Joss Whedon: The Biography (71 page)

Much Ado
remained a closely guarded secret until after principal photography had wrapped. On October 24, 2011, Nathan Fillion was the first to announce it by tweeting out a photo of himself, Sean Maher, and Joss with the message “Hey, guys! Let’s make a movie!” Immediately, Whedon fans were abuzz with excitement.

Fillion also tweeted the link to a website,
MuchAdoTheMovie.com
. The site was simple, with a photo of Kranz clad in scuba gear and holding a cocktail, standing in an infinity pool. Internet speculation about the project was wild—was it a film, another Web series, something entirely different? Soon a press release was added to the site, explaining that Joss had just wrapped on a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. “Filmed in just 12 days entirely on location in exotic Santa Monica, the film features a stellar cast of beloved (or soon to be beloved) actors … all dedicated to the idea that … the joy of working on a passion project surrounded by dear friends, admired colleagues and an atmosphere of unabashed rapture far outweighs their hilariously miniature paychecks.” The press release also officially announced the establishment of Bellwether Pictures as a micro-studio for “the production of small, independent narratives for all media, embracing a DIY ethos and newer technologies.”

Joss jumped back into editing
The Avengers
with a renewed spirit, which he credited to
Much Ado
. “Making
The Avengers
was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous,” he said. “I missed my friends and I missed my home, so I decided to throw them all on camera which is the only way I seem to know to relate to people.” Emotionally and mentally renewed, he was able to take a fresh look at the initial assembly of
Avengers
footage that he’d put together before his sabbatical. It had been running way too long for a feature film, but he’d been having a difficult time finding a way for the story to address everything that it needed to in just over two hours. “When I came back from
Much Ado
,” he said, “without any rancor or confusion, I was able to cut the film down to length and readily focus on the things that mattered. I think I would have come to that one way or another, but
Much Ado
sped it up.”

As 2012 approached, it was quickly shaping up to be the year of Joss Whedon films.
The Avengers
was coming out in the spring,
Much Ado About Nothing
was in postproduction, and
The Cabin in the Woods
finally had a release date that wasn’t threatened by financial problems or studio tinkering. It was an exciting time for Joss, but also a daunting one—particularly where the Marvel film was concerned.

The May 4 premiere of
The Avengers
was set in stone, but much post-production work remained. In addition to finalizing the edit, Joss also had to oversee the film’s conversion to 3-D, as well as the completion of the thousands of special effects shots, which artists had been working on since even before filming began. That included all the scenes involving the Hulk, many of Iron Man’s flight and battle scenes, and many aspects of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. He had help from editor Lisa Lassek, who, like Joss, had developed her skills and keen storytelling sense through more than a decade with the Whedonverse. After starting as an assistant editor on
Angel
and working on
Buffy
and
Firefly
, she’d moved up with Joss on
Serenity
and
The Cabin in the Woods
before taking on
The Avengers
alongside
Captain America
editor Jeffrey Ford. (Her rise was no doubt an inspiration to Joss’s current assistant and
Much Ado
coproducer Daniel Kaminsky, who edited
Much Ado
on his laptop in Joss’s office while the blockbuster was being shaped.)

Publicity for the film had also begun in earnest. The same month that Joss was filming
Much Ado
, a New York Comic Con panel wooed fans with
Avengers
footage. When the first full-length trailer was released on iTunes on October 11, it garnered over ten million downloads in the first twenty-four hours, a new record for trailers on the service.

It was a lot of hype for Joss to live up to—especially considering he’d never helmed a high-budget blockbuster before—but he still managed to get the job done. “This was a movie that came in on time and under budget in our production period, which is very impressive for a director who hadn’t tackled anything of this scale,” Kevin Feige says. “I think it is, in large part, due to his experience on his own—producing his own shows. And it was great to see him able to manage that while at the same time getting the performances.”

The Cabin in the Woods
, of course, had proceeded less smoothly from script to screen. When Lionsgate bought the film in July 2011, Joss and Drew Goddard had felt battered from being in limbo for so long; they no longer had the energy to protect their film. And ironically, the movie they had written as a critique of modern horror tales was being released by the same studio as the
Saw
series. But they discovered that Lionsgate truly cared about
Cabin
, which in turn helped them believe in it again, and reignited the vision and enthusiasm they’d been drained of.

They also realized that there was a positive side to the film’s delay when
Cabin
headlined the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2012. So far removed from the struggles of production, SXSW felt like one giant four-day party, where they were just so excited to be out and have people finally see this film they had loved so much. “Usually, by the time you get to the film release, it all feels like business. You have to do these promotional things, and it feels like work,” Goddard says. “Whereas with
Cabin
, it was sort of like seeing an old friend again that you hadn’t seen in a while. It was like, ‘Oh, let’s just celebrate.’” Their excitement was returned tenfold by the fans, who had been waiting to see it for years and were rewarded for their patience with an engaging new spin on the horror genre.

The festival audience loved it, and when
Cabin
was released a month later, on April 13, many critics agreed.
Rolling Stone’s
Peter Travers wrote that “by turning splatter formula on its empty head,
Cabin
shows you can unleash a fire-breathing horror film without leaving your brain or your heart on the killing floor.” Roger Ebert praised Joss and Goddard for constructing
Cabin
“almost as a puzzle for horror fans to solve. Which conventions are being toyed with? Which authors and films are being referred to? Is the film itself an act of criticism?”

Not every reviewer felt that the film’s deconstruction of horror conventions made for a compelling example of the genre. Some thought that Joss and Goddard had fallen short of horror’s traditional thrills by being too enamored of their own gags. The
Hollywood Reporter
called
Cabin
“a hollow exercise in self-reflexive cleverness that’s not nearly as ingenious as it seems to think,” and the
L.A. Times
felt that it was one big “inside joke.”

But word of mouth about the film was strong, drawing more than just Whedon devotees into movie theaters. In its opening weekend,
Cabin
grossed $14.7 million domestically, and it would pull in $66 million worldwide by the end of its run. People immediately started asking about Joss and Goddard’s next project—as if
The Avengers
weren’t taking up enough of Joss’s time.
Variety
suggested that the two take on
Catching Fire
, the upcoming sequel to
The Hunger Games
, an idea that was embraced online by excited fans of that series and the Whedonverse.

“It’s the nature of it,” Goddard says. “Those games are fun to play, when people ask, ‘What are you doing next?’ But the nice thing I’ve learned from working with Joss is that he always said, ‘Look, I’ve never taken a job for money. I’ve never taken a job just because it pays well. I only take jobs because they speak to me, and I feel like there’s something interesting emotionally to relate to in these jobs.’ And if you just stick to that rule, it ends up guiding your career. And so it sounds so simple, yet it’s difficult to maintain sometimes. Especially when you’re getting offered nice things, like the
Hunger Games
of the world. But if you just write what speaks to you, it all tends to work out.”

The Avengers
had a splashy Hollywood premiere on April 11, 2012, and the positive buzz kept growing as the film went into wide release a month later. It was hailed as a colossal summer blockbuster with heart—with precisely the kind of emotional touchstones that tend to be lost when comic book lore is translated to the big screen. The story resonated with adults who understood the nuances of the character development, and the children who loved the thrilling superheroics. “I have kids running up to me all the time saying, ‘I’m always angry,’” Mark Ruffalo laughs, quoting Bruce Banner’s signature line before Hulking out.

“As human beings we want to be superhuman but we know that we’re fallible, and Joss allows us to see ourselves in these superhumans—that’s
our touch point to the fantastic,” Ruffalo says. “It’s no different than the stories of the saints and the gods—it’s our modern version. We want to put our stories in context, and he really tapped into that in a way that’s astounding.”

And it’s quite fitting that many fans connected most strongly to Scarlett Johansson’s turn as Black Widow—a complex, powerful female character. Her role in the film is not a lighthearted one, nor is it a story of redemption, which is why Joss was so drawn to her. “She doesn’t live in a hero’s world; she lives in a very noir/duplicitous world … and there’s a darkness to her and her past,” he explained. Black Widow is, as Hawkeye says, a spy, not a soldier, yet she readily joins the fight. At no point is she the “token” female of the group; from the moment we meet her—tied to a chair clad in a tight black dress, allowing herself to be interrogated by Russian mobsters while she’s actually pumping
them
for information—she is clearly in control. Throughout the film, her “superpower” is the way she manipulates people—quite often making them believe that she is weak and easily broken. It’s only when she’s being chased through the bowels of the Helicarrier by the Hulk, the one person she cannot reason with, that she is truly shaken.

The way that the Hulk overpowers her can be read as Joss’s latest retelling of his childhood terror at the world around him. For many women watching the scene, it’s also a reminder of the lessons life has taught them—that they must be constantly vigilant, because even the “nice guys” can turn into monsters. Black Widow runs for her life, dodging Hulk’s attacks, until he catches up and throws her against a wall. She’s cowed, letting the others take charge in taking the green monster down, and shortly thereafter it takes a moment for her to answer Nick Fury’s summons to the next battle. In writing this scene, Joss imbued her with the spirit of Buffy—empowered to kick ass but aware that defeat is a possibility in every battle. It’s always about getting back up, no matter how slowly one does it.