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Joss Whedon interview

As you can see from my blog's title, I love Joss Whedon. So I'm really happy that not only is his movie, The Avengers, is coming out on friday, but that he is getting a lot of press because of it. He deserves to be a superstar and hopefully The Avengers makes that happen. So if you weren't planning on seeing The Avengers, or having seen The Cabin in the Woods, I highly encourage you to go see it. I doubt you'll be disappointed. Also, if you aren't familiar with Joss check out this interview with GQ. Here's something I didn't know about his career:

Regardless: It is a true there-is-no-God injustice that it's taken this long for somebody to give Whedon, whose entire oeuvre is a study in how to make comic-bookish subject matter live and breathe realistically and emotionally on-screen, a big-ticket superhero movie to direct. He's come close, a few times. Most recently there was Wonder Woman. He was going to write and direct it for Joel Silver. The archetypal female-hero-worshipping auteur and the ultimate female superhero—perfect, right? Didn't happen. There were others, before that. A pre-Robert Downey Iron Man. And there was Batman. Don't even ask him about Batman.

Okay, fine: It was a while ago, between the day-glo Joel Schumacher sequels and the Chris Nolan reboot (which Whedon loves, don't get him wrong.) There was a lot more, in Whedon's take, about the orphaned Bruce Wayne as a morbid, death-obsessed kid. There was a scene—Whedon used to well up, just thinking about it—where young Bruce tries to protect this girl from being bullied in an alley, an alley like the one his parents were murdered in.

"And he's like this tiny 12-year-old who's about to get the shit kicked out of him. And then it cuts to Wayne Manor, and Alfred is running like something terrible has happened, and he finds Bruce, and he's back from the fight, and he's completely fine. And Bruce is like, 'I stopped them. I can stop them.' That was the moment for me. When he goes 'Oh, wait a minute; I can actually do something about this.' The moment he gets that purpose, instead of just sort of being overwhelmed by the grief of his parents' death."

So he goes in and pitches this. He's on fire, practically shaking. "And the executive was looking at me like I was Agent Smith made of numbers. He wasn't seeing me at all. And I was driving back to work, and I was like, 'Why did I do that? Why did I get so invested in that Batman story? How much more evidence do I need that the machine doesn't care about my vision? And I got back to work and got a phone call that Firefly was cancelled. And I was like, 'It was a rhetorical question! It was not actually a request! Come on!'"

Joss doing a Batman movie would blow my mind. I'm not sure what he has planned after The Avengers. And I'm not sure how long the studio wants to wait after The Dark Knight Rises. But that needs to happen. Someone please make that happen.

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