Objects in Space - Joss' dvd commentary

POSTED BY: punkinpuss
UPDATED: Friday, January 2, 2004 14:22
VIEWED: 5034
PAGE 1 of 1

PUNKINPUSS

Friday, January 2, 2004 10:10 AM

A day late and a dollar short -- a New Year's prezzie. Well, I don't know what misguided notion I had, but I've transcribed Joss' dvd commentary on Objects in Space. It has some fascinating stuff about philosophy, his intentions in writing this particular episode and the characters of River and Jubal Early. My notes (very few and only for 'splaining the things that wouldn't be obvious if you don't have the dvd) are in parentheses. If you notice any glaring errors, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Quote:

---

[Teaser]
Joss Whedon:
Look at the planet, on the right, going down in frame. Look at the ship, as we're going through it. Look at the girl, as we hear Early's voice. I'm going to do commentary on the episode for you here, but I'm not gonna to do it exactly the way I've been doing it. I'd like to try and explain how this episode came to be a little more specifically than I usually do, since it's kind of an odd one. It's one of my favorites that I ever shot, but uhm, not normal. So, hopefully there will be some extremely witty anecdotal stuff about what we did on that day, and how that guy messed up his lines, and how Nathan split his pants, again, but in the meanwhile I may go off picture sometimes just to take you through the process of coming up with this episode and what it means to me.

The first thing I need to talk about is Summer, who luckily is on the screen right now as I say that. Summer Glau who I met when she did Angel. She is a ballerina and played one on Angel and that's how I got to know her as an actress.

Summer in this is very much, almost a formal device and nothing is more important in this episode than her feet because we're going to be talking alot about the way she relates to this ship physically. And as a dancer you can see very well how she moves and how she expresses physically with her entire body what she's feeling emotionally and the connection between those two things is very important. I'm enormously impressed by what she did in this...things like coming down the stairs here which I had not even noticed when I was shooting, I only saw it in the edit, how she experiences coming down those stairs, it's a very big deal.

She's also important because this episode was designed to be about River, to start dealing with the story of River. What we're seeing obviously are psychic visions of things we've either heard or don't yet understand. We're seeing the teaser through her perspective, which is somewhat disassociative from reality.

That's very important for what I ended up trying to say with this episode, but first let's just talk about how this episode came to be at all. Which was me knowing that I wanted to do an episode where River became a part of the group and really had no ideas. Just an embarrassing lack of ideas or a thundering ton of ideas that frankly didn't come together at all. Spent a long time working on it, nothing, nothing, nothing. Finally called Tim Minnear in the morning, I said Tim, I'm dying here. I've got this idea, I got that idea, what do you think, is this good, is it fun? He said Baba Fett. And I'd like to stress that he didn't say Boba Fett. This is a man who has dressed up like Logan at conventions, still couldn't say Boba Fett right. In fact we started calling him Bobbie Fett after awhile because we were all so embarrassed about Tim's mistake. However, those two words, mispronounced though they may have been, brought me to this episode in a way that I -- hey, feet! -- never thought possible because like Our Mrs. Reynolds, all he did was throw the pebble in the pond. Give me the ripples. And those are the best episodes of a show like this. Take one extraordinarily strong element, in this case a preternaturally cool, nearly psychic bounty hunter who is able to board their ship from the middle of space and mess with the entire crew and see what it has to say about our people when you add that element.

Now, to get back to River and her feet. Summer, of course, can do a shot like that,

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME