Written Interview: Joss Whedon (“Much Ado About Nothing”)

I’ve posted about Joss Whedon secretly shooting a movie version of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” in the midst of shooting another movie “The Avengers.” Here is a terrific interview with Tavi at “Rookie” (“website for teenage girls”) where Whedon gives lots more details.

So The Avengers was like this huge superhero production, and really exhausting, I would imagine. After making it you should’ve taken a vacation, but instead you made another movie. I wanna know why, and what’s wrong with you.

There is something horribly wrong with me. I admit that fully. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. I was in New York at the end of the shoot of The Avengers, in the beginning of September. It had been about seven months since I’d slept for a full night. I was so crazed, and Kai, my wife, and I were talking about the vacation we were gonna take for our 20th anniversary of bein’ sweeties. We had October free, so we were going to Venice. Then we started talking about Much Ado — neither of us can remember how it came up. And Kai was like, “You know what? Make the movie. Venice isn’t sinking that fast.” I said, “Honey, there’s no way I can adapt the script and put it together in a month.” She’s like, “Yes, you can.” So I started talking to people about it. Then I realized how much work it would be and I was like, I have gone insane. This is a terrible idea. But at that point I’d already started getting people to commit, so it was like, I gotta put my head down and do it. It’s one of the weirder decisions I’ve ever made and absolutely the best.

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I heard that you used to throw these, like, Shakespeare parties at your house.

They were Shakespeare readings. Shakespeare parties sounds like we all get in the big collars and quilted hose and dance to a lute. It’s just people showing up and reading. We started it years ago with some of the Buffy and Angel people — actors and writers and friends — and it turned into a huge monster of fun. Everybody just enjoyed each other enormously, learned about the text, got to pretend, got to show off a little, and got to make fools of themselves. Then it kinda died down for a while, because we had kids, and everything dies down when you have kids. But during its most fertile period, we did Much Ado with Amy and Alexis, and it became clear to me that if I was ever going to shoot a version of that play, this is my Beatrice and Benedick. They had both done an enormous amount of Shakespeare onstage, and they were the kind of people that even when they had tiny little parts, they would just blow it up, and not in a show-offy way. When they read Beatrice and Benedick, they were just delightful.

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We have to read a bit of Shakespeare this year, and we did Romeo and Juliet last year, and I had a bit of trouble with it. It’s hard to read and appreciate something when it’s an assignment for school. Any ideas on making it easier? Did you like Shakespeare in high school?

Oh my god yes. Literally my favorite subject. I loved what he had to say, I loved all the darkness, I loved all the strangeness. Hamlet is my favorite — that would be no surprise to anybody who’s hung out with me. But I also found sometimes that I needed someone to interpret it for me. The best thing is to see it. Because there are certain things that don’t make sense until you really understand the context. I would always read a play before I saw a film of it, and I remember reading Henry V before I saw [Kenneth] Branagh’s version, and going, OK, this doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Then I saw the movie and saw, A, where it did make sense and I had missed it; and, B, where Branagh used the fact that it didn’t make sense to create his own emotional through line. Both of those things were life lessons for me. He’s great at making clear to an audience what he’s saying and what he’s feeling, and sort of going beyond the text and saying, here’s why they’re talking about this odd thing in the middle of this very emotional scene. And there’s a good deal of that in my Much Ado. A good deal of finding not just the point of the scene but the life beyond it.

That’s one of the things that has consistently fascinated me about screenwriters: They’re such interesting — and interested — people. Here’s Whedon, fresh off working on a zillion dollar, heavy-pressure project The Avengers, but instead of kicking back, he gets interested in doing a passion project: a film adaptation of a Shakespeare play. Who knows? Given the scale of this production, Whedon could do even more of these type of adaptations. As I say, screenwriters can be fascinating individuals.

For more of the “Rookie” interview, go here.

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