Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Because Joss Whedon was making Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV episodes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he never was able to explore how Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Slayer would handle the Internet and technology. As he recalls, it was a big enough deal when Buffy gave her sister a cellphone in the first episode of the seventh season.

“For a long time, I was like, we can’t have those,” Whedon told us during an interview at Comic-Con. “It’s hard to be in danger when you can call your friends all the time.”

He’s overseeing the upcoming Season 11 of the Buffy comic book — which continues the story of the old TV series — but if he was on show duty nowadays, Whedon imagines she’d be making the most of social media. “She’d be living more in the world we’re living in,” he says. “I can imagine her playing Pokémon Go and catching things while fighting and killing things."

But, he adds, “the stuff that’s essential, that doesn’t really change any of it. The world is changing enormously rapidly but not in anyway that actually matters yet.”

Whedon also finds there’s one aspect of Buffy that may be more relevant than others these days.

“Things feel a little more apocalyptic than they have,” he explains. “Cleveland, as we learned (at the Republican National Convention), really is on a Hellmouth. The anger and vile undertow of not just American but a lot of European cultures has just been bubbling forth. It really does feel like something that lurks beneath is coming out. That helps the comic book be more than just ‘Now another wacky adventure!’ ”

Whedon would be down for returning to TV — “I always want everything” — but his latest project is a "disturbing," secretive movie he’s writing. “I didn’t censor myself and the topic is intense. We’re just going to go there. We’ll see if anyone wants to finance this,” he teases. The film is “different than anything I’ve ever done before. It’s me attempting to move forward instead of waxing nostalgic about something I already made for a change.”

After making the Marvel blockbusters The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Whedon feels like he needs to go back to his filmmaking roots.

“There’s so many masters that you’re serving and although filmmaking always has to be fluid and I’m really proud of the work we did, I need to get back to that place where ... as much as we could zig or zag, I didn’t second-guess anything," says Whedon.

“When we made Buffy, if a joke worked, that was the joke, and we worked on the ones that didn’t work,” the filmmaker adds. “It wasn’t ‘Can you top this?’ It was like, ‘Make this solid, make it funny, make it mean something, and then make it.' That’s been lost a little bit, so I want to go back and get a little old school.”