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butterflyThe first part is found here.
This scene is the difficult scene for us. Buffy talks about... to Giles, when she comes up here, she talks about it being her first day. It is not, in fact, her first day, in this angle here where she's talking to Giles. It's close to her last day. This scene was shot with Buffy being extraordinarily angry and it was the first time that I had ever actually said, "Well, you know what? I think that I'll just go upstairs, this scene can take care of itself." And then I saw the dailies and said, "No, that isn't what I wanted at all." So, after we shot all of the episodes, we went back and just shot Sarah's side of this scene so I could bring her performance down to where it was more vulnerable and less pissy. We're talking several months, eight months apart, between this angle of Giles and this angle of Buffy. Luckily, everything matched pretty well and we could hide the things that didn't. It was a terrible pain for Sarah to have to shoot this again and I used to kid her that for the last episode of the series we would do a Back to the Future 2 thing where she actually went back and saw herself having this conversation again, so that we could shoot it from some more angles. Sarah also came to me after this scene was originally shot and said, "I have a feeling that I was too angry." Her instincts, as an actress, are extraordinarily good and she knows generally when something isn't working. And she came to me right away and said, "I think you're going to want to redo this or do something with it." because it just didn't feel right to her either.
What Giles starts describing here is the concept of the Hellmouth, the center of mystical convergence. This turned out to be a great big deal for us. When I first pitched this show to the network, we had a meeting and I spent a little time trying to think of the mythology of the place or broaden it a little bit. And I spent some time with my friend Tom Platkin and we talked about the idea of the Hellmouth, the idea that that would be the reason why all these different creatures could come and attack people all the time. And I didn't think it would matter, didn't think that anybody would ask about that, and the network was obsessed with the idea of the Hellmouth. It is, I think, finally what sold them on the show. The idea that This Was The Center Of Hell and for anybody, High School was, so that made perfect sense to me emotionally but they were just very interested in the lore of it. And the Hellmouth did turn out to be very important for the life of the series, they weren't wrong. It also provides a great shortcut for me because then whenever I can't think of a cool scientific explanation for anything I say, "Well, it's cause we're on a Hellmouth." and just move on.
Here we have Giles coming after Buffy in our one hall and sort of pushing her over to the side. One of the things worried about very much in the beginning was how intense he was with her, how much he manhandled her. I was the nun with the six-inch rule. "They must be six inches apart." Because a teacher having that intense a conversation with a beautiful young student and getting that close to her is pretty much unseemly and so I kept having to say, "You people, let's ease off on the tension here. Let's pull them apart a little bit." Because it's... it's just not right. It's just not done.
Going down now to see the Master's lair, which is the church that was swallowed in the earthquake. Steve Hardy was our original production designer. Designed beautiful sets. You'll also see, here, a bunch of extras. We couldn't actually afford to put vampire makeup on all our vampires and since vampires aren't always in vampface, they go back and forth, I thought, "We'll just have some extras in there and it'll look creepy." And what it looks to me, is a cocktail party of people with torches. It just really doesn't work at all and after about two episodes, we just stopped having them there at all and we only had people in vampire face or nobody at all. The Master suddenly got a lot lonelier in his cavern.
Brian Thompson, playing Luke. He came back and played the Judge for us, in episode 14 of the second season. Quite frankly, we were in a hurry and we already had his face cast and we knew we could put makeup on him. We knew he could give us a good performance.
This scene is the difficult scene for us. Buffy talks about... to Giles, when she comes up here, she talks about it being her first day. It is not, in fact, her first day, in this angle here where she's talking to Giles. It's close to her last day. This scene was shot with Buffy being extraordinarily angry and it was the first time that I had ever actually said, "Well, you know what? I think that I'll just go upstairs, this scene can take care of itself." And then I saw the dailies and said, "No, that isn't what I wanted at all." So, after we shot all of the episodes, we went back and just shot Sarah's side of this scene so I could bring her performance down to where it was more vulnerable and less pissy. We're talking several months, eight months apart, between this angle of Giles and this angle of Buffy. Luckily, everything matched pretty well and we could hide the things that didn't. It was a terrible pain for Sarah to have to shoot this again and I used to kid her that for the last episode of the series we would do a Back to the Future 2 thing where she actually went back and saw herself having this conversation again, so that we could shoot it from some more angles. Sarah also came to me after this scene was originally shot and said, "I have a feeling that I was too angry." Her instincts, as an actress, are extraordinarily good and she knows generally when something isn't working. And she came to me right away and said, "I think you're going to want to redo this or do something with it." because it just didn't feel right to her either.
What Giles starts describing here is the concept of the Hellmouth, the center of mystical convergence. This turned out to be a great big deal for us. When I first pitched this show to the network, we had a meeting and I spent a little time trying to think of the mythology of the place or broaden it a little bit. And I spent some time with my friend Tom Platkin and we talked about the idea of the Hellmouth, the idea that that would be the reason why all these different creatures could come and attack people all the time. And I didn't think it would matter, didn't think that anybody would ask about that, and the network was obsessed with the idea of the Hellmouth. It is, I think, finally what sold them on the show. The idea that This Was The Center Of Hell and for anybody, High School was, so that made perfect sense to me emotionally but they were just very interested in the lore of it. And the Hellmouth did turn out to be very important for the life of the series, they weren't wrong. It also provides a great shortcut for me because then whenever I can't think of a cool scientific explanation for anything I say, "Well, it's cause we're on a Hellmouth." and just move on.
Here we have Giles coming after Buffy in our one hall and sort of pushing her over to the side. One of the things worried about very much in the beginning was how intense he was with her, how much he manhandled her. I was the nun with the six-inch rule. "They must be six inches apart." Because a teacher having that intense a conversation with a beautiful young student and getting that close to her is pretty much unseemly and so I kept having to say, "You people, let's ease off on the tension here. Let's pull them apart a little bit." Because it's... it's just not right. It's just not done.
Going down now to see the Master's lair, which is the church that was swallowed in the earthquake. Steve Hardy was our original production designer. Designed beautiful sets. You'll also see, here, a bunch of extras. We couldn't actually afford to put vampire makeup on all our vampires and since vampires aren't always in vampface, they go back and forth, I thought, "We'll just have some extras in there and it'll look creepy." And what it looks to me, is a cocktail party of people with torches. It just really doesn't work at all and after about two episodes, we just stopped having them there at all and we only had people in vampire face or nobody at all. The Master suddenly got a lot lonelier in his cavern.
Brian Thompson, playing Luke. He came back and played the Judge for us, in episode 14 of the second season. Quite frankly, we were in a hurry and we already had his face cast and we knew we could put makeup on him. We knew he could give us a good performance.