that we’ve seen Shakespeare done many times in this very kind of classical, almost cliché at this point, manner, where there’s lots of beautiful dolly shots and lots of long lenses, and people shoot it almost as if it’s a play happening in front of them.” Hunter adds, “I’m sure a lot of the justification in that is it lets us see the actors act. It ends up feeling very theatrical, and I always wonder when I’m watching it, why am I watching this as a film? If I want to see this kind of interpretation, I should just go to the theater—to the actual, live theater—and see it.”

Joss’s concept was to strip down and simplify the visuals. Shooting it in black and white puts the story—and the audience—in another world, one lacking the distraction of color. “It’s supposed to be invisible photography that’s supposed to immerse the audience into the scene rather than them watching from fifty feet away,” Hunter explains. “You’re actually in there. The actors are moving around the camera; the camera is very close to the actors and shifting around within their space.”

On the first day of shooting, a cable snapped off a camera and hit Hunter right above his eye. “We have pictures of him walking around with this huge bloody gauze,” Kai says. “He probably should have gotten stitches, but he didn’t. He was like, ‘No, let’s just keep going.’ [The shoot] had really a great feel to it, like everyone just—like a family, like, let’s do it, let’s make it.”

“Kai knew better than I did how much I needed it,” Joss said. “On the first day of filming, she said, ‘So, are you happy?’ And I smiled so hard that my face broke. My lips just split because I was smiling so hard.”

Part of Joss’s delight came from the fact that he was shooting in his own home. He had always wanted to film there, and after being away for so long shooting
The Avengers
, he got the chance to settle into a place that he loved, and to share that love. When Kai was first renovating the 1920s, Mediterranean-style house, they’d modeled it on the feeling of Lee’s farm in the Catskills—an “eclectic, artistic space” where people could connect and create.

They’d unknowingly had a trial run for the film a few years earlier, when Jane Espenson was looking for a space to rehearse and perform a stage show. “At the last minute we had no place to perform it. Joss opened his house to me and my little troupe of actors for about a month,” Espenson says. “I had a key to the house and we moved his furniture around and the actors were shouting and singing at all hours. We broke a glass and a picture frame and once we left a window open—we were like bison, and Joss and Kai were cool with it! Kai even stapled fabric to their sofa for us. Their children provided us with our only rehearsal audience. I can never repay that whole family for their kindness.”

Joss was overjoyed that Arden and Squire were exposed to the very intimate and all-encompassing expression of art, as he had been in his mother’s house. “We wanted to encourage people to come in and just do artistic [endeavors]—we wanted our kids to be around as much art and life [as possible],” he said. “This was something both of us were very committed to.” And so their spacious home, with features like the stone amphitheater Kai had built for his Shakespeare readings and the small dance studio that could double for a police interrogation room, was the perfect setting for the film.

“It’s almost like Kai designed the house for this movie to be shot in,” Jay Hunter says. “I don’t think anybody who watches the movie is going to think this is Joss’s house unless they’ve heard that. Because it feels like the location was chosen for the movie—it feels very appropriate. But when you first hear, ‘Oh, we shot the movie in my house,’ it sounds like it was just a matter of convenience. It was, but then also it fit it so well. It was a perfect location.”

It was also the most practical choice, because there was no way that they could have gotten a location and permits to shoot in the short amount of time Joss had away from
The Avengers
. Plus, Kai said, “It was also a great way to finally get me to clean the basement. I had been putting that off for a year and we used it for Dogberry and Verges’ interrogation room.”

The Whedons opened up nearly their entire house for the film, both to the cast and crew and to the viewers who would ultimately see it immortalized on screen. It was a whole new level of intimacy even for a man who had been deeply connected to his fans for years. “We struggled with that a little bit, especially when hiring extras,” Joss says. “But, at the end of the day, love the space, and it remains in its own way anonymous. It’s performing a part; it’s slightly in disguise. [The movie] isn’t a tour of the house—it is sort of nether space, and the fact that it’s black and white too takes it apart from our day-to-day life.”

Being in Joss’s home also changed the tone of shooting slightly. “If we had been shooting this in some other location, I’m sure more things would have been broken or something, or more holes would have been hit through the wall by mistake,” Hunter explains. “Everyone knew that ‘Hey, this is the man’s house. Let’s walk on eggshells and be very delicate.’”

Yet the home wasn’t in a bubble, and real life kept intruding. At times it was charming, like seeing Arden and Squire come down for their breakfast at 6
AM
as everyone else was arriving for the day’s shoot. More often it came with stress, like when demolition started on the house next door the day before shooting began. That sent Joss into a state of panic, but Kai simply went into producer mode and convinced the workers to take a break when they were shooting. That same day, the sewer went out and the toilets backed up, and the entire sewer line needed to be redone. Then the people across the street decided to sand their floors. And suddenly Kai became aware that her home, which had seemed like the quietest place, was under the flight path of a number of airplanes and helicopters every day.

Kai had checked with the police and found out that she didn’t need a permit to shoot on her own property, but she later found out when an officer showed up that the streets were city property and people couldn’t park there. He had actually come by to respond to a neighbor’s complaint, and he shut down their production when he learned that they didn’t have any permits. Joss suggested that they take a break as Kai quickly headed off to recheck the permit situation, but Clark Gregg pushed him to continue shooting. They had been filming the wedding scene, in which Claudio announces that Hero slept with someone the night before and Leonato, shamed, verbally attacks his daughter. When Joss called “action,” Gregg started “yelling at his daughter [even louder] than he had before,” the director recalled. “And I, of course, was filled with terror that this was going to get us all thrown in the Big House…. We made Shakespeare against the law. We fought Johnny Law for art.”

Strangely, working on a blockbuster film with A-list actors who had strong opinions about their characters set Joss up well to shoot a low-budget film in a short time frame. His infamous determination to have everything how he wanted it—from costumes to line readings—had to give way to a necessary flexibility when logistics didn’t match up with desire.

One scene, in particular, posed a huge obstacle: Joss and Hunter had discussed the setting of a scene with Beatrice and Benedick, one that Joss felt should be shot in late afternoon. He had many stills of the actors that he’d taken in rehearsals, when the light was hitting the staircase and his courtyard in such a beautiful way. He wanted to capture that look in the scene; it was the first thing about the film for which he declared, “This is how I want it to be.”

With about five days left before production ended, Hunter had spent an entire day observing light patterns at the house, determining how they shifted and changed throughout the day. They would use his observations to inform the shooting order of scenes—to ensure that, among other things, they had the ideal natural lighting for the scene in question. So of course on the day they shot it, the sky was completely overcast. With such a small budget, there was no big lighting crew to simulate the sun. Nor did they have enough money and time to save the scene for another day. They had no choice but to just roll with the visual hand they were dealt.

Instead of the “backlit, golden sunlight kind of elements” they had planned, “this fog rolled in as the scene progressed, and it was kind of creating the opposite mood of what we had originally intended,” Hunter recalls. By the end of that shot, Joss realized that Hero’s funeral procession, which was to follow this Beatrice and Benedick scene, had been shot a couple of days earlier and then, too, there had been a crazy amount of fog. So Joss ultimately shifted the order of the scenes, setting a melancholy tone as the fog rolls in and around the marchers, then gradually lightening the mood as Benedick scripts a sonnet for Beatrice while on her staircase and the fog seems to recede.

“It’s like a wild, magical moment,” Hunter explains. “Some directors and DPs would probably have lost their minds, because if you have this [image] set and then the film gods give you something different, it can be devastating. But Joss decided to just roll with it, and the film gods ended up giving us this huge gift.”

Joss easily guided his actors into the emotions and actions he wanted, but found that he had certain limitations. “Apart from a basic understanding of what people were saying, I didn’t research the text,” he said. When it came to explaining exactly what Shakespeare meant by a line, he’d summon Denisof over. In addition to studying the Bard at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Denisof had worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so he slipped easily into the role of Shakespeare interpreter.

The entire film was shot secretly in twelve days, over one week and three weekends. Joss took one short break to support sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen with her “Club Mo” team at the 2011 Walk for Lupus Now in Los Angeles. Along with Felicia Day, Joss helped the team raise over $70,000 for the charity.

Tancharoen had been diagnosed with lupus as a teenager, and she was dealing with the side effects of the chemotherapy she was on to fight the disease. She wasn’t sure if she’d be physically able to attend the walk, but Joss showed up extra early, arriving only after her two friends who organized the group. “I was worried I wouldn’t get a T-shirt,” he said; Jed had told him that he wasn’t getting one of the limited-edition custom shirts made by
Firefly
costume designer Shawna Trpcic, because younger brother Zack had raised more money than him. Like showing up on his first day of
Roseanne
with a hundred no. 2 pencils, he knew it was probably a joke but he wasn’t taking any chances.