Welcome to the Hellmouth
Nov. 21st, 2002 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyJoss' Commentary. Everything so far is here.
Buffy here saying the word "slut". That turned out to be a big issue for the WB. The show has pushed its sexual content somewhat in the last years, but when we first made these twelve episodes we weren't even on the air. They didn't know what timeslot we'd be in. They didn't know what kind of a network they were. And they didn't know how far we could go. They didn't like us using the word "virgin" in episode four and the word "slut" here was a great controversy even though we implied it's not great to be a slut.
Kristine Sutherland, playing Joyce. She's just great. And she's like Tony, somebody who's clearly still searching in her own life, you know, who doesn't have all the answers. One of the things we really tried not to do is with this show was make all the grownups complete morons. Even though we play the metaphor of "Mom doesn't understand" and you know, your parents don't understand when you're a kid, what you're going through. She literally doesn't understand that Buffy really does have to save the world and is the Vampire Slayer. But at the same time, it's very clear that she has struggles of her own and she's a very sympathetic character. We didn't feel like demonizing and alienating the grownups on this show. It seemed a little single-minded and immature.
This, then, would be the introduction of Young Angel. David Boreanez, who was possibly the most difficult piece of casting we did. We saw dozens and dozens of guys and never found anyone. David came in, gave a very good read. I liked him, he wasn't exactly, you know, my type. I wasn't sure we necessarily had the guy here until I asked the women in the room. Gale Berman, the executive for Sanddollar, and Marsha Showman, our brilliant casting director, who had both turned into puddles the moment he walked into the room. They had just disappeared, they were so excited about what he was and I had to defer to them. They seemed to know better than me. And thank God I did, because David turned, not only a great star, but a really solid actor.
This scene, this bit right here in the alley, we shot, again, several months later. I shot this when we were shooting the last episode because the stunt hadn't really registered. And I wanted to do something pretty dramatic, very Batman. The stuntwoman, there, was held up by a wire, which we took out digitally, and then came down on Angel. This part of the scene was also shot that night several months later, again because Buffy's attitude had been very angry and we wanted to pull back and make her more vulnerable. The moment he gets up, the rest of the scene now plays when it was originally shot when we were shooting the first episode many, many months before. We still ended up having to do some looping on Sarah to bring the attitude back a little bit, so that she wasn't too aggressive.
The idea that the man Buffy would clearly fall in love with would turn out to be a vampire seemed to me like it might be a bit of a cliche but it was so perfect for this. The wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance. The one person she could categorically never be with, the one person that she'd spent her life learning to hate, was the person she'd fall in love with. It was just too good to pass up. The amazing thing was that so few people figured out that he was a vampire beforehand, I assumed that everybody would. Giving her the cross was supposed to be a mislead, so that you wouldn't suspect it. Of course, he gave it to her in a box, so that he didn't have to touch it.
This is the actual warehouse that we shoot in. When we designed the club, we put the door to the club on the actual outside of the warehouse so that we could do this, so that we could go in from the outside because that would give real life and make it very realistic and exciting and not like a tv show. Of course, we did it exactly once, and I think, once more in the third season, because you have to wait until night to shoot, you have to go in and out, the light, it's really complicated, and it's one of those things that at the time seemed like it was going to increase our production values enormously and then we realized that we're just too lazy to do that. The same thing goes for the balconey upstairs that Buffy goes to, that we just thought was the coolest thing we'd ever designed and it really gave the club some virtual depth, but going up there with all that equipment and all those the lights and it's really hot and really crowded and we just stopped doing it. When you're making these shows, one after another, you start to take shortcuts and that was one of them.
Just a little scene designed to explain the Xander/Willow relationship and sort of cement her friendship with Buffy a little bit more. Alyson had been convinced that she was terrible in this scene and that she had ruined the entire show, which convinced me that she's insane because she was wonderful in it. These are the things that you start to think about: Sarah had to eat the same cherry ten times from ten different angles at the same moment and did it perfect every time. Little things like that, little things about matching and that kind of professionalism, you have no idea how important they become when you're editing these shows, when you're doing one after the other. When you find someone who can't remember what position their arms were in and things like that, it will drive you insane. But Sarah's been doing this, obviously, forever and she's a classic pro at that.
She is actually about to go up to the balcony finally. I think it's a very beautiful sequence in terms of the lighting. Michael Gershim has been our DP on this since the beginning. He's got an extraordinary eye, makes things very beautiful. Really gave the show a lot more depth than it might have had. Most science-fiction/horror shows tend to be very flat, sort of very awkwardly lit, very blue, very sort of distancing. Mike makes a very lush palette with a lot of blacks and a lot of depth, and can make something both eerie and beautiful at the same time really well. I think that's shown to great advantage here where they're standing on the balcony. We shot the show on 16 millimeters, well, which doesn't have the depth of 35 millimeter, it's a much smaller negative, has a lot more grain and the whole time we were shooting on 16, which was for the first two seasons, nobody knew it, because Mike did such a great job.
The band behind them, by the way, is Sprung Monkey, who was our first ever band. We put a club in becuase we thought we'd want to have bands playing as much as possible. It's nice for the energy, and they were usually unsigned or fairly unknown bands, not just the latest pop hits, which really also gave us a good energy, they were excited to do it, everybody always has a good time when we shoot a band... Here's Giles, clearly violating the six-inch rule. Very bad, very bad.
Ah, the infamous "Jesse asks Cordelia to dance" scene. This is one of the few things that's based verbatim on something that happened to me. One of the only times I ever asked a girl to dance in high school, her reply was, "With you?" I didn't actually say anything after that, the way Jesse does, I just sort of slunk off... for about four years.
This is another one of our classic sort of "Giles is trying to live in the world of normal horror movies and Buffy completely undercuts it" scenes. It's what we used for Tony's audition.
The way he gives the line, "But you didn't hone." always makes me laugh extraordinarily much. His frustration at her... just complete subverson of all of the rules of making horror movies. The idea that vampires would dress in the era that they were killed in was a charming notion but one we ultimately abandoned because if every vampire looked like he was from the 70's or the 50's or whatever it was, they really wouldn't be that scary. Patrick did a very nice job of being completely creepy in a completely ridiculous outfit which you gotta give him credit for.
Buffy's going into the bathroom area here. It's another scene we reshot because it's too brightly lit, too wide. It's very hard tonally to maintain suspense, to maintain comedy, and to maintain action. Those three things require very different kinds of framing, different kinds of lighting, and camera movements and to know what to accentuate, to know what space you're in tonally, is something... it's very difficult to find a director who can go back and forth from one to the other. The guys who shot these two shows did a great job, but inevitably there are instances where things just don't seem to work on as many levels as they might. The idea that the show could be that schizophrenic, that it could be bouncing from horror to comedy to action to drama all the time, and some people had trouble getting used to. Luckily, all of my performers all turned out to be people who could do all of those things and turn on a dime between one and the other. And to their great credit, the network completely understood that mix and was behind it. They never asked us, "Can't you just be a comedy? Can't you just be a drama?" We had one sticking point, one issue about that, which was the title. Which very clearly says, "We're a comedy, we're a horror show and we've got action. Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And sort of where it's... both its silliness and its cross-genre popping around kinda on it's sleeve, and that threw the network because they weren't sure how to sell it. They understood what the show was but they weren't sure how to show that to people. And we bandied about the title, we went back and forth a lot of times.
The Master rising from the pool of blood, a CGI effect. Originally, we wanted him to rise from the pool of blood but that's a telelvision production thing. You then have a man covered in blood for an entire episode and that's just too hard to do. So we had him rise up completely clean, just because we couldn't possibly do a second take if we had to come up in all that blood.
Yay, only one more section to do.
Buffy here saying the word "slut". That turned out to be a big issue for the WB. The show has pushed its sexual content somewhat in the last years, but when we first made these twelve episodes we weren't even on the air. They didn't know what timeslot we'd be in. They didn't know what kind of a network they were. And they didn't know how far we could go. They didn't like us using the word "virgin" in episode four and the word "slut" here was a great controversy even though we implied it's not great to be a slut.
Kristine Sutherland, playing Joyce. She's just great. And she's like Tony, somebody who's clearly still searching in her own life, you know, who doesn't have all the answers. One of the things we really tried not to do is with this show was make all the grownups complete morons. Even though we play the metaphor of "Mom doesn't understand" and you know, your parents don't understand when you're a kid, what you're going through. She literally doesn't understand that Buffy really does have to save the world and is the Vampire Slayer. But at the same time, it's very clear that she has struggles of her own and she's a very sympathetic character. We didn't feel like demonizing and alienating the grownups on this show. It seemed a little single-minded and immature.
This, then, would be the introduction of Young Angel. David Boreanez, who was possibly the most difficult piece of casting we did. We saw dozens and dozens of guys and never found anyone. David came in, gave a very good read. I liked him, he wasn't exactly, you know, my type. I wasn't sure we necessarily had the guy here until I asked the women in the room. Gale Berman, the executive for Sanddollar, and Marsha Showman, our brilliant casting director, who had both turned into puddles the moment he walked into the room. They had just disappeared, they were so excited about what he was and I had to defer to them. They seemed to know better than me. And thank God I did, because David turned, not only a great star, but a really solid actor.
This scene, this bit right here in the alley, we shot, again, several months later. I shot this when we were shooting the last episode because the stunt hadn't really registered. And I wanted to do something pretty dramatic, very Batman. The stuntwoman, there, was held up by a wire, which we took out digitally, and then came down on Angel. This part of the scene was also shot that night several months later, again because Buffy's attitude had been very angry and we wanted to pull back and make her more vulnerable. The moment he gets up, the rest of the scene now plays when it was originally shot when we were shooting the first episode many, many months before. We still ended up having to do some looping on Sarah to bring the attitude back a little bit, so that she wasn't too aggressive.
The idea that the man Buffy would clearly fall in love with would turn out to be a vampire seemed to me like it might be a bit of a cliche but it was so perfect for this. The wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance. The one person she could categorically never be with, the one person that she'd spent her life learning to hate, was the person she'd fall in love with. It was just too good to pass up. The amazing thing was that so few people figured out that he was a vampire beforehand, I assumed that everybody would. Giving her the cross was supposed to be a mislead, so that you wouldn't suspect it. Of course, he gave it to her in a box, so that he didn't have to touch it.
This is the actual warehouse that we shoot in. When we designed the club, we put the door to the club on the actual outside of the warehouse so that we could do this, so that we could go in from the outside because that would give real life and make it very realistic and exciting and not like a tv show. Of course, we did it exactly once, and I think, once more in the third season, because you have to wait until night to shoot, you have to go in and out, the light, it's really complicated, and it's one of those things that at the time seemed like it was going to increase our production values enormously and then we realized that we're just too lazy to do that. The same thing goes for the balconey upstairs that Buffy goes to, that we just thought was the coolest thing we'd ever designed and it really gave the club some virtual depth, but going up there with all that equipment and all those the lights and it's really hot and really crowded and we just stopped doing it. When you're making these shows, one after another, you start to take shortcuts and that was one of them.
Just a little scene designed to explain the Xander/Willow relationship and sort of cement her friendship with Buffy a little bit more. Alyson had been convinced that she was terrible in this scene and that she had ruined the entire show, which convinced me that she's insane because she was wonderful in it. These are the things that you start to think about: Sarah had to eat the same cherry ten times from ten different angles at the same moment and did it perfect every time. Little things like that, little things about matching and that kind of professionalism, you have no idea how important they become when you're editing these shows, when you're doing one after the other. When you find someone who can't remember what position their arms were in and things like that, it will drive you insane. But Sarah's been doing this, obviously, forever and she's a classic pro at that.
She is actually about to go up to the balcony finally. I think it's a very beautiful sequence in terms of the lighting. Michael Gershim has been our DP on this since the beginning. He's got an extraordinary eye, makes things very beautiful. Really gave the show a lot more depth than it might have had. Most science-fiction/horror shows tend to be very flat, sort of very awkwardly lit, very blue, very sort of distancing. Mike makes a very lush palette with a lot of blacks and a lot of depth, and can make something both eerie and beautiful at the same time really well. I think that's shown to great advantage here where they're standing on the balcony. We shot the show on 16 millimeters, well, which doesn't have the depth of 35 millimeter, it's a much smaller negative, has a lot more grain and the whole time we were shooting on 16, which was for the first two seasons, nobody knew it, because Mike did such a great job.
The band behind them, by the way, is Sprung Monkey, who was our first ever band. We put a club in becuase we thought we'd want to have bands playing as much as possible. It's nice for the energy, and they were usually unsigned or fairly unknown bands, not just the latest pop hits, which really also gave us a good energy, they were excited to do it, everybody always has a good time when we shoot a band... Here's Giles, clearly violating the six-inch rule. Very bad, very bad.
Ah, the infamous "Jesse asks Cordelia to dance" scene. This is one of the few things that's based verbatim on something that happened to me. One of the only times I ever asked a girl to dance in high school, her reply was, "With you?" I didn't actually say anything after that, the way Jesse does, I just sort of slunk off... for about four years.
This is another one of our classic sort of "Giles is trying to live in the world of normal horror movies and Buffy completely undercuts it" scenes. It's what we used for Tony's audition.
The way he gives the line, "But you didn't hone." always makes me laugh extraordinarily much. His frustration at her... just complete subverson of all of the rules of making horror movies. The idea that vampires would dress in the era that they were killed in was a charming notion but one we ultimately abandoned because if every vampire looked like he was from the 70's or the 50's or whatever it was, they really wouldn't be that scary. Patrick did a very nice job of being completely creepy in a completely ridiculous outfit which you gotta give him credit for.
Buffy's going into the bathroom area here. It's another scene we reshot because it's too brightly lit, too wide. It's very hard tonally to maintain suspense, to maintain comedy, and to maintain action. Those three things require very different kinds of framing, different kinds of lighting, and camera movements and to know what to accentuate, to know what space you're in tonally, is something... it's very difficult to find a director who can go back and forth from one to the other. The guys who shot these two shows did a great job, but inevitably there are instances where things just don't seem to work on as many levels as they might. The idea that the show could be that schizophrenic, that it could be bouncing from horror to comedy to action to drama all the time, and some people had trouble getting used to. Luckily, all of my performers all turned out to be people who could do all of those things and turn on a dime between one and the other. And to their great credit, the network completely understood that mix and was behind it. They never asked us, "Can't you just be a comedy? Can't you just be a drama?" We had one sticking point, one issue about that, which was the title. Which very clearly says, "We're a comedy, we're a horror show and we've got action. Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And sort of where it's... both its silliness and its cross-genre popping around kinda on it's sleeve, and that threw the network because they weren't sure how to sell it. They understood what the show was but they weren't sure how to show that to people. And we bandied about the title, we went back and forth a lot of times.
The Master rising from the pool of blood, a CGI effect. Originally, we wanted him to rise from the pool of blood but that's a telelvision production thing. You then have a man covered in blood for an entire episode and that's just too hard to do. So we had him rise up completely clean, just because we couldn't possibly do a second take if we had to come up in all that blood.
Yay, only one more section to do.