Featuring...
Jane Espenson
Writer/Producer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Continued from previous page...

But many fans are thankful for that decision as well as Jane came aboard Buffy in the start of it’s third season. In just the short amount of time that she’s been with the show, from the writers perspective, she has already seen a great change take place in the characters development. "Oh yeah, I mean so much has happened to them. I don’t know if they are better developed then they were because they were so beautifully developed right from the beginning but they’ve certainly undergone changes and they’ve continued to develop and that’s what’s really important. It’s so easy to let characters become stuck and I think Joss is really good in allowing people to move on and evolve in a way that’s not inconsistent from where they started but allows them to be different from where they started. One thing that I’m really proud about on Buffy is that when we introduce a new character we make sure they are as developed and have as much potential as the ones we already have." So when you’re looking at the story arcs at the beginning of the season you already have an idea where you’re taking that character for the nest year? "Yes," replies Jane as she offers us some insight and a bit of a tease, "Well for a lot of things that are going to happen to the characters this year, we actually knew it last year. I mean, we knew before the start of the season.

"'I feel your pain,' I'm sorry
can I do that again?"
Yeah we’ve got . . . oh boy do we have goodies in store for you guys! We’ve got some nice things happening to our characters." Plenty of pain? "Plenty of pain, plenty of happy, plenty of changes. New relationships, new dynamics," she says with a little mischievous sing-song in her voice.

It’s not only the characters she writes about who get new changes and dynamics this year but Jane will as well when she takes on the new responsibilities as Producer. "That’s my new title this season. So far I haven’t done anything this season I didn’t do last season. Oh, I went to a casting session. I didn’t do that before, but I have on other shows." Do you like that element of involvement? "No, because I get very nervous for the actors. I do enjoy it and I love making sure we have the right person but I was really just observing the casting session, Marti was there making the decisions." When creating a character who may only be around for one episode, the writers may have developed some sense of what they would like the supporting actor to convey with what they are trying to bring out on the page. Casting may be the just the place to assure this or not. "Well, it’s more like, this one is not going to screw it up," admits Jane laughing. "This one said it the way I heard it, yeah I guess it’s a certain amount of that’s what I pictured. You’re really just trying to avoid the bad choice. There are a lot of possible good choices. I kind of like an actor who does something that I didn’t anticipate with the roll. Someone who makes you go, ‘oh, I didn’t even realize when I wrote that line that you could do it that way,’ and ‘how interesting is that.’ I love that. I’m happy to have an actor not being at all what I pictured but I don’t want us to pick an actor that’s not going to be able to do it, that’s the really crucial thing."

There are literally dozens of positions in the upper ranks of the writing and producing staffs of a television show the caliber of Buffy and Angel. Jane tries to clarify her new roll as a producer and the new found responsibilities that accompany that roll. "Well on our show it seems to be that you can give, if you want to, (although this was offered to me last year, I chose not to do it because I didn’t feel ready to do it) give the editor a preliminary set of notes on the edit of your episode. I guess I feel a little bit more comfortable now being down on the set and telling the director or asking the director why he’s doing something a certain way or suggesting that I had visualized something a little differently. I’m not terribly comfortable saying ‘no do it this way.’
"I hope anyway
that you don't go
'oh the writers are
making her deeper.'"
But I would say, ‘huh when I pictured it, it was more like this.’" How involved Jane gets with the directing aspect is not so much on the technical end as it is from an overall conceptual understanding.

"Not so much the angle of the shot," she confesses, "I don’t understand enough about directing to know how to correct that but if I just pictured, ‘oh I didn’t think they were going to have to walk around the counter to see the demon, I thought he was going to appear right in their faces.’ Something like that, I might say, ‘I pictured this different.’"

As for different job titles, while working your way up the Buffy ranks, Jane offers this scenario of rungs. "The titles are very arbitrary. You’re hired as staff writer, you become story editor but you don’t edit stories. You do the exact same thing you do as a staff writer, you write episodes. Then you become executive story editor, you do exactly the same thing, Then you’re co-producer, then you’re producer, then you’re supervising producer. They all have largely the same duties. Marti does a lot more, she’s co-exec now. She will deal with the actors, she will take calls from the studio and network executives, fielding their opinions of the episodes that we’re turning in. Things like that that I don’t have to do." But it will still be nice to see your name up there as producing! "Yeah! Yes, I like that I can say writer/producer," Jane boasts happily.

And does she foresee herself behind the camera as well anytime soon? Surprisingly she say, "No. Doug Petrie has directed a short film and is a great director and really wants to do that and Marti’s going be directing an episode this year. Joss directs, but to me, no I’m a writer. That’s what I love best."