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Steven S. DeKnight - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage August 23rd 2001
Getting Undressed
Give us some background about how you started out
I started as a writer on MTV’s Undressed. I don’t know if that plays in England, but it’s basically a half hour sex comedy produced by Roland Joffe.
I was on four seasons of that. It’s basically about how fast can you get young attractive people to take their clothes off. I got pretty good at getting them undressed very fast.
I actually wrote a spec for Buffy to see if I could get a slightly better TV job where people weren’t taking their clothes off every five minutes, and it ended up over at Joss’s company, Mutant Enemy. They read it and I came in - originally - to talk about working for the animated Buffy show.
They liked it, Joss read it and [he] liked it and invited me in for an interview. We sat around just chewing the fat for half an hour and at the end he said, "I know you came to talk about the animated show, but how would you feel doing a freelance episode of the live action show?" I said "Hell, yeah of course, I would love to".
Sci-Fi Fan
Were you a science fiction fan anyway?
Ever since I was a kid. I grew up on cheap horror movies and sci-fi movies and Kung Fu movies, so this is the perfect job for me because it’s got all the trappings that I love.
It’s got action, adventure, comedy, super cool Kung Fu fights, human drama and real, gut-wrenching emotion, so this was my dream job, it really was.
Cartoon Capers
So, at what stage is the Buffy animated series at?
We have, I believe, five scripts already written. I’ve done one, Jane Espenson has done a couple and it’s a great experience. When I was first brought in to interview, I was brought in to interview for the animated show and I was shown rough sketches of the characters and some of the sets. I loved what I saw, I was dying to work on the show and I was hoping once I was hired on the live action [show], I would still get a chance to work on it.
It’s going to be an amazing show. It’s funny, it’s exciting, it’s all the huge gigantic action that we can’t do in a live action show - so the sky’s the limit. There’s a lot of ideas that they’ve had in the past five seasons that were great ideas but they just couldn’t do, budget-wise.
So we get to do all those cool, high school stories that we couldn’t tell back in High School. Plus, it’s a return to the classic Buffy, the way it all started, with all the teenagers and high jinks. It’s going to be absolutely amazing.
Drawing Blood
Who will animate the series?
I believe the last I heard, we were looking to work with the people that did the Superman adventures and Batman Beyond, because we’re all big fans of that.
I think the Batman adventures were some of the best animation I’ve seen on television, so that would be fantastic.
That's the last I heard and I’ve also heard rumours that we may actually be getting some name illustrators in comic books to do some character designs, which would also be fantastic.
Blast from the past?
Will animated Angel or Dawn be appearing?
You know, anything’s possible in the Joss Whedon world. I would say more than likely you will see a lot of the characters you saw in High School.
As to whether or not Dawn will be there, it’s completely possible. It could definitely fit into the whole time line of season five where Dawn was placed there by the monks and everybody has a memory of her being there, so it would be an interesting idea to actually put Dawn there and see how she would fit into all of this stuff.
Blood Ties
Your first episode was the intense Blood Ties. Was that based on any experiences of people you knew?
All the teens I grew up with pretty much knew where they came from. When I originally got the job as a freelance, it was scheduled out that I was going to do a stand-alone episode, something along the lines of Triangle that could stand by itself and wasn’t a major arc point.
By the time they actually called me in to do it they had moved past that point and they were already into big arc stuff. I had no idea when I came in which episode I would get, I was still assuming it would be a big bad monster rampaging through town and fun had by all. After about the first week of being here it became apparent that I was about to get the ‘Big Dawn’ episode.
I was terrified, because at this point in the season her character really isn’t that well defined yet. We’re still kind of figuring out her character, the way she talks, her attitude and so on, and she was the only character out of the show that I didn’t have a handle on. So I was pretty nervous about tackling that.
But once Joss gave me the metaphor for the show of adoption, it just all fell into place. None of us on the show were actually adopted, but the feelings she goes through are so natural. You can just imagine how you would feel if you found out that your parents and your family weren’t really your family. Beyond the supernatural aspects it’s just that grounded feeling of all of a sudden you don’t know who loves you and why and we took that and really ran with it.
She did a really great job in that episode, didn't she?
I always tell Michelle, every time I see her, "Thank you for getting me hired full time on the show" because I’m convinced how well she performed had a big impact on how well the episode did and Joss’s reaction to the episode and hiring me. So, thank you Michelle.
New Dawn (Spoilers)
Plans for Dawn in season six?
It's pretty much straight teen stuff. Like when the show started out in High School, a lot of the problems were straight teen problems, throwing in a monster metaphor every now and then and I assume Dawn will follow the same path.
She still has an awful lot to deal with. The repercussions of season five are gigantic for Dawn in season six, and she’s really got to come to terms with a lot of things that have happened to her.
Spiral (Spoilers)
Tell us about the plotting of the episode
I got lucky. Once again,that’s just when my episode came up. Actually, Doug Petrie and I were going back and forth about, "Which episode do you want to do? Do you want to do 20? Do you want to do 21?"
Originally I was scheduled for 20, he was scheduled for 21, and then there was some talk between us. We still didn’t know what the stories were and we decided, "Ah we’ll keep it the same, we’ll see what happens" and it came up, the big episode.
It didn’t start out that way. Originally, everybody was going to be in town, Glory was the big threat and we were going to go from there. We were sitting around after about a week of kicking around the story and Joss comes in and sits down and says, "Okay where are you at" and we’ll tell him, "Maybe this, maybe that". He goes "Hmm, you know what, I think they should leave town in a Winnebago and be chased by the Knights of Byzantium".
I was like "Yes, yes, that is exactly what they should do" because it was just such a cool idea. At the time I had no conception that they would roll out such a big budget and do it in a big Hollywood fashion. We’d always said we’d wanted a Stage Coach kind of scene, with a little road warrior thrown in and that’s exactly what we got. I was very happy when I saw the action footage, because it was big Hollywood stuff.
Big Budgets (Spoilers)
Was the big budget a problem for season six?
As a matter of fact, in the first draft of the outline for that script, the opening action scene where Buffy is trying to escape from Glory with Dawn, was massive. It was a ten minute long escape scene. Buffy gets smacked into a tree a hundred feet away, she ends up beating Glory with a sheared off lamp pole, there was big, big action.
Joss read it and said "This is great, this is wonderful, Kubrick couldn’t film this in 20 days with five million dollars, so cut everything". I’m like "Great, okay, that’s fine, as long as I get the Knights chasing the Winnebago".
So we write fairly detailed outlines, anywhere from 10 to 15 pages long, that have all this stuff in it, so Joss can take a look and say "We can’t afford this, cut back on that". Then at the script level, Joss again will take a look at it and Gareth Davies, our [line] producer will take a look at it and we’ll do some more fine tuning to make sure it’s actually achievable, that we have enough time and money to film it.
Knight Moves (spoilers)
One frivolous question. How do the Knights of Byzantium get into Sunnydale without anyone noticing them?
[Laughs] That’s always the big question and, you know, I just can’t tell you. There are many theories about that. We would always kick that around the room too, but ultimately the decision is made that it’s not that important.
There are always monsters coming and going so groups of people can easily get in and out, and also in that Spiral episode you see two of the Knights dressed normally in a hospital, so the assumption I’ve always made is that they don’t travel in full armour, with horses and everything, they travel looking like normal people.
Escaping death (Spoilers)
At the end of The Gift, things are looking rough for Buffy. How would you have written her out of that situation?
How would I write myself out of that situation? I’ve got to tell you I would do it exactly the same way that Joss is doing it.
When I first heard that that was going to be the end of the season I thought "How can you possibly go on without making it cheesy, and a Dallas kind of thing where it was all a dream?".
Then Joss kept saying "Oh, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s rotting in her grave". He said this on the Internet, and sure enough she’s dead and she’s rotting in her grave - and how he brings her back is perfect. It’s not easy, it’s never easy coming back, it’s hard to go home and it will be very much so for Buffy.