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shadowkatpumpkinpuss loaned me her SFX magazine which includes some interesting interviews, one with Joss Whedon about Angel.
Some of the tid-bits gave a nice all around feeling of vindication regarding my opinions posted in this journal and online. I know it's a silly little thing, but there you go.
Falling into fangurl dom briefly.
Here's a few passages:
The Evil Cordelia was something we had been planning for a while, but not 'Cordelia being pregnant' part of the story. Season four saw a cap, except for one episode of season five, of the Cordelia arc. The thing with Cordelia that was beautiful, is I got to tell the BUFFY story from the movie, which I could never tell on the series. The ideo of the movie was that this girl's a ditz, because nobody has ever asked her to be anything else. When you actually put it to her, when there's more required of her, she steps up, she becomes stronger, she becomes interesting and she becomes a hero. That's sort of what we got to do with Cordelia, but once that's done and she's having a baby, it's coma time. Can you squeeze more milk from something usually? Yes, but we really had resolved what we wanted to do with the character and because we knew we had to have her go for a period because of circumstance, it just felt right to wrap it up and move on to new things.
Makes complete sense.
And...regarding Season 5
Going more standalone was a bizarre kind of symmetry to where we has started. Amazingly enough, we started out doing that and still weren't very good at it. I give you the werewolf episode, 'Unleashed'. Good guest star, good idea, nothing particularly wrong , except for a failure to make a genuine emotional connection between what was going on with the guest star and our characters themselves. That was a fault of storybreaking. And the incredible amounts of money we no longer had because of budget cuts really showed up on screen. It got pretty tough. Again, I think we found our footing and ultimately as the season progressed we got better at figuring out how to do standalone episodes with characters we care about...
Yay! Feel vindicated now for despising Unleashed. It was the only episode I really disliked.
And...
Okay this is year five. Year five is about 'Can we stay pure in the heart of an evil place? Can we work for an evil corporation and still maintain our integrity?' The metaphor and the question of what do they really want, what are they going to do to us, plays for the genuine flat-out suspense and the sort of over-arcing question of the season. But ultimately that is not a two-season question.
We're going to see how efficiently Wolfram & Hart can pick these people apart. We're going to see how that affects Angel. His attitude about what he does and why he does it has always been so shifting and, to me, so interesting. He's going to have to go to a very, very dark, weird, selfish place to start playing a a level that Wolfram & Hart had been playing off of from the very start...
The message we always tried to give with the show is that redemption is really hard and it takes your whole life and it involves fighting all the time, sometimes against things that can't be beaten. The last episode of ANGEL will reflect that strongly.
Everyone brings their own interpretation to art, which is one of the things I love most about it. There is no *one* interpretation. And when it comes to heros? We've all got our own visions. I actually enjoy what many people consider dark heros or anti-heros, these characters in my point of view, are people who struggle to do the right thing and more often than not end up doing the wrong one, they are deeply flawed. Their heroism is just fighting each day to be a better person.
To cope with a random universe. Whedon, from what I've read, is a huge fan of Westerns and Marvel comic books, both tend to have flawed characters at the center. Just saw a documentary today on Clint Eastwood, who enjoyed playing dark heros that weren't always justified in their actions. Characters such as Dirty Harry, the Man With No Name, Will Money, Outlaw Josey Wales - each of these men solved problems with violence. They may seem heroic, but they are hardly upstanding citizens. Yet they represent something seen in noir and in Angel, the man who struggles agains the monster inside. The violence inside.
These are what I call anti-heros. For some reason I've never quite understood, people have troubles with the concept of anti-hero. Want to piss off an Angel or Spike fan? Mention the characters are anti-heros. Personally that's what I enjoyed most about the characters, that they were anti-heros, that they strived for redemption or fought to become better, but often screwed up along the way and when they did make the right choice, they lost everything. People find that depressing. I don't. The idea that you have to keep plodding, keep fighting, doesn't depress me - because I think life is about the journey not a destination. And I think the theme
Whedon may have been going for in Not Fade Away was in part just that - there's is no reward or end, there's just this, the fight, to keep going. For me at least, the anti-hero on TV is more fascinating, because it's a rare thing, because most people can't handle it so most networks won't air it, Whedon and Company made the anti-hero aspects ambiguous, but they still stuck with the old dark Western/noir film model - Touched by An Equalizer is a real shout-out to that.. that's what they'd initially went for. And the old Equalizer series was in some ways a rip off of Dirty Harry.
At any rate that's my take. Not sure made sense, sort of watching tv and writing this at the same time.
Some of the tid-bits gave a nice all around feeling of vindication regarding my opinions posted in this journal and online. I know it's a silly little thing, but there you go.
Falling into fangurl dom briefly.
Here's a few passages:
The Evil Cordelia was something we had been planning for a while, but not 'Cordelia being pregnant' part of the story. Season four saw a cap, except for one episode of season five, of the Cordelia arc. The thing with Cordelia that was beautiful, is I got to tell the BUFFY story from the movie, which I could never tell on the series. The ideo of the movie was that this girl's a ditz, because nobody has ever asked her to be anything else. When you actually put it to her, when there's more required of her, she steps up, she becomes stronger, she becomes interesting and she becomes a hero. That's sort of what we got to do with Cordelia, but once that's done and she's having a baby, it's coma time. Can you squeeze more milk from something usually? Yes, but we really had resolved what we wanted to do with the character and because we knew we had to have her go for a period because of circumstance, it just felt right to wrap it up and move on to new things.
Makes complete sense.
And...regarding Season 5
Going more standalone was a bizarre kind of symmetry to where we has started. Amazingly enough, we started out doing that and still weren't very good at it. I give you the werewolf episode, 'Unleashed'. Good guest star, good idea, nothing particularly wrong , except for a failure to make a genuine emotional connection between what was going on with the guest star and our characters themselves. That was a fault of storybreaking. And the incredible amounts of money we no longer had because of budget cuts really showed up on screen. It got pretty tough. Again, I think we found our footing and ultimately as the season progressed we got better at figuring out how to do standalone episodes with characters we care about...
Yay! Feel vindicated now for despising Unleashed. It was the only episode I really disliked.
And...
Okay this is year five. Year five is about 'Can we stay pure in the heart of an evil place? Can we work for an evil corporation and still maintain our integrity?' The metaphor and the question of what do they really want, what are they going to do to us, plays for the genuine flat-out suspense and the sort of over-arcing question of the season. But ultimately that is not a two-season question.
We're going to see how efficiently Wolfram & Hart can pick these people apart. We're going to see how that affects Angel. His attitude about what he does and why he does it has always been so shifting and, to me, so interesting. He's going to have to go to a very, very dark, weird, selfish place to start playing a a level that Wolfram & Hart had been playing off of from the very start...
The message we always tried to give with the show is that redemption is really hard and it takes your whole life and it involves fighting all the time, sometimes against things that can't be beaten. The last episode of ANGEL will reflect that strongly.
Everyone brings their own interpretation to art, which is one of the things I love most about it. There is no *one* interpretation. And when it comes to heros? We've all got our own visions. I actually enjoy what many people consider dark heros or anti-heros, these characters in my point of view, are people who struggle to do the right thing and more often than not end up doing the wrong one, they are deeply flawed. Their heroism is just fighting each day to be a better person.
To cope with a random universe. Whedon, from what I've read, is a huge fan of Westerns and Marvel comic books, both tend to have flawed characters at the center. Just saw a documentary today on Clint Eastwood, who enjoyed playing dark heros that weren't always justified in their actions. Characters such as Dirty Harry, the Man With No Name, Will Money, Outlaw Josey Wales - each of these men solved problems with violence. They may seem heroic, but they are hardly upstanding citizens. Yet they represent something seen in noir and in Angel, the man who struggles agains the monster inside. The violence inside.
These are what I call anti-heros. For some reason I've never quite understood, people have troubles with the concept of anti-hero. Want to piss off an Angel or Spike fan? Mention the characters are anti-heros. Personally that's what I enjoyed most about the characters, that they were anti-heros, that they strived for redemption or fought to become better, but often screwed up along the way and when they did make the right choice, they lost everything. People find that depressing. I don't. The idea that you have to keep plodding, keep fighting, doesn't depress me - because I think life is about the journey not a destination. And I think the theme
Whedon may have been going for in Not Fade Away was in part just that - there's is no reward or end, there's just this, the fight, to keep going. For me at least, the anti-hero on TV is more fascinating, because it's a rare thing, because most people can't handle it so most networks won't air it, Whedon and Company made the anti-hero aspects ambiguous, but they still stuck with the old dark Western/noir film model - Touched by An Equalizer is a real shout-out to that.. that's what they'd initially went for. And the old Equalizer series was in some ways a rip off of Dirty Harry.
At any rate that's my take. Not sure made sense, sort of watching tv and writing this at the same time.