Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Joss Commentary for Chosen - From S7 DVD By Deb W

It’s 2AM I’ve got to work tomorrow but hell I’m gonna do Chosen

Teaser

Hi I’m Joss Whedon and this is the very final audio commentary on the very final episode of the very final series of Buffy and if you’ve actually sat through all the episodes and all the commentaries and you have a feeling of exhaustion confusion and sort of a low riding rage that you can’t really describe or understand then you’ll know how I felt when we shot this , to say that I was wiped out by the time we got here is the understatement of the world and no scene I think showed that more than this one because we had so little time to shoot so much and I’ll explain about that as we go to the credits

Credits

You see that was actually the first stuff we shot and we only had David for a little while and I mean a really little while I had about seven hours to do about ten pages and it all required everybody to be completely on point but that’s what you get with Nathan and Sarah and David professionalism everybody was right on their marks and everybody worked really hard and it was a good start to this because there was no episode that we ever shot that was harder, bigger and that left less time for me to try and do anything interesting with the camera it left less time for the DP to light it left less time for everybody to do their best work and yet somehow people managed to

Act One

The stunts I did not have to shoot that day John Mettland shot most of it second unit and you’ll be hearing a little bit about David Soloman who shot a huge amount of second unit for me on this show because it took so many days

What can I say about Nathan Fillion that hasn’t already been said , he’s a great hero and a great villain and just delightful I was so happy to have him back for the beginning of this episode just because I wanted to work with him and he’d gotten to work with other directors and I didn’t think it was fair that he didn’t get me, and I thought splitting him in half from the crotch up was you know maybe a little on the nose as a radical feminist statement goes but for his character I really thought he’d earned it . so

And David you know again came and just was right on the money same as Sarah from the first take which was important the only person who didn’t do their best work here I think was me because lack of time meant that here we are that’s an over that’s an over and then we have a two shot over over two shot which is pretty much the gold standard for boring t directing but when we’re in the kind of hurry that we were on this one we didn’t have any choice, they make one big move in this entire scene and once they do we started shooting both of them at the same time, it’s the rarest thing of all usually you light one direction it’s very specific and then it takes awhile to turn round and light in the other direction but every now and then when you’re desperate you ask your DP to light both people at the same time, it’s not undoable both of them look good here but we had two cameras running the whole time .. it also helps the scene sometimes because both people are in it in their coverage in their close-ups at the same time and they’re giving their all and they’re feeding off the rhythms of the other person very specifically so you’re not cobbling together something that has taken what could be hours apart . It’s a fun way to shoot it just makes life hell for the DP and Ray came through as he always does really spectacularly on it.

Yes there will be praise because a lot of people really impressed me you know this was a really hard episode hard episode to shoot one of the shots coming up this one a steady cam shot designed to show the scope of the giant graveyard and give a little motion and emotion to what they’re doing, course the giant graveyard is our parking lot, the graveyard that Gareth Davies our producer suggested we build at the beginning of season two to save time going out to graveyards we shot the first half of that scene the first half of that night and then we came out here to shoot the rest of it again the time constraints were insane and yet this stuff looks great and the two of them are as funny and real as they’ve ever been so that worked out just fine . and David doing my all time favourite thing being petty, whenever Angel is Petty I think he’s at his best . And I love the fact that I feel the scope of the graveyard which is where I thought Buffy and Angel should leave their relationship on this show because it is the iconic place for Buffy the graveyard , more than anything else. A lot of this last episode had to do with finding that perfect iconic moment and that perfect iconic thing that really says this is a summation of what we’ve done . I’ve done it before I did it in episode 22 of season 5 where I had Buffy fighting a vampire in the alley at the beginning I had made a lot of the statements to sort of round out my feelings about the show but life went on and the show went on and writing a second final episode of Buffy was much harder than writing the first partially because I’d already written one partially because I knew that this was the end at some point I just had to let go and just write forget about the pressure about it being perfect , it’s not going to be and it isn’t but make it good enough hit the beats give an episode so that people would remember. We knew where we wanted to go thematically It was just getting there. This speech about cookies well not cookies exactly but I believe baking was in there was originally pitched by Marti Noxon early in the season and I think as the show runner I could have done a better job of bringing us to it , it comes to this conclusion a little bit out of the blue and that’s my fault but we knew that emotionally it’s where we wanted to get and where we wanted to get to was the idea of my relationships don’t work out because I’m still becoming a woman and finding my place and I don’t need to be finding the perfect guy at age 22 or however old Buffy is at this point , I can wait, I can wait until I’m fully formed and I think that’s a very important message and when Marti had thought about this in her own life and she told me about it I was like I think this is exactly where we need Buffy to get . And it helps with the other really complicated part of writing this episode which is how to get Angel and Spike together in the same show, have her have the big emotion for both of them and not make her look like the slut queen of slutdonia as Marti herself would say . It was very tricky and I’d like to point out that I had to do it in the same act, that by the end of act , well before the end of act one she’s sleeping with Spike .

This exit for Angel was designed to mirror his first exit him backing off in the darkness. Something hopefully iconic enough and something to give people hope that Buffy and Angel might one day work out because some fans, now I realise not many but there were a few fans who feel that the Buffy Angel romance was like a big deal and clearly I thought Parker was the most important romantic relationship of her life other people disagreed that’s fine I guess they can do that they care about the Angel thing, some people care about the Spike thing I don’t know why we couldn’t get Parker in there too but apparently no you know whatever so that vocal minority who care about Buffy and Angel meant that we had to do service by him.. Comment on screen action) “eye socket jokes always funny”

And this was how to get her in the sack with Spike half an act after Angel had left but you know the experience. I’ve said this probably a hundred times and probably all of them on the audio commentaries to these damn episodes the trick is always to make the audience go through exactly what she’s going through It’s confusing to us emotionally that we should bounce from one to the other and it’s confusing to her but Spike is the person in her life right now. That drawing is one of my own creations and a lot of the crew members were like “why does he hate Butthead?” and I was like “Oh it’s supposed to be Angel” and that was something that I did on the day it wasn’t in the script, that’s the kind of wacky improve I’ve got going. Who knows what could happen. At any moment I could come up with that I think that’s actually the only thing I came up with. Asides from the script The great Marsters with a chemistry with Buffy that is just completely different from Angels and different to Davids and it works very very well he’s more on Buffys level he’s their vulnerabilities come out and I don’t just mean as characters but as actors Around each other and that really works it works on a different level. Their relationship, clearly been through a lot much more in fact than her relationship with Angel and you feel that history with these two and they bring it to the set they come to work and that’s why we still came to work because they did And James the ability to turn on a dime is a very rare thing in an actor from incredibly noble or scary to completely dorky or disarming, he does it with the tongue line earlier he does it here you’d be amazed how few people can actually do that and the last person I ever expected to be able to do it would be a theatre trained actor yet he’s got the chops he can go from Dracula to Jack Benny in a heart beat which is one of the reasons why I love him that and his shiny shiny hair

The idea behind their sleeping together is very important it was that their relationship had enough trust in it that it was physical and romantic but not sexual that was of course in response to the rape issue of last year when he had attempted to rape her because he didn’t understand the boundaries of their relationship, he was soulless but having gotten his soul and having fought to become a person we wanted to say this man can be redeemed from that not and I’ve said this before, not in a Luke And Laura ,he rapes her and they get married way not in an all is forgiven way just in the way of he’s still a human being who did a wrong thing and we still count him as a human being, I think that’s a very important message, that their relationship should be complicated and yet come to a place of trust without saying alright they’re going to become lovers again because I think that would be wrong I think that would be the wrong message I think that it’s a very fine line

I love watching them face off, I love Nathan he tells his little jokes almost like he’s an old man his little puns and his silliness the delight he takes in his character is just so very charming and the point he’s hitting on of course being the whole point of the show .being the whole point of the season and it seemed not only really affordable to have Sarah playing the First fort the most part of this but also the smartest because we’ve come full circle and it did make sense that we had Sarah telling herself literally that she was alone. These two didn’t get along together at all I thought they would but they were complaining their outfits were too similar their trailers were the same size and there was trouble “ I’m drowning in footwear” just one of those lines that make you glad that you’re a writer that you can write something that silly and actually out it on the air it’s an odd thing to end an act with an affirmation of potential victory but it made sense to me here because it’s so strange

End of act one

Act Two

Well this shot is kind of a cheesy trick but it got everybody in frame so I liked it this scene was one of those OK gotta make our day kind of scenes . I shot the room as a three waller , you’ll notice I don’t come around on Giles when he speaks to Willow I get him in profile which I don’t mind doing, I don’t need to be in every bodies faces the whole time exactly for every moment but it was a function of the very small amount of time that we had that I played it in the proscenium form almost you never do see that forth wall and the bed helped. Some people have complained that the magic that this scythe , originally from the Fray comic that I was writing at the same time is a little to convenient , and my answer to those critics is “ well don’t tell everybody” it is convenient and that doesn’t really bother me because ultimately to e the magic the phlobotonin was always secondary to what needs to be said and had to do with empowerment and the way to get there was through Willows magic and what it means to her and being a slayer and what it means to them so the fact that everything really fell into place a little too easily, maybe I could have thought of something a little more interesting but that isn’t where my heart was, my heart was in the heart more than it was in the magic.

This scene well first all of the first time that Buffy got through this speech which I’m sure you can realise when you watch the episode we shot all as one , there are two parts to it and it’s very long and it is about twice as long as what you see on screen we cut about half of it in the editing room apparently my pen runneth over so Sarah’s basically doing a scene that is four times as long as what she does here and did she get every single word right on the first take? Yes she did the extras actually spontaneously burst into applause when she was done? Yes they did . Again it’s one f the reasons why we went as long as we did , working as hard as we did the fact that she could do that. I’d also like to point out that it was Eliza Dushku who actually stopped to point out how much she liked the speech how much she liked the scene how much she liked the work and coming from an actor who knows they’re gonna spend half the day standing there looking , with no lines I though that was particularly gracious.

In this scene she accused me of getting back at some girl because of the way Wood kind of disses on her but actually it just made me laugh, and there aren’t any girls I need to get back! (Laughs) actually I think I told her that’s if what I was doing with the show it would be going another four seasons.

But I think there two just had a lovely chemistry and this is not necessarily something that would have been in the last episode a relationship talk from the two of them but it deals with the isolated nature of the slayer embodied here by Faith rather than Buffy which is really an important part of the season and it just tells us a little something about the two of them and pays off at the end two takes you know in either direction , both of them were so on point so delightful, Eliza not happy about giving up control of being like vulnerable and he attacks her skills and the expression “ Dude I’ve got mad skills” was actually said to me by Eliza in reference to serving ice cream , working at the Dairy Queen I believe not in reference to anything else but I loved the phrase so much I though I simply have to have Faith say it . Which since it was me writing it became dirty. Weird, it’s a thing. DB Woodside from the first frame that I saw in the first episode he intrigued me so much a real you know a real comer a real epic guy just a little bigger than life and you look for that so often you don’t get it, it’s really hard to find someone. It was a match I love Iyari and Allie in this scene well I love Allie in pretty much every scene where she doesn’t have to speak a foreign language and I think It’s not a big secret that originally I had planned to bring Tara back and when that didn’t work out you know I was looking for the anti Tara , somebody as un earthy and unlike her as possible . Iyari has a wonderful presence and a great physicality with Allie that is just very natural so I liked working with them ,this is like my first time because I didn’t shoot any up until this one because I was too tired ,I was pretty much too tired to shoot this one too but I had no choice, I couldn’t let somebody else do it except for the parts that I let John Maidland and David Solomon do which again we’ll come to later and the reasoning behind the two of them was very simply somebody had to end this show with a God damned girlfriend and why shouldn’t it be Willow? Somebody has to end in a decent relationship because we’ve seen so any of them fall apart.

I loved doing this as a one er because I love a One er you have to do them a lot more times they take about as long as doing a scene with coverage but when you get it and it’s all there It’s delightful and Tom well I can’t say enough about him, this thing he does with his hood when he says step back he had never done in any take he just threw it in there now here we go he had never done that before and it just he’s always trying to bring more to the table not in that annoying “ I have an idea that will ruin the shot” way but just in I’m staying in it and I loved that he became a huge part of the show . this scene was also added so that we could give Amanda some screen time so that later on I could kill her because I wanted to take a toll I think that Emma knows that as well as any., a battle without some kind of a toll is not a real battle. Pulled wide here because I had planned to shot that on set and when they said we’re going out I said well then dammit I’m pulling wide so they know we really went there that night we actually had four directors shooting porch scenes for four different shows and this bit here I did actually add on set not just the picture of Butthead on the punching bag but this where I said “ I wanna get a couple of shots (we were going fast) And that one I didn’t know if we were going to use the two of them... and to me it’s almost the most important shot in the show because it shows the mystery of their relationship and that’s one where I wanted the audience to fill in the blank I wanted whatever you want to have happened to have happened If people believe that on their last night together they made love great if people believe that on their last night together they talked all night if people believe they had a fight great whatever it s it’s up to the viewer the viewer has earned that and I love that analytical nature that there should be work for the viewer to do in that sense emotionally I think that makes it more textured and that shot of the two of them looking at each other I just find that beautiful ...

He talked about this right over the beginning of act three but I kept going ... Now I’ll post this as act two and get back

BTW Red Bull makes the typing faster !

Act three

And I loved this shot too setting up all my parameters Look around big wide lens and then of course the great Andrew Oscar speech of the show which made me laugh every single time we did it sometimes out loud which was of course not a good thing for the director to do during a take his Brother Tucker of course who we referenced all the time was the guy who tried to destroy the prom and we had originally wanted that actor Brad to be one of the nerds but he was busy and couldn’t so we found Tom and played up the idea that everybody couldn’t remember him because he was somebody else’s little Brother which by the way happened to me in high school all the time but I love that, the little continuity things are very important to me that sentence ( whatever you say is going to sound like Goodbye) was actually said to me by Marti after the show when she was leaving the house after we had watched it.. why it nearly made me cry , but I don’t cry because I am a manly man This moment I don’t think I really need to explain what’s going on here I felt that it was very important and I think the audience did too that these four have their moment together, these four who started it all should finish it all and Much in the same way they began it that’s why I echoed the exact lines from Giles this shot is I feel the every ending of the two part beginning And this shot also very important as they peel off one by one friends going to their destinies and Buffy left alone I shot that in slow motion but unfortunately it was so slow that it took up about half the show a whole long walk for Buffy where she walked down through the basement and remembered things and walked in slow motion really really long, I had to cut it I had to cut a lot of things my shows almost always come out long because I talk to much, in this instance I’m supposed to be talking right now too much but I almost cut this shot which is again I think one of the most important shots just for time when we were shooting but the idea of all these girls bleeding together I think ha a a good earthy almost menstrual metaphor to it which I think is important since they’re all becoming Slayers . Oh did I give it way? Well if you’re listening to the audio commentaries you probably already know that . My biggest regret about this episode was that I didn’t get to do more funny Willow stuff there was just so much plot to get through and Funny Allie is such a great thing and I wished we’d had more of her

This shot is rather seamlessly welded in by Ronnie and our guys at Zoic and really gave us an epic feel that we just didn’t have the money for on this show all these many years so we’ve been saving all year for this very sequence and these very shots the idea that there was now a technology where you could do hundreds of thousands of bad guys it just didn’t exist in the first six years and people well somebody saw The Two Towers and the fact of the matter is what I saw was a literal thing that was in cinefax explaining that they had this new technology you could create thousands of bad guys and I was like that will make this battle different from all the others the sheer number

And this, this I knew I was coming to from the start of the season pretty early on in it Buffy was isolated as a character even in the world Buffy and her gang never ensemble always like the star and the others in the magazines and what not and it was very important to me to say Ok great that you’ve worshipped this one iconic character but find it in yourself everybody and that’s why we shot the people all over and that was a great fun thing to do the very last thing I shot for the show on first unit was the girl in the trailer and Drew Goddard pointed out that it was kind of a great shot to be shooting at this point for this show and I can’t say enough about our little baseball girl, so may people just lost it I thought “ oh this is gonna be too cheesy the baseball thing” but so many people were like “ I was that girl, I played little league it’s so important” and that s the cry moment for a lot of people again I can’t say enough about the Zoic guys the job they did integrating these things and Felicia Day as Vi and Indigo as Rona just doing great work they really stuck you know a lot of girls came a lot of girls got killed and.

This image which we referred to, speaking of Lord of The Rings as the Blanchett image , obviously meant to she couldn’t stop talking about her black haired evil and the idea that when she empowers these women she comes to something even more powerful beyond the concept of power beyond the powers of evil something truly connected about connection about Women’s connection to the earth and that it can bring out the best in her and it would be nifty It seemed like a good conclusion to her story her arc

This scene this story all of this stuff this is where David Solomon really came in and helped out, he shot for days of second unit because there was simply so much to shoot and without him I mean he was a great director on the show and a great producer anyway and without him doing this episode I never would have made it through he kept it interesting. We actually had to stop filming one night one Friday night half way through because I was just too tired

Felicia was like “you hooked me up fat” she loved all of this footage we got of her but she looked great. that shot was very specifically storyboarded before we ever did anything, that was very important ( Buffy swings scythe and dusts multiple ubies) I wanted to get that moment of just everybody doing everything in slow mo I thought it came out really nice though .

And if you’re going to pay off things that people have dealt with over the years , Bunnies are going to be one of the most important Emma just about the funniest person who ever looked that good DB loved to fight, so did Tony I wished we could have had more of that again we wanted to keep everything moving as fast as possible and you know “I have swimmers” ear” is just something that Tom said that made me laugh and so I put it in I don’t know why the characters saying that it’s not going to stop the vampire . People complained again that the vampires were too easy to kill , they were supposed to be stronger than other vampires and the fact of the matter is it’s true like the convenient magic it’s true because again I was more interested in showing the empowerment than I was in the continuity to make every vampire as hard to kill as the first one would have been too hard. End of act three

Act four

Shooting the battle as it was required many ,many more days than we had scheduled and more directors so once I got all the big moments out this was a very important thing too the sharing of the scythe means the sharing of the power just about as literally as you can get . Had to use a little sunlight since it was the middle of the day. (Anya dies) one of the most brutal images we’ve ever done and you know done to keep the sense of battle , you know the un heroic death also interesting because I’d never seen it before I’d never seen anybody cut like that and I came up with the idea of the stuntman using a half sword and digitally adding the rest of the sword and the cut so just instead of one of those slices like you always get in swordfight movies we really cut someone down And of course Sarah following as well that was because I needed a toll I needed this battle really to feel like a battle and I couldn’t kill any of my core four and still call it a happy ending I couldn’t kill Dawn and still call it a happy ending either so Anya got the nod and to make it as un heroic as possible just felt very real and very creepy and that shot was in fact her last shot ( get out of my face) a lot of people didn’t actually get that this was a pun but it seemed like the right thing and here you’ve really got to give it up for the composer he increased the budget of the show by a half just because his music gave it such an epic feel this music to me embodies so much of what I was striving for , it makes the thing feel twice as epic it was a beautiful piece of music. that’s May a great great stuntwoman who gave us beautiful footage as Felicia did too all the girls really enjoyed their fighting, they wanted to fight more and more , Iyari particularly . Sarah at one point said look we’re going to need more footage, just keep rolling and I’ll fight

The sunlight hits Spike the sunlight is channelled through Spike and it gets nasty some of the body language from these vamps again CGI really beautifully done The idea of the soul as the thing that elevates and kills him felt like a good wrap up and again going from the epic to the humorous in a heartbeat that’s our boy The girls kept walking through the beam and I had to say “you’re being chopped in half. duck and she did ad she fell which was fun but she wasn’t hurt nobody was hurt it’s all fake . The idea of the bus was just that it felt right we had to get a lot of people out and it’s a school bus and that’s what we did this shot one of my favourites too , he’s looking for her she’s right there he doesn’t find her those always get me.

This was an interesting scene because both James and Sarah came to it from the wrong place really, they were playing things falling apart and the terror of it and I said that what I wanted was for them to completely distance themselves from it and I explained how the sound was going to drift out (Hand clasp) this was sort of a romantic image the two of them, we actually did it with real fires. But the hands were all gelled up and you could tell so this is CGI and it looks beautiful I thought it was a nice comment on their relationship .What I basically told them was Play the romance be proud of him, love him when you say you love him ,love her when you say she doesn’t love you. forget about the crumbling world for that period of time it doesn’t exist it’s a cinematic trick but it’s a necessary emotional one I was surprised that they hadn’t come there because usually with the three of us we come to a scene in exactly the same place and this time it really was sort of different. Eventually Sarah said if you have what you think you need I think we should move on because I’m not sure I understand how this works but I look at the two of them together and you know their work is tremendous , but that is part of making TV and movies sometimes you’ll get a take from an actor that blows you away and they’ll go “oh I wasn’t feeling the thing can we go again and I’m like “ you just gave me gold” “ but I didn’t feel it” and I’m like “ The audience will” sometimes you can let them have another and sometimes you just say “ trust me, the audience will be there cos I was” . another beautiful image our boy goin down for the last time even though everybody already knew he was gonna be on Angel

I loved revving Felicia up to as much intensity as we could get that was fun, right there we’re going around the lot our little lot and then this actually miniatures and CGI and I’m just obsessed with people running and jumping on things the big leap and so I got one at the end of my show . Its an old trick there was another old trick( Sunnydale falls away .. I love that by the way you couldn’t have a better description of what happened to Sunnydale) the first trick was she jumped the bus drove under her but actually they happened at different times and we were still doing something which we did when Faith fell into the truck they were talking about the bag how to cheat the perspective and I was like can’t we just shoot them both and then do a split screen? And then of course this I have to say, the endless road behind them was something that came from Tony Head he pointed out “ oh that’s beautiful an endless horizon it’s a perfect image for the rest of the show and the rest of their lives and I was like “ yeah that’s great except I parked in front of it and you guys play in front of the bus and we’re never gonna see it” So I gave that moment to Sarah of just looking out and seeing that horizon cos I agreed with Tony I thought it was beautiful and I didn’t think it should be missed. And then of course that poor sign which in one incarnation or another has been knocked down so many times

Again I had very much planned not to have any reason for Anya’s death any reason behind it or any reason to come after it , but the writer in me couldn’t not resolve it somewhat I think the audience needed what Xander needed which was something and that something was Andrew learning that the think that he’s sort of reviled for, making up stories becomes the thing that he helps Xander with becomes the thing that he actually is good at, giving her the epic death that she didn’t actually get to have

( Faith/ Wood) I think that these two have as grown up and textured a relationship as any of the characters on this show and they had about four scenes together total so I love that about them I love how much goes on in each of them when he dies dying, having a character die and then suddenly bringing them back to life is something you can only actually earn after you’ve killed a couple so this was a nice opportunity to say this isn’t over yet, to have the call back and I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t legitimately offed a few beloved characters

And then we come to what is the final shot, needless to say we shot this one a bunch of times I had this in my head from the start when we first did it we started up high and it looked kind of fake and cheesy and they’re of course playing against an abyss that isn’t there but I knew this was going to be a one er I knew it was going to be a slow push in we started to shoot it and then Ray the DP said you know what? the lights not that good the winds not that good lets just leave the crane arm and go shoot the little bits in front of the bus So we held off for about four hours and came back, tried again everybody getting their lines a tough thing, everybody being in the right place in frame but I wanted it to just be everyone and to end with the close up of Buffy because what this shot ultimately is about is what a lot of the shows about which is that the story goes on that there is closure but not a closing that what we’ve seen is a life being formed like the cookie dough speech explains , this a life in progress a life that in some ways is just beginning, like that smile. That’s all I have to say thanks for watching my show.