When the interviewer is coming from a different place, Joss's answers are always more interesting. Long red hair, hmm? I'd like to see a pic of Joss as a kid.

Lioness | May 24, 22:07 CET

Great interview indeed Simon. It was a interesting and fun read. Made me love Joss like I used to all over again.

the Groosalugg | May 24, 22:49 CET

The webpage properties has a date stamp of 2005.10.07. Not definitive, but it is a good indicator...

dcubed | May 24, 23:51 CET

His first book, Varjak Paw (http://www.varjakpaw.com) is about a cat who does martial arts

Oh my god. I am so buying this book - and I'm not kidding.

gossi | May 25, 00:40 CET

Oh my. Oh my, oh my, oh my.

This is exactly the direction I'm going in my Slayage paper on Joss and Bakhtin. Except that I used more words to say it.

MissKittysMom | May 25, 00:47 CET

That rocked! Thanks Simon. Whenever Joss talks about feminism/gender roles/etc. I get all mushy. Ahh...

bravegal | May 25, 01:15 CET

Lioness, I think there is a pic of Joss with long red hair floating around the net. Its not a kids pic though.

Kessie | May 25, 01:19 CET

Kessie, the picture I suspect you are referring to is here. Just scroll down the page a bit and it's on the right hand side.

alien lanes | May 25, 01:28 CET

Frodo Baggins!

eddy | May 25, 01:32 CET

Aw, that was a great interview. As a manish boy, this is the reason why I love/ have loved/ will always love Joss' work.

CaptainB | May 25, 01:52 CET

I so want to read Joss Whedon, Wonder Boy any new information about a release.

Derf | May 25, 01:52 CET

Yikes. Joss as a New Romantic (well the hair is anyway, no make-up that I can see ;).

Good interview. Some insight into his childhood (though writers often tend to have reasonably similar backgrounds - they're a lot like serial killers that way ;) and, as always, he brings the funny.

Interesting to read about his 'light-bulb' moment with the metaphor approach and to see confirmed what I thought myself about 'Firefly' which is to say, with sci-fi you don't really need to use the same metaphor rich tack because you can address all kinds of different ideas pretty directly (if anything he literalised some things e.g. space as frontier became 'Look, a frontier ! In space !').

Saje | May 25, 01:59 CET

Very interesting and funny interview. The picture you linked, dashboardprophet, looks very much like a philosopher in college -- or lead guitar in a garage band! Yo, that's some red hair, dude! ;-)

billz | May 25, 02:06 CET

Oh, my, that's a good interview and wow, Joss with the flowing red tresses LOL! I love it.

As always, it's fascinating to see how Joss' approach to writing has developed. He's often mentioned that Ripley had a big influence on the evolution of Buffy, but I don't think he'd talked about it in terms of metaphor before. Good stuff.

punkinpuss | May 25, 02:13 CET

Excellent read.

ramses 2 | May 25, 02:18 CET

Not mentioned is that it's illustrated by none other than the amazing Dave McKean. On top of that McKean is currently working adapting the book into a movie for Jim Henson Studios!

Matt_Fabb | May 25, 03:51 CET

Yeah, I'm thinking about getting it too. My brother has a birthday coming up and I know he'd love this.

electricspacegirl | May 25, 04:24 CET

I love to hear this man speak. Great interview.

cheryl | May 25, 07:57 CET

Every word from his mouth makes me love him more; he and his all-loving acceptance of femininity (his pink backpack kicks all kinds of butt) are adorable.

dottikin | May 25, 08:51 CET

Great interview.

Reddygirl | May 26, 06:45 CET

I recently bought the Alien Quadrilogy from Play.com, and I was looking forward to seeing if Joss would appear in the Alien4-bonus material. He did. (With lots of red hair btw :))

I knew from before (from having read numerous interviews as well as the book "Joss Whedon: The Genius behind Buffy") that Joss was unhappy with how Alien4 turned out, especially how they had changed the ending. However, in the Alien4-bonus material he (and many of the other people who were interviewed) stated that the finished script was not that different from the original.

I'm confounded. I don't understand how he could be unhappy with the final product when the script wasn't changed all that much..

Can anyone explain this?

(Oh and the bonus-material also includes the complete original script by Joss Whedon.. so the DVD is definitely worth the money (£17 at Play.com).

[wcip]Angel | May 26, 16:59 CET

[wcip]Angel, I agree that the Quadrilogy is very worth it - and Joss comes across wonderfully on the AR bonus disc. I especially like the fact that Sigourney Weaver and others pay direct tribute to his conception for the movie.

Have to confess, I don't remember hearing any comments that the finished script had not been changed much from J's original. As I recall it, they didn't really address that subject at all - which was itself weird. It went from "wow, Joss's script was great - we were really enthusiastic" (aside from one of the producers, right, who didn't like it?) to talking about the movie, neatly eliding the BIG changes that were made. Or, at least, that's my memory. I could be very wrong.

(ETA) Forgot to add my praise for the interview - excellent stuff.

SoddingNancyTribe | May 26, 21:37 CET