´óÏó´«Ã½

´óÏó´«Ã½ Cult - Printer Friendly Version
David Greenwalt - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage August 23rd 2001

Love at first sight
  How David came to work with Joss

At that time Joss hadn’t really done a lot of television, he’d done a few things like Roseanne and Parenthood and done some marvellous big movies like Toy Story. He was a wonderful writer, but they were looking for someone to quote unquote "come in and help him run the show".

They were hoping that a marriage might be had there. And it was kind of love at first sight I have to say, in a very gay way too (laughs), because I’d never met anyone quite as driven, quite as talented, quite as ambitious - in the good sense of the word - and quite as gracious as Joss. We decided we’d give it a try.

I signed on for the first 12 Buffys and I just really fell in love with the way he worked and with the characters. When you’re a movie writer you usually come to one hour drama on television as opposed to, what has been historically, half hour comedy. All my movies were always funny and always juxtaposed tragic and funny things together and Joss just does so much juxtaposition. That’s one of the many great things he does. He also taught me that you can earn real sentiment without being sentimental, but you have to earn the emotion.

I fell in love with working with him, the show, and the characters. My original deal was that I was supposed to help get this little show started and go into a bigger other show. When my time was up, I said "Oh please let me be with you, let me do this" so we worked together many, many years.

How could this thing with the funny title be so good?
  Tell us how you became aware of Buffy?

My name’s David Greenwalt and I was Joss’s right hand man on Buffy and then Joss and I created the spin off Angel together.

I was a movie writer in the 1980s. I wrote Secret Admirer, American Dreamer and Class with a fellow named Jim Calph, who’s a very talented movie writer. He went on to write Stake Out - unfortunately I didn’t team with him on the hit.

Eventually, like many of my colleagues, I began to dabble in television because it was fun and it was immediate. Before I knew it I fell in love with television, particularly because in American television the writer is king. You have a lot of control over your work if you become a producer as well at the same time.

I had done a very short live show called Profit that starred Adrian Pasdar, about a man who was somewhat psychotic and lived in a box, but also worked at a very wealthy corporation and manipulated people. That was wonderful fun, what’s the expression, outside the box? It lasted about four minutes but the show got me a lot of attention in town, the town being Hollywood.

It was about 1996 and I read every pilot that was out there and had the opportunity to meet all the big producers. And from my big stack of pilots I said, "This funny thing called Buffy The Vampire Slayer, this is the best written pilot, not only this year but probably one of the best written pieces of work I’ve ever read. How could a thing with a funny, odd little below-the-radar title like that be such a great piece? I have to meet this guy, I have to find out what this is about". So I met with Joss.

Spinning off Angel
  How did the initial idea to do Angel come about?

For the first three years of Buffy I was full time and then the end of year three Joss came to me and said "What do you think about spinning Angel off into its own show?"

I said "I think it’s a fabulous idea and I think we should bring young Charisma Carpenter who plays Cordelia Chase with us, because I think she will be a great foil for Angel, a great other side of that dark coin, that big bright girl."

Then we sat down and broke - which means figured out - the story. Breaking the story is almost harder than writing the stories. We broke the story, wrote the pilot and Joss directed it.

I was very excited, although the idea of doing two shows just seemed crazy because Joss worked so hard on Buffy. I would come in to our Buffy sets in Santa Monica, California, and he’d be here at seven in the morning, having spent the night [there], having gotten two hours of sleep.

He was just doing everything in those first few years and I thought "how on earth are we ever going to do two shows?" as it seemed so hard to do one. Particularly with an aim for quality - we want to do good work. Joss seems to have the energy of four men. I’ve the energy of maybe 1.2 men.

Angelic conception
  What were the concepts behind Angel?

Our initial concept of Angel was a little different to how the show turned out. We’d spent all these years with a very intense emotional show, albeit very funny.

The question we were always asking in the [Buffy] writers’ room was "What’s the pain? The adolescent high schooler on dating? People don’t love me?" I’ve often said that if Joss had even had even one date in High School none of us would be here today. We’ve been mining everybody’s pain, mostly his, for a long time.

So we said "This show will be easier, this Angel show, it will be older, it will be urban and gritty, it will take place in big bad Los Angeles, not this mythical Santa Barbara-like town of Sunnydale where it’s sunny and bright but terrible things happen".

We assumed it would be more of a franchise detective show in which [Angel] would every week help somebody in trouble, and we assumed it would be easier to write. As we got into doing the show we realised that we were wrong and that what we do best is really deep character work. What is most interesting to us is what is happening to the characters that we know and love.

The joy and the misery of television is, we do 22 hours a year and it’s like a big grand novel and, not go to a soapy serialised place, you can’t resist [deep character work] because you want to see the characters grow and change.

One of the great things about working with Joss is that he will allow a character to grow and change. Buffy and Angel fell in love, she found he was a vampire, they made love, he turned evil and horrible, and eventually he moved away. Much like real life, as opposed to trying to play the same thing week after week, on and on ad nauseum.

Where Angel’s come from - season one
  Angel's character has been through so many phases. Where is he at now?

To answer that question, you have to look a little bit where he’s come from. I’m fond of saying - although the network doesn’t like it - that he’s the oldest twenty-something ever on television.

Because he’s a vampire, he’s been around for 251 years and he’s done every horrible thing you can imagine, and then was cursed with a soul a little over a hundred years ago. It’s a metaphor for being cursed with a conscience, for being cursed with "Oh my god I remember all the terrible things I’ve ever done".

So he’s on a road to redemption, he really wants to make up for his horrible past. He’d have to live 500 years to really do it so it’s a one day at a time thing.

He came to Los Angeles in the first year of our show and hung out a shingle, basically saying "I’m here to do good, hopefully the universe will tell me what I’m supposed to do". He originally had a sidekick named Doyle who got these terrible visions of people in trouble and then Angel would go and help these people. Eventually Doyle sacrificed himself in a very heroic episode and these visions were passed on to Cordelia.

Where Angel’s come from - the story so far (spoilers)
  How did Angel’s character continue to develop in season two?

In year two Angel faced off against a demon law firm called Wolfram and Hart. They’re a law firm that represent some very dark interests and brokers some very dark deals in Los Angeles. He’s always going up against them and they frequently find themselves at odds.

At the same time two women, Darla and Drusilla, came out of his past and were figuratively and literally haunting him. He finally just lost patience and locked these girls in a room with a bunch of lawyers and let them have at them. That is, eat and kill these lawyers who’d been making his life miserable. So he took a very dark turn last year.

Then he went back and his people, Wesley, Cordelia and Gunn, a new member of the show, said "We are all that stand between you and darkest night," and he said "I know and you’re all fired".

He fired all these people right in the middle of the season, and creatively, it was a wonderful twist. I was just beginning to get sick of "Cordelia gets a vision, we have fun in the hotel, we go solve a crime." Suddenly he’s fired his people because he knew he had some very dark, dirty work to do, he knew he’d have to hunt down these girls and set them on fire and he knew that to do that he’d have to go to a dark, lonely place. He didn’t want to take his people there with him.

He did all of that stuff and then he came out of that darkness and realised, "Oh my gosh, the people I most need to make amends to are these very people who are in my life, who I work with". So he went back and he made up with the group and he tried his best to be among them.

Then Wesley said to him "Well, I don’t know if we’re ready to come back and work for you again" and Angel said "No, I want to work for you, I want to be a worker among workers". So now Wesley is running the shop and Angel is sort of like the Indian scout. He’s the guy who can go where other people can’t, he knows these monsters, he knows the dark places, and he’s in a surprisingly good place by the beginning of year three.

Where Angel’s going (spoilers)
  What’s in store for Angel in season three?

The thing about Angel is just when he thinks he’s caught up to the present, something from his past comes to haunt him. The very latest thing is that he’s over Buffy, he’s in his own world and then Buffy is killed in her world.

So he has to deal with the grief of that, and our first episode in year three is very much about that. Eventually you learn that he really has dealt with that and moved on in his life, but of course a very terrible and mildly amusing thing from his past comes back to haunt him in a big way. Much like I think happens in life, the one thing that we’ve been really focused on is not the thing that comes back to haunt us. It’s some other little thing we did, some little one night adventure or whatever.

He’s been off to Sri Lanka, [where his friends] think he’s meditating and working through his grief, when in fact he’s in a monastery where all the monks have been taken over by Sra Demons, so he ends up fighting for his life instead of having a quiet meditative time. Basically, in year three, he really puts Buffy to rest and then another shocking thing comes out of his past that will really propel this whole year [forward] in a really dramatic, but slightly fun, way.

There’s a guy from Angel’s past named Holtz who’s a fearless vampire hunter, who hunted Angel and Darla all across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This fellow, through a little magic, appears in the present day because he never completed the task of hunting down Angel. He is here to hunt down and kill Angel and make things right for all the terrible things that Angel did.

To me he’s a very interesting villain. Angel’s conflicted about his guy because in a way the guy is right, Angel did do terrible things. Now, whether or not he should be put to the stake is an issue, but Angel’s attitude towards this guy is, "I kind of agree with him, I did do some bad stuff."

In the course of the season there’s something very near and dear to Angel that everybody wants, including this fellow Holtz who will be the antagonist. There’s a rather big shock at the end of the first episode that will really propel us through this whole year and then another gigantic shock at the end of the year.

Time to grow up
  What sort of themes is season three dealing with?

One of the problems with the show is these people are twenty-something and there is no great myth. With adolescent years [and] middle age, there are great myths for those ages.

Those are times in your life when you’re going through big changes. Although there’s a gazillion shows about people in their twenties - because America’s so in love with youth and beauty - they don’t really mean a lot. You get a lot of second chances in your twenties.

What we’re saying this year is it's time for everybody to grow up. Angel has this curse that if he ever knows perfect bliss, really perfect union with another person in a physical way, he will go bad.

The first part of his curse is that he has a soul and remembers everything he’s ever done. But it’s time for somebody to say to Angel "Time to move on, time to grow up". All of them are grown up this year.

Team spirit
  Tell us what’s happening to all the other characters in season three

Cordelia Chase is almost 180 degrees a different character than she was. She’s still very blunt, a tad vain and very funny, but she now has these tremendous visions that are literally killing her and she’s become a bit of a superhero herself.

I don’t think she can go back be an actress in commercials and want all these shallow things that she wanted before, so she’s really changing, and I think that Angel will be taking a hard second look at her, a kind of look that he’s never taken before.

There is also a wonderful new character named Fred, played by Amy Acker. At the end of the second season, in the last four episodes, all our characters were transported to this other dimension. A dimension in which Angel could walk in the sun and was a noble warrior, except that when he turned into a vampire, he turned into a hideous terrible beast who wanted to kill everything.

[It was also] a dimension in which Wesley was a great general but had to learn to send men to their death, and in the midst of which Cordelia was a fabulous princess. They all got what they’ve always wanted, but there was a terrible twist to that thing.

Fred was a girl who’d been a grad student in physics and had been sucked in this dimension, [where] all humans are slaves. So she became a runaway, living in a cave, out of her mind and scribbling on the walls. Angel rescued her from this dimension and brought her back, so in year three you’ll be seeing Fred, who's a pretty loony girl [after being] locked away in a cave for five years, but charming, funny, wonderful, [with] a big puppy-love crush on Angel.

Both Wesley and Gunn have feelings towards Fred. Angel may realise he has some feelings for Cordelia but they will probably never get expressed because other things will get in the way. Everybody’s moving on, growing up, their lives getting more complicated, with lots more pain.

Gunn is a character who grew up on the streets and really didn’t have his parents much after 13 or 14. This is a guy who never expected to live past 25. Very early on in the season he’ll be dealing with "How can I be working with a vampire when vampires killed my sister?" He really has to come to grips with "Who am I? Where do I belong and why am I even still alive?"

Moving on
  Why did you move Angel's headquarters to a hotel for season two?

Well I can tell you a very simple reason why we moved from the location of the first year.

Our initial idea it was a little film noir / Raymond Chandler notion of "I’m in this kind of cool downtown LA, brown wood place."

But it was an oppressive set. It was physically hard to move around in that set and we said "We’ve got to blow this thing up."

So, the end of year one we blew the thing up to smithereens [and] we put them in a big, beautiful old hotel, because we wanted a new prettier set. Frankly, I was just tired to being in these horrible [sets], these short ceilings. There were pillars everywhere, it was just impossible.

it was a very beautiful set, it was really coolly designed, but just impossible to work in. He’ll stay in the hotel, he doesn’t really need to move on from the hotel, unless Wolfram and and Hart burn him out or something happens to him.

I like the idea of Angel in this hotel where there’s a hundred rooms, and he’s just in one of them, I like the feeling that he’s just a guy alone. I grew up living in funny old hotels because my father was in the funny old hotel business, so I have a special kind of feeling for what it’s like to be not quite a resident and not quite a guest.

That’s sort of what Angel is, he’s got one foot in the human world and one foot in the demon world. His goal like - I think - all of us, [is that] he just wants to be whole and some day he wants to be human.