In an online exclusive, A Magazine Curated By are proud to present a conversation between Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, and the writer Katie Lucas – daughter of Star Wars’ George Lucas. This passionate pair sat down together in late 2011 to wax lyrical over Buffy’s adventures, her costumes, her attitude, and her wacky antics. The interview was commissioned exclusively for A Magazine Curated By Rodarte.

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“Dearest Joss,

Where do I begin? I suppose I could start at age eleven, when I religiously carried a stake around in my backpack just in case a vampire decided to brutally murder me at school. But I have a feeling you’re already expecting something like that.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I can’t recall how I first discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but once I did I was riveted. I started having dreams about stalking vampires into dark alleys with my extra-dreamy version of David Boreanaz; our (p)leather trench coats and impeccably styled heads of hair always blowing in the wind. Nobody really got it. My father was concerned that between this and my peculiar fascination with serial killers I was doomed to flourish into a full-blown psychopath. At that point, Vampires weren’t yet an obvious part of a twelve year old girl’s collection of obsessions. Instead, vampire mania was reserved for all of those terribly anti-social miscreants who plotted their parents’ deaths whilst listening to Marilyn Manson and reading the Satanic Bible.

What my peers and very perplexed family failed to notice was that the vampires and the gore weren’t the show’s only major selling point. Sure, I loved the spells and the vampire dusting, the idea that there was one girl in the whole world who protected the rest of us from vampires and demons and the forces of darkness all whilst making out with super gorgeous vampires with fabulous bone structures. But at the end of the day, Buffy was also just a teenager without a fucking clue. Buffy, unlike most of her over-sexualized and hyper-perfect contemporaries, is fallible. She has severe foot-in-mouth syndrome, crashed her mom’s car, and completely failed as a cheerleader. She is vulnerable, impatient, self-righteous, impulsive, and has very questionable taste in men. Much like me, she had struggled in her search to connect. She is engaged in a constant battle to be understood in a world that is often so unwilling to be accepting. For the all-inclusive community of outsiders, Buffy was the superhero who taught us to wear our hearts on our sleeves and to always be open to the possibility of more.

Joss, your show taught me a few of the most important lessons of my adolescence: always stand up for what you believe in no matter the cost, wear red (p)leather pants even if they look trampy, learn to laugh even in the most painful moments, and finally (and in my mind, most importantly), always keep reaching out for more even if the world keeps slapping your hand away. Interviewing you for this magazine was one of the most petrifying experiences of my life, and made me so spectacularly grateful that I don’t have to be Barbara Walters every day. It also made me realize how lucky we are just to have you. You are unbelievably passionate about what you do and you do it well, and that’s incredible to behold.

Thank you for being born on Planet Earth and not on some other planet without television. Sincerliest of sincerelies, K”

Top image: “Sunnydale Street – Sunnydale Sign”

Above: “Buffy’s Bedroom”

Katie Lucas: Kate and Laura Mulleavy are complete Buffy freaks like me, so get ready for a mish mash of questions.

Joss Whedon: Rock and roll. Throw ‘em out there!

KL: Is there something from your childhood that you wish you still had? A memento? A feeling? A person?

JW: My mother – and I did have John Chandler’s autograph.

KL: I like your first answer. Actually, related to that I wanted to talk about “The Body” episode from Buffy because I know you wrote that about your mother. Can you talk a little bit about its conception? I think it’s one of the most stunning pieces of writing out there. Whenever I need help writing myself, I look at that episode and think about how it came from the heart. It wasn’t all about the quips. It was real.

JW: I knew for two years that I would do it. I had spoken to Kristine Sutherland (Buffy’s on-screen mother) about it in Year 3 and she said that she was going to Italy for a year with her family. And I said, “Well that’s perfect because in Year 4 Buffy is going to college so she won’t be seeing you and then in Year 5 you’ll come back a lot, so I can kill you!” I wanted to set up the idea of natural death in that world as opposed to that life-turned-to-dust death that we had trucked in mostly. In a way, you could call it a failure since I was avoiding the traditional catharsis. Usually we learn and we grow, we cry and we love, and death is supposed to become this beautiful thing – even though I find it to be random and insufferable. All I wanted to do was capture that sort of airless, almost boring shock of the first few hours: that moment-to-moment existence. I went out of my way not to make it a cathartic experience, and now people talk to me about that episode allowing them to grieve, or how it made this breakthrough for them. It just had an unexpected emotional effect. I was kind of stunned by that. It wasn’t until a few weeks before I started writing it that I had this little epiphany that this episode was potentially way more artistically important than any of the movie projects that I had going, or anything else I was thinking about. It is a funny thing to have happen in the middle of year five of a show, and it was terrifying. Another piece of how it came about was simply that I once said to Sarah, “That was beautiful, I can hear exactly where the music cue should come in,” and she said, “That’s actually insulting to an actor,” (laughs). It made me realise that I rely on music too much, so that was one of the first conceptual decisions I made about that episode. There couldn’t be music.

KL: I think that’s one of the most shocking parts, when you expect this sweeping score, and it is just dead silent. It’s shocking to watch. It’s not just silence like in “Hush” (another episode).

JW: No. “Hush” was one of our noisiest episodes.

KL: In this one you could hear a pin drop, but more than that you could hear the grief. That was what was so poignant. You shook everybody to the core. I know when my boyfriend and I got together he’d only seen a few Buffy episodes and I was like “OK, well you need to sit down and you need to watch “The Body” first”. I made him see it before I made him watch the rest.

JW: It’s kind of false advertising since the whole series isn’t exactly like that (laughing). But it does contain elements.

KL: It still has the subtle humour. I remember when my aunt died, for some reason I was so shocked that I went to the supermarket. I just wandered around the supermarket for an hour doing nothing, just sitting down in the aisle and thinking about how she didn’t exist in this realm anymore. Now I look back on it and it’s just funny, because life still has to go on.

JW: There’s always going to be something inappropriately funny right after a loved one has died. And you think, “That’s messed up” but its also part of it. Everything happens during grief. It shouldn’t, but it does.

KL: I feel like a lot of writers write what they want people to feel, but I feel like in that episode you really just gave what you had, and it happened to be universal. That episode is a shining light in the series for everybody I know that loves Buffy. Not that the series isn’t a total shining light. But there is something so different about this episode. Thank you Joss for putting that on Earth.

JW: Thank you.

KL: You didn’t need all of the vampires in that episode, but I think the vampire at the end was amazing.

JW: People are kind of split on that one.

KL: I liked it because Buffy was so weak at that point, and then Joyce’s hand falls from the table. It was a great mesh of both worlds.

JW: To me there’s something unseemly about it, and the morbid physicality of death. Being attacked by a naked dead man is sort of an externalization of that, so it made sense to me.

KL: (Laughs) Let’s deal with not-depressing stuff for just a few minutes! What was your first apartment like?

JW: It was awesome, so beautiful (not counting places I had in college). My first actual apartment all by myself was in Venice, almost on the water. I lived there for a year and a half and I only went to the beach three times – twice with visitors, and once because I was on drugs. The place was so small that I could touch all the walls from the center of the living room – it was teeny tiny, but it was mine. I used to turn to the closet and it was just so weirdly deep, it wasn’t wide, but it was weirdly deep. I had this small desk I stuck in there and made it into my study. I don’t think I ever even turned on the stove. It was a place in which I did not live – which is something that you could say about my life, for a long time.

KL: I love the image of you taking the man-cave to a whole different level. Did you have a bachelor party before you were married?

JW: I did. I asked not to, but I knew it was going to happen. So I said, “Here’s the deal, I’m fine having dinner, but no strippers. This isn’t a pathetic crying out for the things that are no longer going to be in my life” Which strippers are not (by the way). So my friends threw a fine, manly dinner and everybody who came had to have written a dirty limerick about me. Some of them were quite astonishing!

KL: Do you remember any of the limericks? Like your favorite one?

JW: I just remember that at least two managed to finish the rhyme with Sigourney, and another finished with Kuzui. They were all quite filthy.

KL: That sounds very gentlemanly though.

JW: It was! It was a civilized evening. I was anxious to get on so I could be married to Kai.

KL: Would you say that Kai is your best friend?

JW: Yes. I absolutely would.

Is there a cultural phenomenon from your adolescence that you still wish was around?

JW: The Grateful Dead.

KL: Oh, you were a Dead Head?

JW: I was a Dead Head, yeah.

Above: “Ext. Cemetery”

Above: “Prophecy Girl, Angel, Willow”

KL: My dad has some of Jerry Garcia’s ties that he made! Down the street from our house is this place called the Dharma Treating Company where they tie-dyed all those shirts. They’re the big tie-dyers who did the Grateful Dead shirts. Did you travel around to their concerts?

JW: I saw them when I lived in England during high school. I’ve seen them when I was in college in New Haven and Hartford, New Jersey and Syracuse. Anywhere we could get to. I never got to see a New York show.

KL: That’s amazing. I love that you were a Dead Head. Did you have long hair?

JW: Oh yes. Oooh yes.

KL: Did you have a beard?

JW: No I didn’t have a beard. I couldn’t have grown a beard. I’m not a hirsute fellow! Now I have the beard. I have hair, but only on the bottom of my head. So, I guess it’s evened out.

KL: Name three songs that are important to you, and why.

JW: Three songs that are important to me. Wow, this is tough. “Finishing the Hat” from the movie “Sunday in the Park with George” – because that explains everything. “Hands Held High” by Linkin Park because that explains the last eight years of this century. Then I would say “Camera” by REM because it was extremely powerful in a breakup of mine in college. It just embodied everything I felt even though I couldn’t understand a word Michael Stipe was saying and still don’t know what it’s about.

KL: You know they just broke up? It’s so sad.

JW: They’re listening to one of my songs now, during their breakup.

Like I did. (Laughs).

KL: You wrote the song “Blue” with Angie Hart, right? I love that song. It’s one of my favorite songs from the Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Radio Sunnydale soundtrack.

JW: Thank you. I loved working with Angie.

KL: Is she still in Splendid or is she on her own now?

JW: No, she’s on her own. Splendid was her ex-husband’s, Jessie Tobias. Now she’s back in Australia, and he’s the guitarist for Morrissey and he’s writing with him now. So they’re both rockin’.

KL: I loved the Splendid songs. I could never find the album, and when we lived in Australia to shoot the movies my goal was to find the Splendid album. I just searched every store.

JW: If you couldn’t find Splendid in Australia, then she really needs to work on her representation for God’s sake.

KL: I know! I went online and I tried to order it. I went on like Buffy fan message boards being like, “Hey does anybody have this CD that I could have?” Nothing. I’m a dedicated Buffy music fan. You had THC on the show and I fell in love with their music. It took me eight months to get their CD; I had to hunt it down. I still have it.

JW: Well done, well done.

KL: If you could adapt one of your favorite books for the screen, which would it be?

JW: It’s probably not a good idea, but I have thought of adapting “Dombey and Son”. It’s tough when someone grows up in a book. Inevitably you focus on one of the actresses and then there are at least two other actresses who have to do the same job, and and it’s tough, you know? At some point Kirsten Dunst is going to turn into Samantha Mathis and you just have to deal with that.

KL: I would love to see that. That would be amazing.

JW: Yeah, I think it’s an underrated Dickens. It’s kind of extraordinary.

KL: What is your cure for fear?

JW: My cure for fear? My cure for fear used to be quoting Frank Herbert’s cure for fear in “Dune”:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

I used to know it by heart and just say it. I’m more or less a timid person. I would say my cure for fear is impatience. At some point you just go “Oh for God’s sake!” By the way, you can kill a demon with just those words, “Oh for God’s sake!”

KL: “Oh for God’s sake!”

JW: They can though. Then they’re like, “Oh he gets it now, we better leave.”

KL: Who did you like together with Buffy the most: Angel, Riley, or Spike?

JW: You know what, I liked Spike. With Angel it’s too “Romeo and Juliet”. Which means, as soon as it happens you’re bored. Riley, you know he was a well-adjusted person who loved her in a much, much healthier way than the other two guys. Nobody wants to see that. With Buffy and Spike, they had a real Beatrice and Benedick kind of relationship, in “Much Ado About Nothing”. I think with the wedding, she would have tried to do something fast, but he would have made it elaborate and done everything wrong. It would have been extraordinarily counter-intuitive, and awesome!

KL: The wedding that they already planned out sounded amazing, so I can’t even imagine what it would have looked like on screen. That would have been amazing. Do you remember the moment you created the character of Buffy?

JW: Yeah, you know she had a little evolution. I had spoken before of Rhonda the immortal waitress. This was sort of the beginning of my search for that person who’s not being paid attention to, but who is actually badass. That’s a character I’ve worked on, male or female, for my whole life. I was watching PJ Soles in “Halloween” get killed, and I just asked, “Why do they always get killed?” PJ Soles: she’s cute, she’s funny, she’s naked, she parties. She’s a perfectly nice girl. It’s not like she’s mean, it’s not like she’s doing anything bad to anyone. You know, she’s just fun and blonde and perky – and dead. I was like, “Why does that girl always have to get slammed?” I had that rupture of “Here’s the person who’s ignored,” and I fixated on it being the blonde girl – that girl in the movies who never survives.

KL: I mean you really turned the genre on its head with the blonde going down an alley and kicking the bad guy’s ass, instead of getting terribly murdered.

JW: That was the image that started the whole thing. I wrote the trailer before I wrote the film.

KL: Does she have a namesake?

JW: A namesake as in a precursor? Do I know a Buffy? I don’t know a Buffy.

KL: Did you just come up with that name, or was that a name you heard somewhere?

JW: I was searching. I was searching for a name that that meant, “You cannot take me seriously.”

KL: Well it’s definitely Buffy, but that was then – Buffy now equates to total strength and kickass-ery!

JW: How ‘bout that.

KL: What would you be if you weren’t a filmmaker?

JW: I’d like to think that I’d be a writer, but I would be perfectly content to be a teacher.

KL: I can totally see you doing that. Do you do classes here? Writing classes?

JW: I don’t. You know I never took a writing class, so I wouldn’t really know how to teach one!

KL: You would be amazing at it. So I have three more questions. What’s it like to see this vampire, werewolf, and other fantastical creature craze going around right now?

JW: At first I was unmoved because at the end of the day vampires don’t do anything for me (although Interview with a Vampire is very meaningful to me). We got rid of the vampires-only concept in the first episode of Buffy. There would be no show if it were just about vampires. Not the show I intended, anyway. Eventually I realized that I really couldn’t go back because it’s no longer the road less traveled. It’s the fucking 405. I sometimes think it’s a lost opportunity that everyone else followed. I don’t mind. I mean, I get it. There is a reason why stuff resonates, and it needs to be said that Buffy would have been successful even if it hadn’t been good. Because it just makes sense, the premise works. I like to think that it was good, but there is a resonance that I may never capture again in the idea of immortality and being a teen, and those things combined. They’re just too potent to ignore.

KL: I agree. My boyfriend and I went to the midnight screening of Twilight in a theater in my town that only 12-year-old girls attend. It’s the 12-year-old girl mall. That was an experience. I will never ever forget the shrieking.

What are your thoughts on (US Republican member) Michelle Bachmann? Hero or villain, or a little bit of both?

JW: My thoughts are: pay attention. I remember when Reagan was just a clown that nobody took seriously, and people like that can be much more dangerous than we give them credit for – especially in this country. I say don’t discount the danger.

KL: I definitely think she is a terrifying prospect.

OK, the last question. Is this where you thought you would be at this point in your life, and is there anything you would change?

JW: I know I mentioned the situation with my hair! Apart from that I thought I would be everything; I would be doing this, or that. I never really landed on what I was actually going to do. I sort of wanted to create, and create, and create. In a weird way, by virtue of my not figuring out where I was going to be in my life, I am where I thought I would be in my life. I am doing all of the things I want to do. I’m doing Shakespeare with my friends, and comic books, and movies and prose. I am living most of the lives that I could have hoped to, and if I could change something it would be my need for sleep. I hate giving up part of my life to sleep when there is so much fun to have, so much art to make. Also it would be easier to get the kids off to school.

Written by Katie Lucas

Edited by Donesh Olyaie and Dan Thawley





Above: “Int. Library”