Firefly

The Sunday Firefly talk at the White Room Convention at the Heathrow Thistle, London, was scheduled to be Nathan Fillion (Captain Malcolm Reynolds), Morena Baccarin (Inara Serra) and also Summer Glau (River Tam), who had only popped in briefly on Saturday. The teaser trailer, as premiered at the ComicCon earlier in the year, had already been shown twice at the opening ceremony (the audience cheered so much the first time they missed most of the dialogue). Nathan was asked, although there were lots obviously lots of guns in the film, would there be any horses. His response was, "Summer?" Summer, instead of answering, started to laugh. The questioner then asked if he would ever shoot a horse again, to which he honestly couldn’t say.

He was asked whether, given the chance, he would have preferred to continue on television, or do what has happened, and be given a theatrical release following a curtailed television run. His preference would have been the route of Star Trek, or more so Star Trek The Next Generation, with a long, successful television run, followed by many successful movies. Then they could live in mansions. And Summer would be all Sigourney Weaver.

Summer talked about Tim Minear, who was working on another film while they were making the feature, so he couldn’t come to their parties, but he has seen the rough cut of the film, and he was very enthusiastic about it. It was commented on that with Firefly, they are very much doing the Buffy route in reverse, taking a television show and making a movie - did they hope the film would be any more successful? Summer pointed out that Joss didn’t direct the Buffy movie. Nathan agreed - "The first film was flogged and raped. Universal did not try to control the Firefly movie in any way."

Nathan told us that Blue Sun would not feature prominently in the film, but was asked if he knew the secret of the corporation that was so ubiquitous in the show, that may have links with the Alliance government and the experiments on River. "Yes. I can’t tell you. If you’re clever, you’ll figure it out." Nathan confirmed that Chinese language will be used in the film, and forced Morena and Summer to both recite their Chinese lines, which they duly did, and they did it well, too. Summer apparently has lots of Chinese dialogue "in that scene where the camera is going crazy all over the place," as Nathan described it.

The bootleg version of the trailer is already on the internet, and has been for some time, but having now seen a decent version on the big screen, this film will look amazing, and the wait for April, and my next chance to meet these fantastic people, is too long away.