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Jeffrey Overstreet joined a small crowd of journalists at the Serenity film junket in L.A. on Thursday, September 18.

Here's a transcript of a press conference with Joss Whedon regarding the release of Serenity, the challenge of turning a great television series into a feature film, the possibility of sequels, and more.

More transcripts will appear later this week. Stay tuned!

(The questions raised by the press have been paraphrased here. *'d questions were raised by Jeffrey Overstreet.)

How nervous are you about this movie opening?

Wow. Starting with the hard stuff, huh?

I’m actually pretty calm. I am being medicated right now, steadily, to keep me that way.

I got really nervous when I realized that ultimately I have absolutely no idea how this movie is going to do. I believe that if people see it they will like it. That is sort of my first job, and that was more or less accomplished. But I have no idea if they actually will see it.

And if they don’t see it, then how can they like it?

So I panicked. And I freaked out … publicly. Proud of that! And I sort of realized, it’s out of my hands. I will do everything in my power to try and get people to see it, but there’s only so much that’s in my power. And if they don’t, what if they … how can I put this… hate it? Then that’s just what’s going to happen, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I believe in the film. I loved making it. I love what we came up with. I’m proud of all my actors. That’s going to have to sustain me.

That’s me now. Talk to me on the morning of the 30^th when I’m hiding in the bathtub with a hat on.

*I can’t think of any other series where the fans, when they talk about it, spend more time talking about the quality of the writing than anything else. What you do is great. I work with a bunch of writers in Seattle, and they’ve sent me with pages of questions for you. And clearly we won’t get to all of those. So... could you share some of your favorite tips about writing dialogue, what to do, what not to do? What is it that makes the dialogue in Serenity snap?

Part of it was getting to invent the language, which came from a lot of different influences. The movie has that sort of genre-mix feeling and era-mix. And once I had, it reads like a kind of poetry. It’s very easy to write, it rolls of the tongue in a way that nothing I’ve ever written before does.

But in terms of advice… or, my dark secrets?

The most important thing to me is finding everybody’s voice very specifically. I build shows and movies on what I refer to as “the Golden Girls model,” which is, very simply, everybody’s gotta come from a different place, so that everybody’s reaction to something is different and equally valid and equally fun.

Never having anybody say anything that isn’t the next thing they’d say, that isn’t their point of view, that isn’t their perspective… that’s where the humor comes from. Jayne’s perspective on the situation will be different than everybody else’s, and when he speaks, that makes it funny. But at the same time, that’s what makes it valid. 

If a line is just a setup for somebody else to be funny, it’s disingenuous to the character and to the actor portraying them.

That’s the biggest thing for me—everybody, and that includes the Second Thug From Left, has perspective that they bring with them to the piece. And they don’t all have to be eloquent about it in a sort of obnoxious, proto-Tarantino way of “everybody speaks volumes.” (I think he’s done that very well, but I’ve seen the bad version.) But just respecting everybody, and knowing that the whole point of any dialogue is that it’s two people with completely different points of view trying to find a space in the middle. That’s where the conflict comes from, that’s where the humor comes from, that’s where the humanity comes from. That’s the biggest thing for me.

And I think it’s also what makes people respond to all the characters—they’re all very present, all of the time.

There are so many central characters in Firefly that you introduced over the course of the series. Here, you have a two-hour movie, and yet you have the same large cast of characters. What were the challenges you faced because of the change in format?

The challenge was to get everybody in there.

Obviously on a TV show, you need a bunch of “peeps” if you want to create internal conflict and it’s not just a sort of “Problem of the Week” kind of show.

And then, when I was given the opportunity to make a movie of this, yes, all of a sudden I had nine characters. And that’s a lot of people to put in a movie.

But ultimately, what it gave me was the chance to have a kind of a Platoon feeling… the band as this great big group of people [where] you can focus on who you want to.

Obviously, on a show you’re going to give everybody equal time to an extent, and you’re going to make sure that everybody’s [developed.] In a film, you’re going to say, “Okay, Mal is the hero, he’s the guy we have to be watching. We come in through River--she’s kind of his proxy. It’s ... about how she affects him and how they help each other.' (That doesn’t mean, however, that anyone is expendable.) You make sure that everybody’s perspective brings something different to the movie, and everybody’s physicality, their actions, and what they’re useful for….

A lot of movies center around one character, and maybe two others, that are defined, and then everybody else fades into the distance. For some films that’s very useful. But because I wanted this sort of chaotic “everything-is-happening-at-once” feeling of being on that ship, and being in this world, having a large cast is useful because they all bring so much texture to it. Hopefully it isn’t confusing, but it means it’s very lively and it’s very lived-in.

Do you have ideas for the sequel, if you get to make a sequel?

It’s very sweet to mention the word ‘sequel.’ Obviously that’s the way my brain works. It continues to tell stories.

I’ve written sequels in my head for movies that other people made... all the time. I had a great idea for The Fly 2 before they made The Fly 2, and I never told anybody about it. But it was really cool!

It’s inevitable that I do that. And of course, I love this universe. I love these people. I would jump at the chance to do it again. 

But I couldn’t think about that while I was making it because, ultimately, you have to make [this one.]

Everyone kept saying, ‘You’re making a trilogy?’  ‘No, it’s just a film.’ ‘So… a trilogy?’ ‘Just the one!’ It’s a trilogy if you make two that are so good there’s a third.

That was the only thing I could think about. I had to NOT think about where it came from—the series—or think about where it may go—a franchise—and just make this one thing an experience worth having. The rest will either fall in place or it won’t. If you focus on that, you’re a dead man.

Now that I’ve finished it and I’ve started to market it, I think about it all the time. But I don’t tell anybody that. Except just now.

Tell us about working with Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Chiwetel is extraordinary, and I gave him a really tough job because the operative is self-proclaimed, and very specifically, undefined. Because he refuses to let himself be defined. He doesn’t consider himself a person. He considers himself less than that.

I wanted to create a villain who was more an antagonist than just a villain. Again, if you don’t believe the perspective of the person, then they become just a plot device. The idea of having somebody completely idealistic and dedicated to decency and nobility as my villain, and somebody who’s self-involved and cut-off and a criminal as my hero, that’s kind of basically what my film’s about. Only our messy, repulsive humanity can save us from the deadly notion of perfection.

Chiwetel came in, and the reason particularly that I hired him was them big ol’ eyes. He’s just so soulful. He brings such a sense of “decent disappointment” at how things have worked out in the world and the people around him. He doesn’t play anything arch at all. He understood completely what this guy was, that he was a decent man who was actually a serial killer and doesn’t really understand himself that well. He played it.

And there were times that we had to shoot it more than one way because we didn’t know how much we wanted him to telegraph the aggression that’s actually in this guy that allows him to be so good at killing people… and how much we wanted to let him subsume himself and be quiet and decent… and when is the moment when he’s going to sort of take over?

Like when he’s in with Dr. Matthias… there’s a long time where he’s being kind of obsequious, and [saying] “This is your space, it’s your world, I’m just living in it.’  And then there’s another moment where he takes over.

And that is somethin that we played with a lot, so he didn’t come off as having no energy, but he didn’t come off as… you know… a moustache-twirler. I could never have written that. And Chiwetel is so sympathetic… He could play that. He has. He can play anything. But he’s definitely the right person to play someone who is full of unbelief.

Talk about the challenges of opening it up from a series to a film, and how did you make it accessible to people who haven’t seen the Firefly series.

Ultimately, that’s certainly the hardest job that I ever had. It’s a question of opening it up and a question of closing it down.

Opening it up in the sense of, ‘We need a gigantic epic story that is not the kind of thing these people usually get involved in in the TV series, which is more mundane. You need a reason for this to be a movie, a big… well, big for me anyway…. budget movie. And a Universal film, in particular. An action movie that has to work on a certain scale.

That’s the opening. The closing comes in making sure it is accessible to everybody, that you explain everybody as much as you need to, explain the world as much as you need to, that you begin and you end… that you have an arc for the characters, as well as a plot that has a question and an answer.

Oftentimes I’ve said, once or twice already, that the difference between movies and TV shows is TV shows are a question and movies are an answer.

In this we had to have a definitive statement about freedom and humanity, and what we need and what we should be allowed to have as people… which is all of our flaws. And then I answer that and make a definitive statement, and put a period… or hopefully an exclamation point on that… as opposed to just sort of pursuing the question for years with the TV show.

Firefly has been a TV show, comic books, and now a film. What’s your preference?

They definitely all have different strengths. Firefly and Serenity are really two different animals, and that’s very deliberate on my part because if they weren’t, I’m making a glorified episode of a television show and I have no business wasting Universal’s money.

I spent the bulk of the writing, the bulk of the editing, just trying to make it work for people who don’t know the series.

But the movies give you a chance to do something extraordinary, epic, and realize … whatever insane vision you might have… and turn a ballerina into a martial arts star, which is always a good thing to do with your time if you can.

TV gives you an opportunity to explore things on a smaller level, which was very gratifying. It’s a different thing. I miss it. I miss Firefly because Serenity is not Firefly… which was deliberate.

But the great thing was that the TV show was deliberately small in scope, [like] the people within it. And the movie is deliberately an epic filled with small people.

And that’s the kind of story I like to tell… the story of when people who have no business being in an epic get caught up in one… how do they react? Do they fold, or do they fight?

The film answers many questions raised in the television show. Are these answers the same things we would have seen if the television show had continued? Or did you change the conclusions because of the limitations of the film?

Very little was changed for the movie. Obviously things were dropped. Obviously and most importantly things were distilled into a fine two-hour liqueur instead of a more watered-down longer version.

Yes, that was where I was going with the idea of River and her secret and the Reavers and theirs, and how it all connected. I had planned to get there in a couple of years instead of in a couple of hours.

But apart from not being able to service all of these subplots for all of these different people, that is exactly where I was going. Which made that the easy part—structuring it. Pitching it was, ‘This is where this series was building to, and I think if you took this as a separate story, it is an epic story and it has a great deal of meaning for today.’

Do you take suggestions from the fans for character development or the stories?

Legally speaking, no. [laughs]

They seldom will actually pitch things. I use them as a barometer of what it is they respond to, who it is they’re responding to. ‘Oh, they’re not responding to this character. Let’s go find out what’s inside this character and makes them tick…  And open them up so that they do.' Stuff like that.

Also because the series is not ongoing, people aren’t going ‘Oh, you can do this and you can do that.’ If they haven’t seen the series, they’re not going to tell me what to do. If they have seen it, some of them may criticize some of the things that I did. But generally speaking , they’re just going, ‘That was fun!’

*In the conversation between Shepherd Book and Mal, you raise interesting issues about faith and God. That shouldn’t surprise us, since other sci-fi epics like The Matrix and Star Wars dealt rather obviously with spiritual questions and conflicts. In the overarching story of Firefly, is there something besides the social and political themes, something spiritual you’re trying to bring across through this story?

I think we all have different takes on it, we all have different things to say about spirituality. [Star Wars and The Matrix] used more deliberate religious iconography because they’re coming from that mythic place in a way that, I would say, Buffy did. But Firefly and Serenity don’t.

Again, to come back to the question and the answer – in Firefly there was a conflict between Mal and the Shepherd that was deliberate, which was that Mal is an atheist and he’s beyond that… kind of faithless. He doesn’t trust people. He doesn’t really think of anything as a greater good. Even though he has a moral code himself, he can’t really admit or understand it. Shepherd Book is very clear on his faith, and there was a conflict between the two of them that was supposed to be ongoing throughout the series.

Obviously, the movie being more about answers, I had one definitive statement to make, which was simply [that] the power of belief, the power of something greater than yourself doesn’t necessarily have to mean religion.

Shepherd Book himself says that. He doesn’t say, ‘Find God.’ He says, ‘Find your way.’

Shepherd Book obviously believes in God. He believes that God is a part of what’s going on. Mal doesn’t, but Shepherd doesn’t judge him for that. He says, ‘The point is not whether or not you believe what I believe. The point is that you don’t believe in anything. And it’s killing you. And it’s tearing your crew apart. And it’s making you do stupid things.’

The word ‘belief’ comes into the film a lot for that reason. It’s a simple act of subsuming yourself to the idea of something that is great. Believing that there is something worth structuring your life around that will direct your moral decisions, and sometimes [help] you make harder decisions… that is important.  What that belief is... is not.

Is your leadership style Mal’s leadership style?

Yes and no. To an extent my interest in Mal as a leader was built partially [by] my years of running shows and seeing that dynamic from a different point of view.

The seventh season of Buffy was similar to that respect. It had a lot to do with the pitfalls of being a leader.

What’s interesting to me about that concept is the ‘removed’ sort of monstrosity who doesn’t accept the responsibility of being a leader. Because ultimately, when you’re in the service of something greater, or even just when you’re in the position of having to make the decisions for everybody, you are removed from them. It’s interesting to me because it requires a toughness that is almost dehumanizing, and when he does take up the mantle, that’s when he starts to become really dangerous.

To an extent, the Operative embodies that too. Belief is dangerous, and a leader has to have that very strongly. Even if the only thing he’s trying to do is keep these people alive… their welfare, even if it’s paramount to him… he’s going to do things are either horrific or even incomprehensible to them. I find that fascinating.

For some reason my leadership style is a little more abrasive, and for some reason a little less handsome.

How’s your progress on the Wonder Woman film?

I’m just writing it. I’m having the time of my life. And no, it’s not cast.

Who would win in a fight? River or Buffy?

Wow, nobody’s ever asked me that, and I’m shocked!

Ultimately, I can’t say. I’m going to have to watch. Buffy’s got the super strength, but River’s got all kinds of crazy training. She’s not a super hero in the same way, but she’s very focused. It’s tough. It’s a smack-down. Be there.