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Not so shiny: Plenty of drama for Buffy creator Joss Whedon (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 2010)

Bernard Zuel of the Sydney Morning Herald spoke to Joss this week about his wide ranging career in the lead up to his sold out speaking engagements in Melbourne and Sydney this weekend.

On Firefly:

The cancelled Firefly (“still the greatest grief I have about my career”) begat his first film as director, the Firefly “sequel” Serenity. It didn’t do Batman business but as a space-western with wit and social consciousness it made money and, along the way, gave him another young female character who – literally and metaphorically – kicked arse.

And on it’s cancellation…

The problem can come when you butt your head against a wall and it doesn’t break but you do. He’s often laughed about the pain of scripts in limbo, of films derailed, of utterly ridiculous decisions, such as a network deciding not to screen the opening episodes of a series until after the rest of the show had screened. More seriously, he says that the cancellation of Firefly not only made him “the sourest man alive” but had an unexpected and potentially devastating side effect.

“I stopped having ideas, which for me is an extremely rare experience,” Whedon says. “It was something much more subtle [than losing hope], it took away my ability to think in terms of episodic television. For years.”

Read the full article here