So this is an awkward way to begin an interview, especially for a fan of Cabin in the Woods, but do you mind if I put you on speakerphone for recording purposes?

No, that's fine.

I promise that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford aren't listening in.

That's good.

I know you've discussed your need to recharge while you were editing The Avengers, and the way Much Ado arose from the informal Shakespeare readings you've done at your house dating back to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer years. But I wonder if you'd like to say a few more words about how the project came together so quickly.

I had talked about doing Much Ado for years, because Amy [Acker, who plays Beatrice] and Alexis [Denisof, who plays Benedick] had done it at the house, and I thought I'd love to film them doing that. My wife Kai and I had a little bit of vacation time, and I'd been gone for a while, and Kai sort of acted like a producer: "C'mon, do it. Do it, do it, do it. What are you, chicken?" She just knew that it would be the most relaxing and fulfilling thing I could do after a year of being involved with a giant blockbuster.

So, from the beginning you knew that you wanted to do Much Ado? It wasn't that you wanted to do a Shakespeare play and it just turned out to be Much Ado?

I've wanted to do a Shakespeare play on film for years, decades in fact. But it was Much Ado because, you know, Amy and Alexis--they're kind of my guys. Also, very practically, I was thinking, it's light, it all takes place in one location, it feels like the sort of thing you can do with a breezy air. It's not that ponderous "We Are Doing Shakespeare." It's kind of a gateway drug for Shakespeare in a lot of ways.

It's so modern. I hadn't read the play since high school, and I remember back when I saw the Kenneth Branagh adaptation, there were a number of lines that felt as though they must have been inserted into the film--for example, the Benedick line where he refers to Don Pedro and Claudio as "the prince and Monsieur Love"...

Or his reading of "There's a double meaning in that."

My favorite moment in that movie! My wife and I quote it to one another. And then there's the fact--I don't know if you agree--that Beatrice seems very much a Whedonesque heroine.

I like her pretty well, I'm not going to lie. Knowing that, it still astonished me, when I went back to the text, how that one scene, "Oh, that I were a man"--how bald it is, how unapologetic it is. It's one of the most important things Shakespeare ever wrote, particularly in this play in which libertines treat women not just appallingly, but publicly.

I don't know whether this was in the back of your mind, but the film also offered you a chance to give Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof the happy ending that you denied them not once but twice on Angel.

It wasn't initially what I was thinking about. I threw those two together because they've got extraordinary chemistry. But it did occur to me later on. It is sort of the last chapter of their trilogy. Hopefully, not the last, but it does feel like a grace note for Wes and Fred.