Uddrag af et interview med Jane Espenson (en af de faste forfattere til serien) fra Zealot. Alle spoilere til 3. og 4. sæson er fjernet, men det oprindelige interview kan læses her (advarsel: det røber meget af handlingen i 3. og 4. sæson). '<...>' viser hvor dele af det oprindelige interview er fjernet.

Jane Espenson: Superstar!

A Zealot Interview by Joe Crowe & Shane Ivey

Producer, screenwriter, and executive story editor Jane Espenson is responsible for some of the funniest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last couple of years:

"Band Candy" Giles (Buffy's mentor) and Joyce (Buffy's mom), revert to teenage personalities and get into some risky business together. ("Giles at sixteen? Less 'together guy,' more 'bad-magic hates-the-world ticking-time-bomb guy.'")

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Before Buffy, Jane wrote for sitcoms and Deep Space Nine; she got her foot in the Hollywood door selling a story idea to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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The Writing Process

Joe: So tell us about the work process, working on Buffy. What is that like?
Jane: Every day’s very different from the other day. Some days you come in at nine, and you’re immediately in the room and you’re with Joss all day breaking stories. Some days Joss is busy with Angel, or busy on the set, or busy doing any of a million other things that he has to do, editing lots of stuff, and we may all just sit in our individual offices all day and not do anything, just play Solitaire in our offices or meet in smaller groups and discuss future ideas for episodes, and at four o’clock everybody goes home because it’s clear Joss isn’t going to have any time for us today. And some days you don’t even go to work because you’re out on script. Some people come in and write their scripts in the office; I write mine at home or in the Beverly Hills Library. I pack up my computer and I go to the Library and spend a day there and don’t go to work at all. And you also don’t know until you get to work, whether this could be the day that my story’s broke and I’m sent out of the room to go off to write it and I would even go home at noon. It could be a day when we’ve got Joss and everyone works ‘til nine at night. It could be a day when we don’t have Joss… you just don’t know until you get there.
Shane: How often do you have a situation where it just hinges on his presence to talk about plans that are already there.
Jane: Always. It always hinges on his presence.
Shane: So you don’t really have situations where some of the writers can get together on their own and kind of hammer out ideas…
Jane: We do that, and sometimes they stick. Usually, nothing of great value is done without Joss in the room. Although, more and more, Marti is running it. [Marti Noxon is a longtime Buffy writer and producer.] If Marti is there, we can get stuff done without Joss, and with increasing amounts of predictability that’s happening, as Marti gets more and more involved in the running of the show. But, frequently, if we don’t have Joss, we don’t have Marti, either. And that smaller group tends to get less done, because it’s very much a game of mind-reading at that point. We’re guessing what Joss is going to want, and that’s very hard to do.
Shane: I believe up ‘til now he’s been responsible for the overall story arc, seeing how each episode fits into the story. Is that about right?
Jane: Right, yes.
Shane: Is that still the case, since he’s having to split his attention with two shows?
Jane: Oh yeah, absolutely, and that hasn’t decreased in any way the amount to which he is absolutely in charge of all the arcs and really all the episodes. They really all come from him.
Shane: How far ahead is the story planned out?
Jane: We know ‘til the end of the season the general story. We know the story of the season, and we know the story of the start of next season with some degree of specificity. We know what every character’s arc is for the season, what the big events are going to be in Sunnydale, what villainy is afoot. We know all of that. We know in which episodes certain pivotal things are going to happen. What we don’t have, very far in advance, are the twenty-two little self-contained, satisfying, sci-fi stories that fit those twenty-two slots. We know four or five of those for the year.

The 4th Season Story Arc

Shane: You were talking in the panel just now about how to pitch a script to different shows. That got me thinking about the storyline and the structure of the stories. It seemed like the fourth season, the structure was a little different from the first three. It seemed like the emphasis was much more on relationships and it seemed like there was less emphasis on the monster that everybody was having to deal with…
Jane: That’s interesting. I think that probably did happen, and I think it was sort of a reaction to... you run out of monsters, you’ve done your big, obvious metaphors for the big, obvious emotions of 17-year olds and you start having to go a little deeper and say, what are some of the more subtle emotional things that these people could be going through? And those tend to be about relationships until things start becoming more focused on that. I would probably say that that did happen, and things got a little deeper at that point.
Shane: Last year at this time, Keith de Candido and Chris Golden were talking in one of the Buffy novelization panels, and I think it was Keith who made a really salient point, that Joss particularly always hammers the point home to the novel writers that what the show is really about doesn’t have much to do with teenagers as much as human problems.
Jane: Yeah, absolutely.
Shane: In the storylines, where you’re dealing with teenage problems and growing-up problems, is that worked into it after the fact?
Jane: No, when we’re talking about the show and working out a couple of different story ideas, we’re generally talking about what was happening to us when we were 19. We really do think of them as the problems of a young woman, and when it was in high school we tried to say, all right, we’re going to have these particular teenage problems. But… your problems don’t change that much in their essence. There’s still the “I got dumped, how do I feel about it?” thing no matter how old you are. And so it’s not like we’re having to go, “How did I feel when my heart was broken at 17?” You go, “How do I feel when my heart’s broken?” And you write that. We get to the events in her life through what happened to us, but we deal with the emotions that she would feel, as we would feel them today. Because that doesn’t change.

Another Movie

Shane: Have there been any plans, any discussions about another movie?
Jane: Every now and then Joss will mention that maybe there’ll be a movie someday, but I don’t think there’s anything concrete, either for or against. I think it’s an open topic.
Shane: And is that something that’s been discussed on the production end, with the money people and all that, or is this strictly just batting ideas around?
Jane: I don’t think so. I think everyone’s just speculating what will happen. Because we don’t know how long the show’s gonna run, we don’t know how long Angel’s gonna run. If you’re wanting to do a movie with the two of them, you might want to wait ‘til after Angel’s run is done. So now we’re talking five, six years in the future or more, so yeah, nothing has been discussed about bringing this to fast…
Joe: To be honest… as opposed to, I guess, lying to you the whole time…
Jane: Yes! (laughs)
Joe: I honestly feel that there’s no need for a movie. Because, with the show, you’ve got 22 hours…
Jane: Right.
Joe: How could you make a 2-hour movie and make that… there would have to be so very much in that 2-hour movie, when you’ve got a whole season, you’ve got 22 hours to do a great story.
Jane: Well, yes. I think you could say that it’s the, make it a satisfying P.S. to the stories and do it with the scope and the time that we can’t afford with a TV show. I trust Joss Whedon so much that if he said there’s a movie here, I would know there’s a movie there. And I think you could tell the… both of their battles having been won, Buffy and Angel get together, oh no, something horrible has happened that’s one last thing to defeat, kind of story.
Shane: And, of course, a problem with that is, how pivotal is the movie event, and how is that going to change the show?
Jane: Right, yeah, I don’t think it would be a, “Do the movie and then go back to the show.” I think it would…
Shane: I mean, see The X-Files.
Jane: Right. I think if he does a movie, it would be after the show’s over.
Joe: And I think that’s fine with us.
Jane: But, again, I’m simply guessing. I don’t feel the need for a movie. I feel completely satisfied with what I see on the show. But if Joss wanted to do it, it would be so GOOD that I think you’d all love it!
Joe: It would need to be a movie that Joss is completely involved in.
Jane: He would have to direct it.
Joe: And he’s contributing to dialog in, what, 20 other movies lately?
Shane: He’s been doing that a lot. Has that been noticeable from your end, in his role in the shows?
Jane: Oh, no. When he goes off and does a draft of X-Men or something, it’s remarkable how much it doesn’t interfere with us. He does it at night, he does it on the weekend… It’s more like it cleanses his brain: he gets a little away from Buffy and he comes back to Buffy with a freshness. It’s never like, “You have to get out of the room now because I have to go punch up Titan A.E.”
Joe: So what’s your role in the show on July 1st, right now? When are you going to start writing the new season?

Writing Season 5

Jane: I have not started writing my episodes for the new season yet, although two of our writers have. Episodes 1 and 2 are out being written. I’m writing episode 3, so I will be probably the next person broken, the next person with the story all laid out and I’ll be sent out to write an outline, probably either next week or the week after that. We know what my episode’s going to be about and we know some events that are going to happen in it. We don’t know with any specificity what’s happening in which act and exactly what’s happened to work all that out.
Joe: So you’ve had your, I guess in theory you would have a next season’s meeting, so you know what next season’s story’s about already?
Jane: Oh, we had a next season’s meeting that lasted three weeks. Yeah, we went in great detail to see what everybody’s arc is and everything that’s gonna happen this year, all the big events and where they happen in the year. We have a chart on the wall with the numbers one through twenty-two, and under each number is written something. Even if it’s just a question mark. But we know when certain things are happening and what the shape of the story is, and, yeah, that took us a couple of weeks. And now we’re going in and we’re dropping little diamond-cut stories into each one of those 22 slots.

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The Original Movie

Joe: I have one quick question regarding the history. Has there been talk over the course of the years about going back and exploring any of the characters from the original Buffy movie?
Jane: No. Joss very much feels that those characters have gone and were sort of reconfigured into these characters. So they don’t exist.
Joe: There probably, from what I understand of fandom, was a lot of backlash against that first movie. But I thought it was fun.
Jane: Joss is proud of the script. He didn’t like the movie.
Joe: And of course the script became the show, so…
Jane: Right.
Shane: He just wrote the script for that and then somebody else took it and did a lot of the campy kind of stuff.
Jane: Joss would have done it differently.

Writing Humor

Shane: The show is well known for its sense of humor. For every really horrific element that there is, it always balances it with great dialog and very funny stuff. “Hush” was sort of archetypical, where it was horrific, but at the same time hilarious. <...>
Shane: <...> Does everybody involved in the writing staff have the same level of humor, or are there certain people who contribute different elements to the story?
Jane: Everybody writes their own episodes. Everybody does everything to the extent that you see it in the episode. To a certain extent, I specialize in the funny episodes, but I don’t have to. I could write a scary one if I had to, and there’s still enough humor there to make me happy. Some of the writers claim that they’re not as comfortable writing humor, but you see their stuff, it’s funny. I think we all have learned to do it all.

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Writing Angel

Shane: Are you involved at all with Angel?
Jane: A little bit. I wrote an Angel last season, I’m going to write another one this season.
Shane: How do you see the differences between the two shows? How do you approach them, thematically, or whatever?
Jane: Yeah… In Angel, you come up with stories that have to do with truths about society. In Buffy, you come up with stories that have to do with truths about our characters. Angel’s stories are much less personally centered and much more about the world.
Shane: The first thing I thought about when I saw Angel was that it was much more about grown-ups.
Jane: Yes, absolutely. We want themes that are more universal and don’t just apply to 19-year olds. Although, like I said, the emotions that the 19-year olds feel still are the same ones everybody else has. They’re all accessible to everyone… but it’s true, the stories are more adult on Angel. But even more than that, they’re broader. They’re more about a truth about the way the world works than about how the human heart works.
Joe: Well, all right.
Jane: Great!
Joe: Thanks a lot!
Jane: Thank you.

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Det fulde Zealot interview (inkl. alle spoilere for 3. og 4. sæson) kan læses her.

BuffyFan DK 12-07-00