PLUME: Did you feel that you were missing out on social aspects?

WHEDON: No, no. You know, I had very good friends. I had very good pot. I snuck out to London overnight to get shows. I was lonely, but I was just as lonely when I was around girls as when I wasn’t.

PLUME: Where did the loneliness stem from? It’s interesting, because it seems to almost be a thread through the work you’ve done, if you look at Buffy and then even to Toy Story and – god forbid – Alien Resurrection. There’s a certain aspect of isolation, an outsider to all the world…

WHEDON: I lived my life feeling alone. That’s just the way of it. I always did. As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was alone. No matter how much I loved my family – and I actually got along better with my family than I think most people do – but I just always felt separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time. I wasn’t living a life that was particularly different from anybody else’s, a pariah – it wasn’t like I didn’t have friends, but I just… we all of us are alone in our own minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my life. Loneliness and aloneness – which are different things – are very much, I would say, of the three main things I focus on in my work.

PLUME: Was it ever a feeling that you felt you were different from anyone else?

WHEDON: I think everybody always feels they’re different. I did feel different from the people around me. I’ve always felt that I was the outsider in every group I’ve ever been in, except my staff.
[ad#square]
PLUME: By nature or by design?

WHEDON: Well, you know, it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be a part of a group. But I felt like Luke Cage in the Fantastic Four, you know – no matter what. That’s just always been the way. You know, very often you’ll be in a group and you’ll discover that every single person in it feels like they’re the one on the perimeter. It’s like everybody has their own moment that’s going on, some more than others. It was just a huge theme for me, and it was a huge theme that sort of crystallized in adolescence. Because, really, not having a girlfriend… I wish I could say I was above caring about that …

PLUME: Was it a loneliness that ever went into depression?

WHEDON: Oh yeah, but not the kind of depression where you don’t do anything. I was depressive, melodramatic …

PLUME: Yet productive.

WHEDON: Not if you were my Russian teacher. But productive, yes, actually. Something always going on, some scheme, some art. You know, in the worst of it, I would write, not really realizing that I was writing. I didn’t think of myself as a writer per se, but yeah, I was always trying to communicate something – even if I was just, “Pay attention to me!”

PLUME: But you were writing to yourself, so it really didn’t accomplish much, did it?

WHEDON: Yeah, you point that out now.

PLUME: There’s a certain logical disconnect there, but I guess there is in all teenage writing.

WHEDON: Yeah, it’s weird now, because with the Internet, much teenage writing is for the consumption of everybody in the universe. Had there been the Internet, I probably would have been on it like a bandit. But yeah, you’re right, the writing and the drawing that I did to express myself, I really did for myself. But always in the hope of eventually creating something that would speak to people. Part of the desire to communicate, which to me is the most important part of art, is the desire to be heard, which is entirely selfish.

PLUME: So it’s a large-form attempt at attention.

WHEDON: Then beyond attention comes, you know, the other half – the desire to connect. That is the unselfish part of that desire.

PLUME: Do you think that, through creative means, the connection is still – for all intents and purposes – at arms length?

WHEDON: Well, it’s not like I’m going out hugging everybody that watches my show – although I probably could in about half an hour, because we really don’t have that big an audience.

PLUME: It’s time for the goodwill tour.

WHEDON: Goodwill tour… or, as I call it, ComicCon. No, I mean, the thing about the art is that the communication is both sides. The selfishness of, “Please hear me,” and the beauty of, “I hear you.” The beauty of here’s something that you’re going through, that you’re lonely, and I know what it’s like, so here’s that presented to you. That’s the best thing about the show and everything they do, when people go, “I feel less alone because I saw this, because I saw someone go through it. I saw someone be rejected, I saw somebody hurt, I saw whatever it was. I saw her getting stronger, and it made me stronger, too.”

PLUME: I guess to some extent, with the safety net of it also being a finished work that’s presented for those connections, it’s an intermediary between creator and audience.

WHEDON: Well, I could call a lot of people and go, “Hey, I’m lonely, too.” They’re probably going to just hang up or call the police.

PLUME: Yeah, but that’s what the Internet’s for.

WHEDON: Yes, I guess it is, but that’s not the medium I was raised on. I don’t know how to wield it.

PLUME: Did Winchester facilitate a creative bent, or was it mostly an extra-curricular sort of thing?

WHEDON: Most of the things that I’ve done that have been truly creative have been extra-curricular. However, stories that I’ve written have gotten me recommendations, which was nice. At Winchester, they tried to squash a lot of things. Certainly everything I wore or said bothered them, but at the same time I studied classic literature and drama with some of the greatest teachers out there. You couldn’t help but become more creative.

PLUME: How far back does your love of Shakespeare go?

WHEDON: As far back as I can remember. I used to read plays when I was a kid. As soon as I was old enough to get through a play, the first one I remember reading were Henry IV…

PLUME: It would have been so much different if you’d started with a comedy.

WHEDON: “For god’s sake, give me A Midsummer Night’s Dream, boy…” When they started doing them on the BBC, they did the entire canon on the BBC for a budget of like 12 dollars.

PLUME: That’s quite lavish for the BBC.

WHEDON: I know, it was a big deal back then. I used to watch them …

PLUME: At least they’re finally making their way to DVD.

WHEDON: Are they?

PLUME: Yes. Slowly but surely.

WHEDON: It’s hilarious, how little money they had, but at the same time I still think some really good stuff went on there, and it was very formative for me.

PLUME: Do you think, to some extent, that’s when Shakespeare works best? When there isn’t a lot of artifice to draw the eye away?

WHEDON: No, I think Shakespeare works when it’s emotionally true. It can be done on a bare stage. Actually, we had a reading of Lear yesterday, at my house, sitting around out by the garden. So it’s not heavy with production values. But I also think it can work completely gussied up, as long as everything is working towards emotional truth, what’s going on. But sometimes great big elaborate sets and special effects can help with that. There’s nothing wrong with lavish productions.

PLUME: Were there certain elements that struck cords with you, especially at that early age, reading something like Henry V?

WHEDON: I didn’t read Henry V until I was older. I, by coincidence, spent most of the time studying – the hardest and deepest and most in-depth times – studying Hamlet.

PLUME: By coincidence.

WHEDON: Yes. Well, it turned out that way, because I was studying for A levels, which meant you really studied one play for months.

PLUME: Your choice for the play, or the instructor’s?

WHEDON: It was not the instructor’s choice – it was whatever play was on the A levels that year. And because I actually wasn’t planning on going to university in England, the tests themselves were not that important, so I started on A level English when I got there, which was above – I was still at O-levels in everything else. Then sort of bumped back to a different A level … I think Lear and Othello were the main ones for the second one, but for the first we studied Hamlet. This was a thing where, in A levels, your getting into a decent university depends on three tests. That’s it. You spend the last two years of high school studying for those three tests, and you choose your three subjects. It’s very odd, but it’s also great because I didn’t have to take math or science.

PLUME: Damn you!

WHEDON: Well, that’s why my wife does the bills… When the bills come and I go, “What’s a decimal?” So we’d have class for an hour and twenty minutes, like in college, and then there’d be three more hours until dinner, and we’d just stay. We’d just stay and keep talking. Some of them were doing it because they were desperate to get good grades, they wanted to get into Oxford or Cambridge. One of them mentioned to me, “You know, Joss, you’re not taking the A levels, you don’t have to stay.” “Dude, where else would I be?” It was amazing. Four hours at a stretch, great scholars and a great teacher completely prying open the text of Hamlet. I mean, what more fun can there be? … Spoken like a man who never had sex in high school …

PLUME: Do you think, again, that Winchester – and the type of school it was – facilitated that kind of study? As opposed to a public school, say, in the United States?

WHEDON: Yeah. You know, my sister-in-law teaches for LA USC, which I think – just two more miracles and she’s eligible for Sainthood… or at least martyrdom. You just don’t get that level. You do occasionally, but it’s always the exception to the rule. Having a private school education was a huge benefit for me. If I could actually make a mission out of my life, it would be to get our public schools up to that kind of level. To get education to become important to anybody in the country. It’s so dispiriting to see kids not be given the opportunity to find out that learning is the most fascinating and useful thing there is.

PLUME: So when will that become a crusade for you?

WHEDON: I’m not sure. I’m not a great crusader. Don’t really know how to go about it.

PLUME: Well, making statements in a positive direction’s a start.

WHEDON: Yeah.

PLUME: What direction will you be pushing, now that you’re a father? Would you try to avoid sending your child to a public school?

WHEDON: We’ve talked about it. He’s five months old. So right now, it’s more about poo. Big decisions, mostly involve poo, and then we’ll figure out what we want. We want him to get the best education he can. We want the public schools to be able to provide that. We’re basically two dumb teenagers who had a kid by mistake – except that I’m nearly 40 and we’ve been married for 8 years. But it feels like the other thing. So we haven’t quite mastered the whole thing. We’ve talked a lot about it, but we don’t know.

PLUME: One day it’s poo, the next day it’s SATs…

WHEDON: Exactly, exactly. Which are very similar to poo.

PLUME: And also disposable.

Continued below…

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Comments: 1 Comment