An audience with Joss, Summer and Nathan.
To celebrate today's release of the Serenity DVD in Germany: here's a previously unseen interview, courtesty of bschnell, from the German press screening last October. (Click on the Firefy icon to access English and German versions of the interview).
And many thanks to Barbara for doing this.
March 02 2006
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I've often wondered myself who those original five were. That Joss claims he doesn't recall himself is a bit of a ..dare I say disappointment? It means we may never really know. However, having attempted myself at times (unsuccessfully) to create a totally original story with entirely new characters and settings that don't exist in the real world, I have to say I couldn't recall exactly what they were before they were finished either, and obviously until Joss decided to go from five to nine things weren't really clicking for him. Then he found that magical number and the tumblers just apparently fell into place.
I hadn't thought the 'whore' character was in the original five though. I'd assumed he added her later. My guess had been until now that he started with the requisite characters you MUST have on a starship in order to make it go. That'd be the captain (Mal), the pilot (Wash), and the enginner (Kaylee). Then I figured he'd have to have a right hand man for the captain, but that originally it was a guy who was a combination of Zoe and Jayne. And this character would start as undyingly loyal, but we'd learn later on it was a more alpha male kinda thing where the Captain's right hand man would try to mutiny. Then as Whedon expanded the cast he just took that one guy and broke him up into two people, one undyingly loyal and one shifty and powerstupid. However to think he had Zoe in mind from the get go kinda shatters that whole concept.
The idea he'd know from the beginning "well you have to have a whore I mean come on" also puts a chink in my original theory. Inara seems like the kind of character who would have started as an outsider that the cast would run into intermittently early on and then maybe join the cast more regularly if her presence was deemed positive by audience response. Or you could write her out later at your leisure and bring in something else. I still think it's obvious from what ended up on the screen (both little and big) that early on the ideas of the Shepherd and the Tams were perhaps there early on but only as one-shot characters who would appear for one or two episodes to shake up the original crew of five and then disappear. Only when he fleshed out the Tams backstory would he realize he had to keep these guys on for at least two whole seasons and just explore that arc. I have imagined that if the series did go for three or more seasons, that eventually Simon would leave the ship and return to the Alliance, perhaps returning occasionally as a bad guy. However River would have become a more prominent role in the ship, as we see at the end of Serenity the film where she effectively takes over Wash's job. That is assuming that Joss woulda killed off Wash anyway at the end of season two of the series, which again we'll never truly know since the series didn't make it to season two. He did kill off Tara to make Willow more unpredictable, so I can't help but assume that he woulda wanted to give Zoe that same emotional arc of loss. It just makes for good entertainment, keeping a happy couple from being, y'know, happy.
Very good questions from the audience overall, though halfway through viewing this I felt sorry for Nathan & Summer. They flew all the way to Germany to stand there and watch Joss get all the good questions.
ZachsMind | March 02, 08:06 CET
I'm not sure how sorry Nathan and Summer were that Joss got to do most of the talking, since they had been doing interviews _all_ day, and I gather they didn't get much sleep the night before.
There are links to several of the interviews, my own as well as Dietmar Dath's, both in English and German.
Still, yes, the question about the original five is an interesting one. Hard to imagine FIREFLY without any of them, even though SERENITY had a clearer "core cast".
bschnell | March 02, 16:40 CET
And the cover is worth a peek:
http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B000E6UUO6.03.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
[ edited by bschnell on 2006-03-02 16:47 ]
bschnell | March 02, 18:46 CET