Q&A: Joss Whedon Talks 'Dollhouse'

The writer/producer behind such hit shows as "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," "Angel" and "Firefly" returns to television with a new drama that examines the idea of identity and what makes us who we are.

"Dollhouse" stars Elisa Dushku as "Echo," a woman who willingly agrees to let her brain to be wiped of every memory and shred of personality. Her brain is then given the memories and experiences to match the requirements of whatever client desires an "experience." Sometimes that requires to be a lover, a hostage negotiator or a trained outdoors expert. And after each client, her brain is wiped until the next time she is needed.

Whedon recently spoke about "Dollhouse, " the reasons he enjoys working with Duschku and his ongoing fascination with the definition of personal identity.

Q: Can you  talk a little bit about the genesis of the show?  What got you thinking about these characters in this world?

Joss Whedon: Well, there’s already the famous story of lunch with Eliza where we were talking about what kind of stuff she should play and I thought she should play lots of different things, and then the show happened.

Beyond that, there has also been I’m very interested in concepts of identity, what portion is our own, what’s socialized, can people actually change, what do we expect from each other, how much do we use each other and manipulate each other, and what would we do if we had this kind of power over each other?  And in this, our increasingly virtual world, self-definition has become a very amorphous concept, so it just felt what was on my mind.  I don’t mean it felt timely like I was trolling the papers looking for something timely.  It’s just been something I think about a lot.

As for the characters, they sell out by necessity.  I wanted to have a strong ensemble around Eliza, because I didn’t want her to have to carry the burden of every single day of shooting, or she would burn out.  So it was the question of really just doing the math.  You’re going to need the handler, you’re going to need somebody running the place, you’re going to need the programmer, and then realizing what all of those different perspectives would give us, even before we had the astonishing cast, started to make the show really live.

Q:  What do you like about Eliza?  Why was she the right actress to build this around?

Joss Whedon: She’s overcome her homely shyness over these years.  Eliza is, apart from being, in my opinion, as great a star as I have ever known, she has a genuinely powerful electric and luminous quality that I’ve rarely seen.  She’s also a really solid person.  She’s a good friend.  She’s a feminist. She’s an activist. She’s interested in the people around her.  She has a lot of different things going on, and I’ve watched her over the years, as a friend, try to take control of her career, and try to get the roles that weren’t available to her, and protect the ethos and the message of what it was that she was doing, and I respect that enormously.  Being part of that progression is, for me, one of the greatest benefits of this show.

Q: I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the process of finding this show through the rewritten pilot, and then the early episodes, and then talk about how it differed from finding your earlier shows.

Joss Whedon: I think this show definitely went through a tougher process, tough in a different way than the other shows.  Probably most similar to "Angel" in the sense of what we had in our minds about what Angel was ultimately was different than what the network did. Our version was a little darker, and in this instance, it wasn’t so much a question of reworking what the show was as it was a question of reworking how we get into it. There were definitely some differences of opinion about what was going on and what we were going to stress in the show, but mostly it was about how do we bring the audience in and the mandate was very much once they had seen the pilot.

They made some noise about this before. I don’t want to say that they just thought it up out of the blue, but the mandate “was give us not just the world of the show, but the structure of the show.” The original pilot explained everything that happened, but came at it very sideways, and they said let the audience see an engagement so that they understand that every week she’s going to go to a different place and be a different person and that they have that sense of structure.

That part was simple enough. It was my idea to do a new pilot, because once I was clear on what it was they didn’t have that I had planned to provide in the show anyway, it seemed like a no-brainer to give them something they could get behind more.

But there was some real questioning about what exactly we wanted to get at in terms of the humanity and what they do and why people hire them and there’s a sexual aspect to it that makes some people nervous.  Part of the mandate of the show is to make people nervous.  It’s to make them identify with people they don’t like and get into situations that they don’t approve of, and also look at some of the heroic side of things and wonder if maybe they were wrong about what motivated those as well.

So we’re out to make people uncomfortable, but not maybe so much our bosses.

Q: Do you feel like you’ve found the show now, or is it still just an ongoing process?

Joss Whedon: Well, it’s always an ongoing process to an extent, but I would say emphatically yes.  We had all of the elements, the characters, none of which were changed really, and none of the regular characters, and the premise, the concept, the way we were able to explore what makes us human, all of that is in there.

As the season progresses, it ends up going exactly where I had hoped it would go before all of this happened, so I do feel like we got back to our vision in a way that really works for the network.  And the last few episodes that we just completed shooting got all of us extraordinarily excited.

Q:  What do you have to say maybe to the fans who are already in a panic and have formed these save "Dollhouse" campaigns long before the story even ends, maybe even starting last summer?  Do you have words of calming for them, or anything like that?  What do you say to people who are already worried about the show before it airs?

Joss Whedon: Usually, words of calm in these situations lead to panic.  If you say there’s nothing to panic about, somebody says, he said the word panic.  Basically, we found the show.  My concern isn’t whether the show gets saved.  It’s whether these fans who are panicking about it love it.  They may get over their panic.  They may see it and go, you know, actually, we’re okay.  The network should do what they think is right.  Ultimately, the support is very sweet, and the fact that people care and they want to see the show get a chance.  That’s important to me too, because it really is a show that finds itself as it goes along, but, at the end of the day, my biggest concern is that I give them something worth panicking over.

Q: With a show like "Buffy," you had some episodes and you did some things that really stood out in people’s minds like having a musical episode, having an episode where no one speaks.  Do you have some of those ideas for "Dollhouse" where you want to try something different than maybe hasn’t been done in TV before, or things like that that are in your mind right now for this show?

Joss Whedon: Most of the things I think have been done at some point, and we don’t think it’s done for their own sakes, but one of the exciting things about the show, one of the reasons why we’re excited to have more runs at it is that you can really come at these stories from a lot of different perspectives; from the perspective of a client, from the perspective, as we do in episode six, from the man on the street, from the perspective of obviously Echo or any of the dolls or the people who are running it.

There’s always a different way into the story, and since there is a basic structure of an engagement where somebody comes in, says what they want, and they build that personality and the engagement takes place, there is a lot of fun that can be had with how you come at those stories.

But I don’t have anything specific in mind, and no, I’m not planning a "Dollhouse" musical just yet.

Q:  I know you’ve talked about the more earnest nature of the show and the Joss-e humor, but I just wanted to follow-up and ask why you felt this should be a more earnest show, because it seems like with the concept, there would be plenty of opportunities to have fun with it too.

Joss Whedon: There is a lot of fun and a lot of humor in it.  What it doesn’t have is an inherent silliness that both "Buffy" and "Firefly" had, and even "Angel," that was we could just take one step back that part of the fun was of deconstructing the genre we were in. This has to be a little bit more grounded in order for it to play, or it would become campy, and with vampires and spaceships and horses, we had more leeway to be a little less realistic in how we plotted things.

But humor is a part of the show all over the place, because we have really funny actors, and these situations do become absurd, and besides, we would get really bored if we didn’t.

Q:  Given the pressures and drawbacks of being a creative person working within television, what keeps you going? What inspires you?

Joss Whedon: You know, the thing that keeps me going, chardonnay.  I shouldn’t have said that.  Honestly though, actually that kind of slows me down.  Ultimately, it’s two things.  It’s the story and it’s the people I’m working with.  I’ve gotten pretty good at putting together a group of people, both in the writing and in the acting fields who are not just really gifted and delightful to learn from and to watch, but are just good people to be around.  And creating an environment that is fun and safe and creative is difficult and enormously important, and a lot of shows obviously don’t feel the same way, and a lot of stars don’t feel the same way.

But I have had both good luck and the good sense to make sure the people I’m around are the people you want to spend your time with, and when those people come to you with ideas, or bring you something you didn’t expect and really know what they’re doing, it snowballs and an idea gets bounced around between all of the people who are helping create it and it just gets bigger and better.