Was the big budget a problem for season six?
As a matter of fact, in the first draft of the outline for that script, the opening action scene where Buffy is trying to escape from Glory with Dawn, was massive. It was a ten minute long escape scene. Buffy gets smacked into a tree a hundred feet away, she ends up beating Glory with a sheared off lamp pole, there was big, big action.
Joss read it and said "This is great, this is wonderful, Kubrick couldn’t film this in 20 days with five million dollars, so cut everything". I’m like "Great, okay, that’s fine, as long as I get the Knights chasing the Winnebago".
So we write fairly detailed outlines, anywhere from 10 to 15 pages long, that have all this stuff in it, so Joss can take a look and say "We can’t afford this, cut back on that". Then at the script level, Joss again will take a look at it and Gareth Davies, our [line] producer will take a look at it and we’ll do some more fine tuning to make sure it’s actually achievable, that we have enough time and money to film it.
