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butterflyCompletely done with the Welcome to the Hellmouth commentary.
Mark Metcalfe, playing the Master, did a great job for us. He had been working on Seinfield as the Maestro, he had been in Animal House. Most of the guys we read came in and gave us 'Villain, Villain, Villain' in a very unimaginative way. Mark is completely not that guy. He's not that character. He's very just sort of sly and kind of urban and real. Although he completely came up to it and we put him in some really good-looking make-up, he undercut all of the villainousness with real charm and that's, like Buffy herself, one of the those things that's key to the show, a sense of always playing the comedy under the horror and vice versa.
Another rule of the show that we learned very early on was 'put Willow in peril'. Alyson, her vulnerability works really well and every time something looked like it was going to happen to her, it just kinda tears the audience up. One of the problems with the show, as a writer, is that your heroine is your hero. She is stronger than a lot of the things she faces. She's take-charge, as she is here. She's very much the hero, and creating opportunities for her to be in genuine peril are difficult because the whole point is her strength. So, it's very good to have ancillary characters, especially 'cause, like Jesse, they sometimes get killed, we can really put them in danger and really stress their vulnerability. With Buffy, it turns out to be question, more and more as we work on the series, of putting her in peril emotionally. Because… just because she can defeat something doesn't mean it can't affect her. And Sarah plays the grief and really dealing with that part of her life really well, so Buffy's problems are less physical than emotional.
Whereas Willow sorta has both going. Here she is, tentative about her sexuality and about being with a boy and he's about to turn into an ugly, scary vampire. The decision to make vamp-face for the vampires was very conscious and very thought-out. The idea that they would look normal and then change into vampires was done because we wanted a) to have normal high school students who you could interact with and then they would turn out to be evil and you were never really sure which was which and also because, when Buffy is fighting them, it was important to be that they look like demons at that point, like monsters. I didn't think I really wanted to put a show on the air about a high school student who was stabbing normal-looking people in the heart. I thought that somehow that might send the wrong message. But when they are clearly monsters, it takes it to a level of fantasy that is safer.
Here we're about to see one of our first morphs. My whole agenda was that the morph not look like just a special effects shot, but it is shot sort of flatly and very much in a new frame, a different frame that says, "Okay, we're going to do an effect here." Which is a little bit of a disappointment, but the effect looks really good.
As you can see, the make-up, very white-face, very creepy, very ghoulish, but we sorta backed off from that in later seasons to make it a little more human, partially because of Angel and partially because that much body make-up took a lot of time and some people thought that the white was a little funny-looking. I actually find it somewhat creepier, more Day of the Dead, more Evil Dead, than the later vampires we've had.
Our first dusting coming up. I like the way he explodes into dust there, that's something we've worked on, perfected over the years as well. That was also a very conscious decision, that they would turn into dust, clothes and all, because I didn't think that it would be fun to have fifteen minutes of "Let's clean up the bodies" after every episode. Part of this has to be hidden, people can't know that there are vampires everywhere. We get away with a lot of that by saying, "People just won't admit it to themselves."
Luke refers to Buffy as "the little girl" in this scene. That was one of the joys of the show, that we haven't been able to do as much, was the idea that nobody took Buffy seriously. As the show's progressed, you know, she's had fewer and fewer people who don't know who she is, who think that she's nothing but a little girl. And it's such a charge when somebody underestimates you and you turn out to be stronger than they are, and that's really the heart of the show.
I love that fall, particularly painful. I said Buffy is stronger than most of the things she faces, Brian Thompson, not one of them. He's just enormous and very creepy. He provides genuine menace.
The thing about Buffy is, you know, hero that she is, it's very important that she keep that quirkiness, that vulnerability and that character actress feeling. She'll make the joke, she'll get scared, she'll be a person in that situation and not just Superman. So that, even though we know she's going to win the day, we're still gonna worry about it.
Mark Metcalfe, playing the Master, did a great job for us. He had been working on Seinfield as the Maestro, he had been in Animal House. Most of the guys we read came in and gave us 'Villain, Villain, Villain' in a very unimaginative way. Mark is completely not that guy. He's not that character. He's very just sort of sly and kind of urban and real. Although he completely came up to it and we put him in some really good-looking make-up, he undercut all of the villainousness with real charm and that's, like Buffy herself, one of the those things that's key to the show, a sense of always playing the comedy under the horror and vice versa.
Another rule of the show that we learned very early on was 'put Willow in peril'. Alyson, her vulnerability works really well and every time something looked like it was going to happen to her, it just kinda tears the audience up. One of the problems with the show, as a writer, is that your heroine is your hero. She is stronger than a lot of the things she faces. She's take-charge, as she is here. She's very much the hero, and creating opportunities for her to be in genuine peril are difficult because the whole point is her strength. So, it's very good to have ancillary characters, especially 'cause, like Jesse, they sometimes get killed, we can really put them in danger and really stress their vulnerability. With Buffy, it turns out to be question, more and more as we work on the series, of putting her in peril emotionally. Because… just because she can defeat something doesn't mean it can't affect her. And Sarah plays the grief and really dealing with that part of her life really well, so Buffy's problems are less physical than emotional.
Whereas Willow sorta has both going. Here she is, tentative about her sexuality and about being with a boy and he's about to turn into an ugly, scary vampire. The decision to make vamp-face for the vampires was very conscious and very thought-out. The idea that they would look normal and then change into vampires was done because we wanted a) to have normal high school students who you could interact with and then they would turn out to be evil and you were never really sure which was which and also because, when Buffy is fighting them, it was important to be that they look like demons at that point, like monsters. I didn't think I really wanted to put a show on the air about a high school student who was stabbing normal-looking people in the heart. I thought that somehow that might send the wrong message. But when they are clearly monsters, it takes it to a level of fantasy that is safer.
Here we're about to see one of our first morphs. My whole agenda was that the morph not look like just a special effects shot, but it is shot sort of flatly and very much in a new frame, a different frame that says, "Okay, we're going to do an effect here." Which is a little bit of a disappointment, but the effect looks really good.
As you can see, the make-up, very white-face, very creepy, very ghoulish, but we sorta backed off from that in later seasons to make it a little more human, partially because of Angel and partially because that much body make-up took a lot of time and some people thought that the white was a little funny-looking. I actually find it somewhat creepier, more Day of the Dead, more Evil Dead, than the later vampires we've had.
Our first dusting coming up. I like the way he explodes into dust there, that's something we've worked on, perfected over the years as well. That was also a very conscious decision, that they would turn into dust, clothes and all, because I didn't think that it would be fun to have fifteen minutes of "Let's clean up the bodies" after every episode. Part of this has to be hidden, people can't know that there are vampires everywhere. We get away with a lot of that by saying, "People just won't admit it to themselves."
Luke refers to Buffy as "the little girl" in this scene. That was one of the joys of the show, that we haven't been able to do as much, was the idea that nobody took Buffy seriously. As the show's progressed, you know, she's had fewer and fewer people who don't know who she is, who think that she's nothing but a little girl. And it's such a charge when somebody underestimates you and you turn out to be stronger than they are, and that's really the heart of the show.
I love that fall, particularly painful. I said Buffy is stronger than most of the things she faces, Brian Thompson, not one of them. He's just enormous and very creepy. He provides genuine menace.
The thing about Buffy is, you know, hero that she is, it's very important that she keep that quirkiness, that vulnerability and that character actress feeling. She'll make the joke, she'll get scared, she'll be a person in that situation and not just Superman. So that, even though we know she's going to win the day, we're still gonna worry about it.
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Date: 2002-12-01 09:03 pm (UTC):)
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