Seriously:  the Entertainment Weekly interview with Joss Whedon is page after page of quality stuff.  For instance: when asked what character would be his alter ego, Whedon said it would be Topher from Dollhouse.  Why?  Because “he’s a nerd who stays up in the attic by himself controlling people’s lives and telling who they’re going to be that week.”  Which really does sound like the life of a writer/director.

Whedon, of course, finds himself in the same place as many go-to directors these days: caught between making new stuff and making variations on old stuff.  He says:

It’s very important that we start creating new content again.  We can only build on nostalgia so much before we have nothing left to build on.  Before we’re rebooting Spider-Man— again.  It’s dangerous to the culture, and it’s boring to me.

What’s his general rule for telling good stories on a weekly hour-long like Buffy or Firefly?

Have a different reason to tell a story every week and not just have a different story.

That is, I believe, a fine but necessary distinction.

But it’s the end of the interview that really gets me.  He is asked about his own somewhat nihilistic view of life and how his writing counteracts that:

My stories do have hope because that is one of the things that is part of the solution– if there can be one,  We use stories to connect, to care about people, to care about a situation.  To turn the mundane heroic, to make people really think about who they are. . .  We create to fill a gap– not just to avoid the idea of dying, it’s to fill some particular gap in ourselves.  So yeah, I write things where people will lay down their lives for each other.  And on a personal level, I know many wonderful people who are spending their lives trying to help others, or who are just kind and decent . . . But on a macro level, I don’t see that in the world.  So I have a need to create . . . I want to be wrong more than anything.  I hate to say it, it’s that line from The Lord of the Rings— “I give hope to men; I keep none for myself.”  They say it in Elvish, so it sounds supercool.

The “Joss Whedon” issue of Entertainment Weekly is on sale now.  I highly recommend it.