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Marti Noxon - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage August 23rd 2001

Getting Started
  How did your interest in writing develop?

I started in school. My dad was a documentary film maker - he does documentaries for National Geographic.

I quickly figured out that I wanted to do something similar, but I wanted to manipulate reality rather than wait for things to happen.

In school I was into drama and all that kind of stuff. When I got out, I started working as an assistant and wrote a lot of spec material. Actually, I was working as a secretary and writing plays when I got Buffy. I had sold one other thing and I was writing a lot of spec features and stuff like that, so Buffy’s my first big gig. I got very lucky.

Ascension
  Rising through the ranks of the Buffy production team. How did it happen?

I think it was the right time and right place. I came on the show when there was some fluctuation going on with other writers.

Now we have a group of seven or eight people who can all write a Buffy script, no problem. We had a much smaller group then, and I was just given a lot of responsibility because we needed people to write the episodes.

In my first year I think I wrote seven episodes - maybe not [all] credited - but I did work on other things. I think it’s just the good fortune of meeting Joss and us having a certain kind of understanding of each other and the fact that he’s not afraid to promote women. He actually really believes in strong women, he doesn’t just believe in them on TV, so that’s excellent.

He’s the kind of person who’s not intimidated by letting other people do their jobs, and that’s one of the most amazing things about him. A lot of people with his talent still can’t allow other people to be good at what they do or aspire to be good at what they do and he’s great. He just encourages all of us to get better and helps us to get better.

In my case, he just encouraged me to keep trying new things. Last year, he was the one who said "You really should direct." I was terrified. I wanted to, but I was scared and he was like, "No, this is how you will learn how the show really runs and works."

I had been writing for a really long time before I actually got my first job, so in some ways I was just ready. I was not 22, right out of college, and I didn’t do a chicken run, I didn’t just go "La la." I was ready.

I think some of that I brought a little maturity to it, and that you need because of the stress and the pressure and the pace.

What would Joss do?
  Can you explain what an Executive Producer does? Are you the day-to-day glue that holds things together?

I actually like to think of myself as the gum, I’m more like the gum under your shoe that sorts of sticks things together. Basically, when Joss is not around I now oversee all of the production, I oversee most of the stuff that goes on on set, and I work with the writers and try to break the stories.

I just do basically everything that [Joss] would try to do while he was here, except with about three quarters of the genius. But, and I have said this before, I spend a lot of time just thinking, "What would Joss do?" There’s a story about Billy Wilder. His mentor was a director names Lubich and he had a sign up in his office which said "What would Lubich do?" So, in Joss’s absence, I basically have a sign up in my office which says, "What would Whedon do?" and I try to think like him and do like him.

We have an incredible group of writers now, and all of them are also involved in production and editing and all of the many facets of the show. So, in his absence, we all fall into line and do our jobs, and when he’s around I still do some more than I used to do but it’s still his toy so... I haven’t taken the key.

Great minds think alike?
  Do you and Joss have particular writing strengths and weakness that compliment each other?

Well, pathetically for all of us, Joss doesn’t seem to have any weaknesses. We’re still waiting...

I know I sound like incredibly fawning, but it’s all sincere because I have yet to see something he can’t do.

However there are things that I can’t do or don’t have as much interest in doing. Joss goes to a whole different place than I do. Before I got here I mostly wrote plays and movies about suicide and death, despair and ghosts. My background is really in hardcore drama. In fact Joss called me the "suicide girl" for the first year that I was here because all of my projects had a theme of wanting to off yourself.

The episodes you see from me which have that kind of dramatic bent are just because that’s where my writing was when I got here and I’ve had the opportunity to keep going in that direction.

I’d love to do comedy and humour but, for me, it’s not the first instinct. It takes me about three weeks to circle around a joke as you can see from the gum comment I just made. I would have to do like a second and third draft of that joke before I perfected it, whereas Joss is funny on the fly, so there’s that.

Buffy vs. Dracula
  Mythology, romance and grabbing ratings

I was a big fan of the mythology. I think I had my [first] inkling of what a sexual experience might be when I saw Dracula with Frank Langela. The pointy collars, being sexy, coming through long windows and bodice busting and all that stuff. When I was very young, Dracula just totally captured my imagination and I always saw this as a sort of great romance.

The supernatural quality didn’t interest me as much as the longing for eternal love, so the whole notion of Dracula being this sort of symbolic figure was a part of it. Moreso, it was about the mythology of what it was to be a Slayer and what it was to be the best or the greatest in your field.

[Dracula] is saying to her, "Darkness is your gift, you have some of me in you." He was sort of urging her to take her gift in a different direction, and we just thought that he was symbolic of somebody who had reached the pinnacle of his "oeuvre" and he was saying "You could be my queen." He basically thought she’d make an amazing vampire and that, to me, was thematically resonating with all the questions of identity that Buffy goes through in Season Five.

We didn’t just do it as a ratings grabber, we didn’t think in those terms until we realised… initially it was going to be just another vampire who rode a horse and was all cool. We [then] realised it could actually be the real Dracula because I kept saying "Dracula, Dracula," and Joss was like "Why not Dracula?" Nobody owns Dracula, he’s public domain, so we never really thought of it as a stunt until then.

Of course it turned out to be a stunt, and in some ways I think it raised expectations for the episode that we couldn’t quite fulfil in an hour. I felt a little bit hindered in the sense that he’s such a big myth and we tried to squeeze him into 42 minutes. I feel like we could have maybe done more with him.

We tried to pack a lot into that episode and it was actually one of the hardest episodes we ever had to break. I think I wrote an entire draft of that script which we threw out and then wrote a whole another draft of that script and usually things go a little smoother.

That was a tortured project. We re-shot the ending, because we were trying to pack a lot of ideas and a lot of sex appeal and a lot of jokes into one episode which had its good points and its bad points.

Into the Woods (Spoilers)
  Writing for Riley

Every time you have a character who is romantic interest, you grow very attached to him and to the idea of him, but that was our whole idea - romance never goes well in Sunnydale.

We knew that Riley’s shelf life was limited, especially being such a good guy and such a straight man. I think we all felt that ultimately he and Buffy wouldn’t work out because the stresses between superhero and non-superhero being were just going to be too much for them to handle. We knew that was inevitable and that’s what we played in episodes where Riley’s character starts to go a tad darker.

It was difficult, but by the time he actually flew, I felt like we’d really earned it. The whole challenge of that episode was how to do it in a way that felt fresh, because we’d already done a big leaving with Angel of course, and it had different issues.

Some of what comes up in that episode is Buffy’s own culpability in what happened - accepting that she had a part in it. It’s not just fate, it’s like, "Oh, I screwed up."

It was an amazing episode to direct [for the first time] because it was just really rich in character stuff and the stuff that I tend to do. I just don’t see myself doing a big troll musical farce. Maybe some day. I don’t want to say that I couldn’t - I certainly would love to do something like - that but for my first thing it was great to do something that was really emotional and really lived in the lives of the characters more than just some external thing that happens to them.

Forever (Spoilers)
  Did you feel intimidated, following an episode as important as The Body?

Absolutely. I was so glad, at least in the United States, [that] the episodes aired three weeks apart. There was this nice long lull for people to forget "the genius" and then for me to come up with my follow-up.

To me, the show always is the most affecting - this is just my personal feeling - but the show’s always the most affecting when the supernatural element rings very true to something someone would do or want in their life.

To me, the idea of wanting to defy death is just an inherent, almost mythological, iconic notion. It’s something we can relate to, so any time that the menace or the supernatural thing comes out of some kind of real universal longing, I’m so into it .

I felt that’s what that show was all about. We were just thinking, "If you were in Sunnydale and someone you loved died, you would absolutely call on the forces of darkness." That’s what you’d do, because in that stage of mourning you are not accepting - you are bargaining.

I was really glad that we could go there with our story. It was just a really good episode for me to get my hands on just because those tend to be the arenas that I like to work in.

It was hard to follow Joss, and he as a director is light years ahead of anybody. I don’t even try to, I’m just trying to figure out what eyelines are still and trying to give it a little panache without going overboard. I don’t want to look like a student film-maker either. I just try to tell the story and use the camera when it made sense emotionally, not when it didn’t.

The experience of directing in both cases was hugely helpful in terms of understanding how the show works and how to write. It helped me figure out how to write.

The Gift (Spoilers)
  Keeping things fresh after 100 episodes

One of the things that I think is interesting about The Gift is that in that episode, I think Buffy achieves a kind of peace. She feels a sense of completion, because when she figures out what the gift is, she knows her destiny. In a way it’s an interesting thing because the series comes to a natural end and I think a lot of us thought that episode 22 of season 5 would be our natural end.

I certainly didn’t think I’d still be writing Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and I certainly didn’t think that I’d be loving it and passionate about it into my 100th episode or close to it.

I think the really amazing thing about where we’re at in terms of arcing the next couple of years - because now we have a couple more years for sure - is that we really got to start the show kind of fresh. Now that we’re doing Season Six episodes, I think everyone agrees that we feel really invigorated and there’s this whole kind of clean slate feeling.

You get Buffy with a whole new set of problems, you know, obviously like how do you get undead. That would be a real obvious one... We have obvious loss throughout Season Five, we have lots of things taken away from our main characters and a lot of people poised on the brink of adulthood. So we’re coming at the next 2 years [as if] it’s almost a new show starring the same characters in very different circumstances with very different perspectives on life, Buffy most of all.

It turned out to be one of the greatest things we could do. We didn’t even know we were switching networks [at the time] but we really all feel like Season Six is a re-birth. The strange thing is that we just have no idea how long it can go. It feels like it can go almost indefinitely, so I can just see us all [saying] "Well, it think Buffy should be played in sock puppets, I think Buffy should be wearing dentures and dealing with orthopaedists."

Spoil my Fun
  You've had a lot of problems recently with leaked spoilers. What's your message to those people who do leak important plot points?

It’s funny, because I just wrote a letter to one of the guys at Ain't It Cool News and basically said, "I want you to understand what our perspective is, which is that we love that people care so much about the show, but we work so hard to bring it to you fresh and we work so hard to surprise you and entice you and do all of this stuff."

That’s the stuff of our daily living, trying to work an audience from week to week and really bring them the best we can give them and when stuff gets spoiled... I said this in the letter, that people unwittingly give stuff away. If it gets into the public consciousness there’s ways that you could find out, even if you’re not someone looking for spoilers. You know how someone ruins the end of a movie unwittingly, it just sucks, and I just hate that that information gets out there for people who don’t want it.

It really just diffuses the energy of what we try to do, so I wrote him this appeal just saying, "Look..." - because a lot of the stuff they have is not correct, but there are bits and pieces that are - "if you love the show, this is about helping us keeping that energy going." In fact, he surprised me because he wrote back and said, "You know, you’re really right and we’re really sorry and can you feed us information, of course..."

It’s mostly about that, it’s about trying to protect the audience’s enjoyment. We get such a kick out of making people feel things, that’s what we live for and when we feel like the endeavour gets messed up by the internet, it just really frustrates us. It’s all about "Let us entertain you, let us make you smile".