"Firefly is the source of probably more joy and pain than anything I've done." "It was, to me, a new kind of storytelling." "It's this wonderful combination of future and a past." "It basically tells us, you know, this is us in the future." "Our problems are the same, we're just more of us spread over more planets." "It's nine people looking in the blackness of space, seeing nine different things." "That, to me, is what's interesting." "Action!" "When you have a Joss Whedon on payroll as the studio did..." "When you have a Joss Whedon on payroll as the studio did obviously, they were looking to try and get another project out of him." "And so he, at one of the early meetings, said to them:" ""Well, I've got this idea that I've always played with of doing this sort of show"." "They were eager to get a show, so they said, "Great, let's do it"." "So I wanted to get a show that took the past and future and put them together by making them feel like the present by making a show with, not only troubles that people could relate to, as opposed to aliens or bumpy foreheads or ambassadors or things that are not part of everyday life but, like, getting a job, getting out of trouble." "You know, stuff like that, that was very simple." "Put it all in the present and give it a "you are here" feel." "Put it all in the present and give it a "you are here" feel." "I got to read the various incarnations of the script." "And boy, I thought that looked neat." "It was a Western, but it was in space and there were horses and guns and cool people on the spaceship." "When I delivered "Serenity," the two-hour pilot the network kind of got cold feet about it." "They felt they didn't want a long sort of story that took its time explaining who everybody was." "They wanted to jump in the middle of the action." "The Fox dictum was, "You're in the thick of it!" "Let's go!"" "The initial results, they made the network nervous that the men didn't respond as strongly as they thought they would and that the women responded more strongly." "They wanted a little more humor, particularly in the captain's character." "The idea originally was that he was very closed off and over the course of the pilot, we found out why." "And then over the course of the series, we saw him..." "You know, we saw he was a decent man and we got to see him warm up." "And they said, "We only have a certain amount of time to hook viewers into new property." "We need to do it more quickly"." "They wanted to get in with some action, get in with some jokes..." "But I had nine characters with very involved stories and a world nobody had seen before, culled from different cultures." "So there was just a huge amount of visual and oral and character information for people to absorb in an hour." "Rather than not making the show, we, of course tried to work with them on that score." "Tim and Joss were very eager to please our partners because they're financing the show." "They told us they needed to see what the first couple episodes would look like." "You know, "What does this look like as a TV series?" "We've seen this pilot, we're still not sure what it'd be week to week"." "So in order to convince them to pick up the show we came up with the story for "The Train Job. "" "And they thought that seemed okay but really what they wanted to see was a script." "And they wanted to see it by Monday." "So we had two days to write what was, in essence, going to be a new pilot." "We scrambled to explain everything in the second episode which was then the pilot." "We still wanted them to air "Serenity" first because we felt this was such a complex, new universe with so many characters that really you needed that Western two-hour introduction to this world to really understand it." "Sadly, the network did not agree, and they aired it later." "A lot of the pressure of being a show that might be canceled at any moment..." "A lot of the pressure of being a show that might be canceled at any moment really helps you." "It doesn't help your digestion." "It doesn't help your marriage." "But what it does help is your storytelling because you go back and say, "What is the most important thing I need to feel?" "What's the most primal story?" "What is the thing that is going to show how great this crew is?"" "You know, how funny they are how brave, how disjoint..." "Whatever it is you need." ""What do I need?" Get primal." "They'd break a story and run to the set and be like, "This is going to happen. "" "It was just these incredible..." "Joss and Tim, their minds are just always going and going and going." "And then we'd get the scripts, and they were like gold." "We wouldn't get first drafts, only the shooting draft which is good." "It protected us from whining. "I like that other line." "It was nice." "I wanted to say that in Chinese. "" "Joss had a really specific vision in his head of what happened between now and when Firefly is set." "And the notion that the only two superpowers that survived were the United States and China." "The idea was your most basic, white-trash person can speak Chinese." "The person with no education, who was the last person you would expect speaks Chinese off the bat." "And it just gives it a lovely, kind of lived-in texture." "As far as the Chinese goes, I resented it." "They just randomly come into my head:" "It wasn't easy at all." "Chinese is not exactly..." "I mean, French is easier than Chinese." "If it was French, it'd be fine but it was a little difficult." "We educated the world by teaching them a little bit of Mandarin." "The writers would be in their writing room and come up with funny things to say, if you knew what you were saying." "We only did phrases that we didn't need to know what they meant." "Like, if he shouts:" "We know he's saying, "Shut up!"" "If he goes, "Blah, blah"." "We know he's going, "My God, I'm very surprised"." "He wouldn't put one-world expletives that you then switch to Chinese, like:" ""Man!" And, you know:" "And then explain." "It was these long:" "And I don't speak Chinese and have even trouble ordering at Chinese restaurants." "Every episode, I was making several phone calls to a group of people, back and forth, trying to get the right words." "I did love the fact that you didn't have to bleep anything out." "I did love the fact that you didn't have to bleep anything out." "And you could actually say:" ""Frog-humping, cat-sucking, pissant," in Chinese and not have to worry about censors going, "You can't say 'shit.' "" "For other things, more current slang like, "Baboon's ass crack," per se I would call my friends, who was more up on the correct colloquialisms and curse words in China or Taiwan." "We had cassette tapes that we were to listen to, to get the sound of it right." "Most of the time, none of us got it right anyway." "I would hear what it was supposed to sound like, then I'd hear the actor say it." "Right." "I bet there are a lot of people in China going, "What are they saying?"" "We wanted a multiracial mix of people because our statement was, in the future, there's two superpowers and everybody's mixed." "That's why the way people dress are mixed." "He wanted to have that reflected in these people coming together." "My very original concept was a little smaller." "I had, like, five characters." "And then when I said, "Okay, Millennium Falcon, yes." "Stagecoach, better" I realized I'm gonna be living on this boat." "And a lesson I learned from Angel is you really need an ensemble." "Especially because I had thought of this as more of a drama than action-drama." "When I actually got down to making it, I decided to go from five to nine." "When each one of those characters plays ultimately, a very important role in the show it really was incumbent upon Joss and the casting team to find some great actors." "And I think we did." "What I said to Joss in our first meeting was:" ""I'm so not this guy." "He's tortured, he's bitter, he's hollow he has no hope." "There's nothing lively and wonderful exploding within this man. "" "I kept telling him, "I'm not this guy." "I'm not this tortured soul. "" "Ultimately, eight of the nine original cast members stuck." "The one that didn't being Rebecca Gayheart who was the last role cast, the part of Inara." "Ultimately, it didn't work out for either one of us and that led us to discover Morena." "I go in and audition and basically just stick around for a couple hours, meet Joss find out I'm testing the next day and then, like, start work the day after that." "It was so fast and it was mind-blowing." "I remember going down for my network test into the set where everybody was shooting and being like:" ""Great, this is where you're working now. "" "I was a big fan of Westerns growing up and Warren Oates and Eli Wallach were two down-and-dirty characters." "One from The Wild Bunch one from The Good, Bad and the Ugly." "I thought:" ""It would be great to play a guy like that, but handsomer. "" "Everything was a first for me." "I'd never gone to a table read with all of the other actors and all of these people that I'd seen on TV before." "And I went and sat with the other actors and did the first read-through of the script." "It came to life and I was shaking with excitement." "It was just every moment was incredible." "I have kept myself from being exposed to as much science fiction as possible." "So I was actually delighted that there were no prosthetics." "The script came in, I heard Joss Whedon was behind it, got excited, read it got even more excited, and heard that if I were to get the part I would have to gain 20 pounds." "He wanted Kaylee to look like a woman." "He didn't want any sort of anorexic-looking young actress girl that everybody's so used to seeing on TV." "He wanted someone that looked like they enjoyed a cheeseburger once in a while and really embellished in life." "You never have to be under the heel of nobody ever again." "No matter how long the arm of the Alliance might get we'll get ourselves a little further." "Malcolm Reynolds represented someone who although had lost all his hope would not give up, just would press on." "He didn't have any grand dreams, didn't have any grand causes or goals." "All he wanted to do was continue." "He wasn't gonna shut down and die." "He was just gonna continue living his life." " Do you want me to put it up?" " No, that's okay." " Do you want me to put it up?" " No, that's okay." "I think Inara brought to that world to the life of these people on the ship the heart, and sort of, like, a nurturing quality." "I think that she is an extremely passionate person and she cared very, very much for every single person on that ship." "Shouldn't be a problem at all." "My strongest understanding of Wash came through my relationship with Zoe, or Gina, with my wife." "That was where I had the most understanding." "It was an interesting relationship." "She was this solid, fighter woman and I was a chicken." "I didn't like fighting." "I wasn't in the war." "I wore Hawaiian shirts all the time." "I love Gina and we had a great rapport, and the stuff that was written for us this kind of struggling marriage, made sense to me." "Captain shouldn't babysit a groupie and he knows it." "Okay, when did this become not funny?" "When you didn't put her ass back down on Triumph." "She's the resident, like, hard-ass chick." "She's the one." "She gets the job done." "She enjoys her job." "She's career military." "She has no problem with killing people, if it's right." "And because she is career military you really won't hear her argue with, or oppose Mal too often unless she really thinks there's something wrong." "[ALARM SOUNDING]" " Where do you think you're going?" " Zoe's been badly hurt." "I need my medical supplies." "Simon had a lot, technically, to do on the show in terms of wounds and bullet holes and lots of fun-filled infirmary bloody stuff." "River!" "She's the wayward child of the group." "She understands." "She doesn't comprehend." "And I think that she's a purpose for them too." "They had to make decisions that they wouldn't normally make on her behalf." "Having to try to help her, save her." " There's no beacon." " It's likely no one's looking to find her." "All the more reason for us to do the right thing." "I think Book was kind of the conscience of the ship in any kind of situation." "He could be inserted as the conscience both from his own point of view and also from the perspective of being able to require other people to be aware of dealing with where their consciences were coming from." "Care to make the first incision, Dr. Tam?" " Happy birthday, Simon." " Happy birthday." "Kaylee brings the sense of family." "She makes sure that everybody remembers that they really are one big family and all they have is each other." "Don't know these folks, don't care to." " They're whores." " I'm in." "Sex, muscle, humor, thuggery, Jayne." "Pretty cunning, don't you think?" "When you look at the pilot that Joss created it's not what you expect in what might be thought of as a space opera." "Everything's hand-held, virtually everything's hand-held." "There are zooms, like in a '70s Western." "There are actually zooms in a shot." "There are zooms, like in a '70s Western." "There are actually zooms in a shot." "And nowadays, people don't use zooms so much as, sort of, dolly moves or..." "I mean, zooms are considered to be somewhat cheesy." "That cheese aspect actually really added, I think, to the look of the show." "If you got a flare, or bumped into something sometimes if you misframed, they almost liked it better." "And a lot of times it was don't hold the perfect frame, make it a little different." "All of a sudden, you find something you weren't expecting and continue shooting." "That includes the CGI shots we did and everything." "Just sort of haphazard and embracing the zoom lens and not covering things in a normal television fashion." "All designed to sort of give you that feeling of this is something that's happening and you're there in the thick of it." "As opposed to science fiction that says, "Stand back." "This is a forbidden planet"." "I didn't wanna be stately at all." "I really just wanted to have that immediacy." "We got excited because we wanted to bring that into the photography of live-action spaceships." "We wanted to have hand-held camera with pans, lens flares rack focuses and zooms." "All of which have been complete taboos in visual effects things you don't do because you can't repair them." "We, as a group, said, "There are certain risks we're gonna be taking here." "Some techniques are gonna work, some aren't." "And whatever happens, happens." "We'll have to compensate and make it work"." "But we've never seen camera operators that are late in catching the action on a computer-generated ship." "We've never seen a camera operator mounted to the side of a spaceship that vibrates to the extent that you can barely see what it's seeing." "I have friends that still sing the theme song." "The theme song just gets under your skin and I love it." "That song, every word in it, is very deliberate." "And it tells the story of exactly who Mal is from the get-go." "We had Greg Edmonson on the show and he got, more than anybody, and it's a hard thing to get the idea of using a Western vernacular and then mixing it with world music and a Chinese influence as well." "And at the same time, servicing a normal TV score so that:" ""Here's the sad moment." "Here's the happy moment," without being intrusive." "And there are things he did for that show that went beyond just telling the story or expressing the mood of a scene." "He went way beyond that." "He was really telling a story too." "And he expressed things in Firefly that couldn't have been done any other way." "There's always emotion there even in the goofy stuff." "There were funny moments and many poignant moments and there were many dark moments." "But I always tried to write from the emotion rather than the character." "That man, more than once, brought tears to my eyes." "I would watch an episode to enjoy it and to really watch it and have a good time." "And then I'd go back immediately and I'd watch it again just for the music." "Just for particular scenes where the music really, really touched me." "We used instruments you never use, because I believe Joss saw this as a post-apocalyptic world where cultures were thrown together in this giant melting pot." "Therefore, anything that you could use somehow was justified." "Chinese music could be mixed in with Eastern European music mixed in with orchestral music." "And I remember he called me for the last piece of score on "The Message. "" "There's a scene at the end where they're carrying the casket of their friend out." "This is one of those moments where you are so happy that you do what you do." "It is so rife with the..." "And we knew at this point that the show was gone." "And it's beautifully shot in the snow." "And the camera would periodically just go to each one of the main characters." "And the camera would periodically just go to each one of the main characters." "And there is a beautiful piece of music over that and he called me and said:" ""I'm worried." "I think this might be too pretty because what I'm writing here is not this character's death I'm saying goodbye to the show"." "And that's the piece he created for that moment, and it's perfect." "It works great." "I had people who say, "I've been in this business for 15 years I've never had this much fun. "" "Like, really cynical people saying, "This is..."" "Feeling they were part of something bigger." "I would come and sit on set before my scenes would come up." "I just couldn't stand to sit in my trailer." "I'd think, "They're having fun without me." "I've gotta go be in the middle of it. "" "It was a very sarcastic set." "If somebody was correcting you to say:" ""Don't turn so far into the camera on this shot because you're getting into the light of this other actor" they might say it in a way where they go, "Listen, fool when you're turning, you're ruining everything behind you." "Is this a selfish moment for you, or do you want to help the team?"" "You know, we were having fun." "Everybody had a good time." "I always think of "Ariel" the moment when Mal grabs Kaylee from behind and just kind of hugs her which is just something Nathan did on the set." "It wasn't in the script." "It was just something Nathan naturally did." "It seemed like the thing to do." "And that was because they got along so well and they joked so much." "And that love that the cast and the crew were actually feeling for each other and for the work and for what we were doing shows up on-screen." "You all gonna be here when I wake up?" " We'll be here." " Good." "We bonded like a family." "And when it was over it was so difficult to know that you weren't going to be with these people again." "You know what?" "This makes me weepy." "Because it was really extraordinary." "Really extraordinary." "And I do miss it." "The cross section of and intelligence of people who are fans of Firefly have just really broadened my horizons." "I hate to give them that much credit, but it's true." "The people who are seeing this understand it and there's nothing more important." "There's only one reason to make art, and that's it." "They really kept us going for a long time." "And the fact that there are people still out there..." "And the fact that there are people still out there who are having Firefly parties and stuff, that's so amazing." "That's so humbling to think about." "And we were really very, very appreciative of it." "It's flattering, and it's humbling." "And it should happen to me more often." "What the fan reaction did was, really keep us on our feet." "It was a very difficult year." "Obviously, this is not a complete season of television we're talking about and that means the C word, as in "canceled. "" "And the fan base understood that very early on, that we were in trouble and needed their help." "They got together, they wrote letters, they were very passionate about saving the show and watching the show." "They sent postcards to Fox." "They sent postcards to the sponsors." "They took out a full-page ad thanking Fox and thanking the advertisers for supporting Firefly." "And did it in an incredibly organized fashion." "They raised thousands of dollars for that." "They also have raised thousands of dollars for several charities in the name of Firefly." "WHEDON:" "To know that the fans were becoming as obsessive about the show as we were, that quickly was really just gratifying." "It's easy to discount something like that." "But in our situation, it wasn't because if we had gone on the boards and found a sort of lackluster response or even just, "Well, that's very nice," at some point, we would have given up." "We would have stopped fighting." "One of the things that made working with Joss Whedon on any of his shows, so fascinating was that he would take an unexpected turn." "You'd think you would know where the show was coming, and he'd say:" ""We're gonna go over here. "" "He would've done that on Firefly, and it would've ended up in places that none of us, including him, could have anticipated." "Simon would have finally kissed Kaylee, I think." "A long time coming." "Joss' plan, for if the show had continued, involved more uncovering of the Blue Sun Corporation which are the people who are the big corporate entity/government presence in this future world." "And they're the ones that were sort of engineering this psychic program that River was abducted into." "What would've happened with Mal and Inara?" "Could they have been together?" "The answers to all of Adam's questions about Book's past would have been very fun and interesting to uncover." "The marriage of Wash and Zoe would have maybe gotten into trouble, maybe gotten out of trouble." "Something I was really looking forward to seeing was what role River played in this far grander scheme that brought all this trouble to this little crew trying to do their own thing." "To see what world they would have ended up in." "I think that they would have eventually figured out that where they were on that ship together was as good as any home." "The shows that shine briefly, the shows that have a very short run but that everybody kind of goes, "That was something special," that was Firefly." "...but that everybody kind of goes, "That was something special," that was Firefly." "The show didn't go far enough for me to tell the secrets that were contained within but that's something I still hope to do, at a later date, in another venue." "I feel like whatever I didn't get to accomplish, I will in terms of narrative." "What I wanted the show to be, we accomplished it from the first frame." "I look forward to the day and time that recollections of my Firefly experience um doesn't make me cry." "I really look forward to that day." "There was something that Adam Baldwin actually said on the last day we were wrapping everything out." "He said, "Look, I've been doing this for a while and the thing that I really appreciate about this job is that we all seem to understand how good it is and we're all appreciating it today as opposed to later. "" "And that was really true." "People got it while it was happening." "Firefly will forever represent for me, I think just the best of all worlds as far as being a pleasant place to work enjoying the stories I was telling, enjoying the dialogue enjoying the character and the cast and the crew." "I had a very positive experience on Firefly and for me it will be the best job I've ever had." "The best job I've ever had." "My fantasy about this is that they'll make a feature and it'll be successful, and then someone will come to Joss and say:" ""Why don't we make a television series out of Firefly. "" "We made something that I consider extraordinary and that I am as proud of as anything I've done." "It really was a jewel." "Just something that, when I think back on it, it shines." "I can't think of anything else to say besides that."