覺得這篇訪問還不錯哩。
http://dwscifi.com/interviews/2847-joss-whedon-welcome-to-the-dollhouse
Posted on Thursday 11 December 2008
Joss Whedon is no stranger to success. After the
phenomenally successfully Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its
spin-off Angel, Whedon has treated viewers to the
short-lived but well regarded Firefly (and subsequent movie
Serenity) and the musical superhero spoof Dr. Horrible's
Sing-Along Blog. His latest project is Dollhouse, which
paints a future where “Actives” (or dolls) have their
personalities wiped and reprogrammed in order to carry out
different assignments. Abbie Bernstein caught up with
Whedon to find out how the show came about.
What’s Dollhouse about?
It’s about a girl trying to figure out who she is, while
she’s imprinted with every personality you can imagine. It
’s about acting, living, being a woman, being everything.
Let me put it this way – when I thought it up and launched
it at Eliza [Dushku, who executive produces with Whedon and
plays main character Echo], the first thing she said was, “
Oh, my God, it’s my life!” And she meant mostly as an
actress, but then we realized it didn’t just mean that.
It’s a metaphor for everybody. If it isn’t, you’re
missing something. The idea is, we all have certain
assumptions about who we are, based on what we were told
when we were little and what we think we’re supposed to
do. And we have a lot of assumptions about what is good,
and what about us is not good, and what’s sinful and what’
s saintly, and we’re often wrong about all of them.
Dollhouse is basically about breaking all that down and
exploring it and finding out what it really means to be a
human being.
How did Dollhouse come into being?
To me, Eliza is like watching a meteor shower. I’m just
amazed. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’ve known her
for 10 years. She’s always been a star. But being a star
and being a human being are two very different things. And
over the 10 years, we’ve spent time becoming friends, but I
’ve also watched her deliberately and painfully take
control of her career and the way in which it’s going, the
things she is portraying, and you don’t see that a lot.
I see it with Felicia Day doing The Guild on the internet,
saying, “Nobody’s going to make my way, so I’ll make my
own way,” and Felicia is smart enough to pull that off.
The two of them share that. Eliza – when I first sat her
down, years ago, to say, “Stop making bad movies!” she
said, “We don’t set out to make them bad – I don’t know
what to tell you.” But we talked about her agency, her
choices. And it was a bleak landscape.
I seem to be the guy who spends his life saying how hard it
is for beautiful young women – but it is hard to be an ing
énue in this town. We got together a few years later, [but
the people around her] insisted she do the big-budget
thing, so nobody wanted to know what Eliza thought, except
Eliza.
And when we got together for lunch this time, she was like,
“I’ve made a deal, I don’t expect to write or control a
show, but I do need to control the quality of what I’m
doing and the image of what I am, and I want to make
meaningful, decent, political, feminist, real, fun, sexy,
interesting TV.” Those were all on her list. And I said, “
There’s only one man for that job!” [laughs]
In the course of the conversation, the idea of Echo came to
me from that exact thing. The story of Dollhouse is the
story of somebody trying to figure out who she is while
everybody tells her what they want her to be. That is the
story of Eliza Dushku, and watching Eliza do that has been
one of the great joys of my career. She’s always been an
intellectual equal. She’s always been a seeker. I’m still
trying to figure myself out.
That’s another point of the show, is that the people who
control the Actives, the dolls, are just as much in need of
understanding what they are as the dolls.
When you and the writing staff are creating personas for
Echo, do you think, “Boy, this would be a really cool
identity, but who on Earth would want them to do this and
why?”
”Who would want them to do this and why?” is sort of what
keeps it interesting every week. Sometimes it’s somebody
extraordinarily nefarious and sometimes it’s somebody very
decent, but usually, it’s all the way in between. I mean,
as long as nobody gets hurt, as long as the Actives are not
harmed, everything’s good, everything is game. Some people
would abuse that and some people need it.
Ultimately, you’ll find the one thing that every episode
has in common is that Echo is the person you need at that
point in your life to either turn your life around, to give
you the moment you thought you’d never have, or to pull
you out of a place you think you can’t get out of. Or to
rob the bank. Whatever it is, she’s a kind of life coach,
without even meaning to be. She’s always the perfect
person for whatever it is you need.
Sometimes there will be B stories – we’ll always see the
workings of the Dollhouse, but we’ll also see other
Actives on other engagements, and sometimes they’ll just
be B stories, sometimes they’ll cross over or sometimes
they’ll just connect thematically.
How did you determine who the other characters around Echo
should be?
The first thing I said to Eliza, before I’d even created
the show, was, “You need an ensemble. You can’t be in
every scene – it’ll make you nuts. You need a genre show
and you need a big ensemble. You need a premise that’s
bigger than just you, so that if you need to stand down and
get some rest, you can maintain after a certain time.”
To that end, there was more than one Active. Then you work
out the idea of the place [the Dollhouse]. You need a
programmer, you need someone who runs it, you need someone
to back her up, her handler, and you need somebody to save
her, who’s trying to find her.
Then Dr. Saunders, who’s played by Amy Acker, was created
after I pitched the show. It was, “We need this voice in
the Dollhouse, to counteract Topher the programmer.” So it
was all very organic. It was just the obvious people that
would be in Echo’s life. It wasn’t like, “I need my
wacky sidekick.” There was nothing cynical about the way
they came in – they were all just what they needed to be,
and then I found the actors who had that same quality. I
feel again that same thing I had on Firefly of, “These
guys have always been doing this, nobody else could’ve.”
There’s a lot of anticipation about Dollhouse in the
online fan community…
Sometimes there’s a backlash against fans – “Oh, they’
re going to make everybody else not watch.” Well, that’s
not the case. The only person who can really do that is me.
If people come, if they give it a fair shake, I will do my
best to entertain them. And everything else will fall by
the wayside.
Can you say anything about Cabin in the Woods, the feature
film you’re producing that Drew Goddard will direct?
It’s a horror movie. Some teenagers may meet with violence!
Dollhouse starts airing on Fox in February 2009.
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