17
Aug
- Wired:
- Your characters don’t talk like other writers’ characters.
- Joss Whedon:
- I have abused language. I love it and I abuse it…. I don’t write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don’t have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it’s bent doesn’t actually register. It’s the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.
- Wired:
- Different vernaculars say something about who the character is, right?
- Whedon:
- Absolutely. People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in Firefly? Because I don’t know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot. Now people are saying, “Oh, now The Avengers is going to make a lot of pop culture references.” They’re not going to make none, but you can bury yourself in that stuff if you want anything to be remotely timeless.
- Wired:
- So when people are hearing pop culture references in your work, what they’re really hearing are modern cadences?
- Whedon:
- Both. Sometimes you mention Keyser Söze. And if you brought him up now, teenagers would go, “WTF?” Or probably they wouldn’t, because they probably don’t say that anymore. When I first wrote Buffy, and it’s something I have said before, I was looking at teenagers and — hmm, maybe I should rephrase that. I was listening to teenagers. And everything they said was from Heathers. I realized, you can’t ape the way they talk. You can only ape the fact that the way they talk is going to change and is going to roll through some reference and then past it, or some phrase and then past it. And if you’re going to write teenagers that teenagers believe, you can’t write the way they talk, because of lead time. So I just talked the way I wanted to talk. And they’ll either recognize it as something alien but not pandering, or they’ll start to talk that way.
- Wired:
- Because that was the target audience? Teenagers?
- Whedon:
- Yeah, well, at this point it was the movie. You’re not making a teen horror flick for the older crowd necessarily. You’d love it if they’d come. The majority of my stories are about young people anyway.
- Wired:
- So you can get at truthfulness in the way they’re speaking?
- Whedon:
- Yeah, but fake truth is better than outdated truth. And a lot of my stuff that, particularly in Firefly, but even in Buffy, is twisted Elizabethan. A lot of it is stuff taken from Westerns or movies from the 1940s, or things that have gone so far out of style that you can create your own version. I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn’t written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I — it’s like not seeing my kids, I can’t do it for very long.
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