The second season of “Dollhouse” premieres tonight on FOX. Want to know what season two has in store for the dolls? Here are excerpts from a conference call interview with show creator Joss Whedon:
How will Echo, and of course the many other characters she is flashing to, come into her own this season?
Basically, through force of will. She did have all those personalities dumped into her at once, and as we pick up, we’re going to find out that that’s starting to affect her. Rather than be at sea in between engagements, she’s much more directed and driven, and even in her Doll state is growing and learning and starting to try to access these personalities to see what they can help her with, because she has a mission that she understands now, which is to get back to her personality and get everybody back to theirs.
How many seasons do you see Dollhouse going for?
Dollhouse, the premise is limited, and I think by season 17, you’re really going to see us repeating ourselves.
Last season you began with a number of restating pilot episodes where you wanted to make sure that you could bring in new viewers. This season doesn’t begin with that sort of episode. Could you talk about how you approached the idea of new viewers following the show?
Well, we always try to make, especially in the first episode of the season, we try and make the premise clear enough so that if you haven’t been watching it, you don’t have to do a huge amount of math. There’s a lot of exposition in the first pilot, in the first episode of the season, to help that. But at the end of the day, you do have to go, “Well, if they don’t get the premise…” We’ve even rejiggered the opening credits to make it clearer. They’ll either become involved in these peoples’ stories or they won’t. You have to move slow enough so people can grab a hold and jump on with you, but you have to keep moving.
How arced is the show going to be this season?
The show is going to be pretty arc-y. Clearly, what people responded to was the workings of the Dollhouse and the progression of the characters in it, and we’re going to honor that. At the same time, I’m very much of the mind that you do need to resolve something in an episode. You can’t just create a series of twists and turns. You need an episode to have a sense of completion, so there will still be engagements, or at least problems that need to be dealt with, but they will feed into the main arc as well.
Obviously, you can’t give too much away, but is any of [the storyline from unaired episode “Epitaph One”] going to factor in to Dollhouse, or are you just totally throwing it out?
No, no, we’re absolutely not throwing it out. It had originally been my intention to start in that era and then come back, but I just had too much information in my first episode. What we’re talking about doing is perhaps revisiting that timeline towards the end of the 13 in a similar fashion, but we’re also looking at the show through the lens of that episode and saying, “Well, this is taking us to a more global concept of how this power is used and abused.” That’s a lot of what informs the season. You don’t have to have seen it to understand that, but it helps if you do. I think it adds a layer.
There were a lot of people who were worried that you might be cancelled after your first season. What do you think it was that convinced FOX to sign you on for another round, and hopefully longer?
I think it’s the nature of the business and the nature of the fan base. The nature of the fan base is, they’re in it for the long haul, and they’re nurturing, and they’re intense about it, and they will see it through. They will stick with it, and that means years after it’s cancelled. Firefly still sells, Buffy still sells, and that’s also a business thing for the studio. They’re in it for the long haul, because they know the long haul is how my work pays off. I don’t make hit shows. I make shows that stick around, that people come to long after they would have stopped generating revenue in the old system.
With the advent of DVD and the eventual monetization of online, there’s a market there that exists beyond your Nielsen numbers, and the fans showing up and DVRing, and buying a DVD, and proving on all my other projects that they don’t do these things lightly, that it runs deep in them, means that the base doesn’t have to be as broad for the studio to think it’s worth it to try and eke out another season.
I have read a couple of interviews with Eliza Dushku in which she talks about how she had a hand in developing her character. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the ways in which she helped shape who Echo has become and will become.
Well, she really wants to dance burlesque. We keep forgetting to put that in. Eliza has specific things she’s interested in, specific things she feels comfortable with. Sometimes I like to go to that place, because I know that she can knock it out of the park, and sometimes I like to go in the opposite direction to take her out of her comfort zone, because that’s the best thing you can do with an actor.
The fact is, she shapes it because she is very specific as a person. She’s very specific in the way she presents, and even though there are many different aspects to that, people don’t usually get to see how funny she can be, how elegant. She doesn’t always have to play the tough girl, but she really just presents. It was a conversation about all of the different things she was supposed to be, or had been, or was trying to be, or trying to get away from that led to the creation of the show. It made me think, “Wait a minute. That’s what the show should be about.” So it wasn’t so much that she said, “I’d like to be the following things,” although we talked about what the characters are, it’s just that she is so many people that we pluck from them. She did go bow hunting. I understand, however, that she herself was not hunted.
I’d like to know a little bit more about the relationships that are coming up this season – what it’s going to be like with Echo and Paul, and even among the Dolls this year?
Victor and Sierra just can’t keep their hands off each other. They’re like monkeys, and it’s something that we’re going to be treating, they’re going to be seeing through for a while. It makes some people very uncomfortable and sometimes it’s just extremely sweet. Sometimes it’s just funny.
But Echo is very much building herself, and she sees it as an indication that they’re ready to be pushed to a level like hers. She’s looking for allies, and Paul is the first person she’s going to turn to for that. A lot of the season is going to be her attempt to put together some kind of team, even though she has trouble articulating it at first. She’s looking for the sense of family that I think the audience was looking for last season. So, we’re going to be seeing who’s on her side and who, not so much.
What ways are you going to stretch the parameters of the tech this season?
We’re going to stretch the tech fairly heftily. I actually can’t answer the question directly, because a lot of it has to do with the different ways in which this tech can be manipulated, and we’re going to see that it’s not all the simple chair treatments. There’s more that can be done, and the excitement and the danger of that is a large part of this season.
I read an interview with Eliza where she said that you’re shooting in HD this year. How is that affecting the style of the show, the shooting of the show? How the show is going to match up to how it appeared last year?
We’re keeping a lot of things basically the same, but we are trying to free up the camera and to create more depth and emotion with the lighting and the camera work. The HD packet is smaller. It takes less time to light. The lighting is more environmental. We get more time for the actors. We get more opportunities to do different angles. Something that still has some of the elegance of the first season but is also a little more visceral.
It also means that, occasionally, we finish our days extremely early, and nobody’s hating that. Our DP, Lisa Wiegand, has done a lot of independent features, and so she’s got some really interesting ideas and she can give us classical-looking television. It looks, I think, very beautiful, but at the same time we can tweak it a little bit more, or we can take it a little bit farther and do that faster.
A big thing that people discussed in the first season is, “Who’s the Doll?” Who is secretly a Doll? But now that we know that people can be remotely programmed in a flash, without necessarily being dolls to begin with, is that still a meaningful question?
No, that’s the case in the far future. It’s not the case right now. I’ll tell you right now, everybody is not a Doll, because it would be very easy for us to pull that trick over and over and ultimately shoot ourselves in the foot, because you would find that nothing was at stake and that everybody would see the plot coming. We’ve actually grounded the show fairly heavily. People who are Dolls are Dolls, and the other people…every now and then, I’m not saying never. I’m not saying we won’t question reality every now and then, but basically, we’re taking the people we have and we’re pushing them around as much as possible.
We’re trying to keep it grounded so that people know that there is something at stake, and if somebody did have their personality altered or taken away, that that would be a huge deal. That’s like The Attic; that’s like death. That’s like the worst thing that can happen to a character, so we want to make sure that the characters are grounded enough that people feel those stakes. If we just make people Dolls willy-nilly, then it’s the rabbit hole and none of it really connects or means anything.
Stay tuned for more from this interview where Whedon dishes about the guest stars on “Dollhouse”.
“Dollhouse” returns tonight, Fridays on FOX at 9/8 C.
[Source] Cinemablend
