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Deconstructing the Emotional Allure |
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Continued from previous page...
In light of that we touch briefly on several of the most outstanding episodes that Marti has penned. We begin a little farther back amidst Season 2 of Buffy with "I Only Have Eyes For You". Interestingly enough, Marti is a fan of ghosts so obviously this is what she may have tapped into, especially the scene where ghosts of the main characters enter into the bodies of Buffy and Angel and play out their deadly, forlorn roles. This scene was just exceptional and a favorite among many fans. "Oh, well thanks. The cool thing about that was the twist that Joss came up with," Marti explains, "that the ghosts go into the sexual opposites. The role played by Buffy is more the emotional place she's in, but she plays the man's part and [Angel] plays the female's part, was just inspired. He came up with that and it transformed that whole scene. Some of my favorite movies and a lot of the feature stuff I did before I got to Buffy were about ghosts and transformation." One such movie that Marti loves is the 1991 British film entitled, Truly, Madly, Deeply, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman. "It's a little bit like the American film, Ghost, but I actually think it's better." Marti describes the film as being, "all about our longing for eternal love as expressed in this whole idea of ghosts. So I was dying to do a love story with ghosts in it and Joss responded to the basic idea we came up with, that's one of my favorite episodes actually."
Joss and Marti enjoyed acting when they were in high school and in college and it reflects on their method of approach when dealing with critically emotional arcs. "Joss and I are both like this and we really get into a scene. You know, you sit there and you cry, you write it and you cry, and you walk around and you cry. Probably it's drawing on your own life experience but it's also, I think, that you have the ability to fold yourself into an experience and that's when you do your best writing of all," defines Marti, "when you're just totally emotionally connected. When you're really mainlining something that feels very real to you, that's when writing is just magical because you're basically channeling something. You're not really writing it, it's just moving through you. There are certain scenes that I've written when I was absolutely visited by something outside of myself and that is one them. I remember that scene just kind of flowing in a way that I was like, 'Wow, where'd that come from?' You really don't own it, you feel like it came from the Gods," she states with a laugh. "So I don't even feel particularly Ego-bound to that at all, if that makes sense, it's like I don't really feel it came from me. I'm glad people like it but I don't know where it came from!"
The last episode we touch upon is "Dear Boy" of Angel Season 2, written by Angel Executive Producer, David Greenwalt. "Dear Boy" was also honored at the Paley Television Festival this past summer. Yet the entire scene where Darla confronts Angel and says the now classic line, 'God doesn't want you but I still do,' was the genius of Noxon. When we spoke with Angel writer Mere Smith she also brought that specific scene up and admitted that every time she sees it she just gets chills. And Julie Benz [Darla] commented, "At the end of 'Dear Boy' I was sobbing! When I got the script I was like, 'I can't do this justice.' " Marti certainly nailed it again! Between Julie Benz's delivery and Marti's dialogue, the outcome was outstanding. "That was a riot because I was the day away from leaving for my trip to go get married," she remembers. "Joss called me in a panic and said, 'We have these 13 pages of this script which we feel like we need some help with and can you rewrite all these scenes -- today -- before you leave?' And that scene was one of them," Marti laughs. "That scene was, as you know, fairly pivotal in the show and I had to completely unhinge from the part of me that is critical, the voice in me that says, 'Oh, I don't know about that,' and I just had to absolutely let go.
Doing a Little Angeling Marti has double duty these days, not only is she handling the reins as Buffy Exec but she is also a Consulting Producing over here on our side of the tracks at Angel. Suitably, Marti is credited on the live action film project, Supernatural Law based on Batton Lash's Comic Book Series, Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre about a pair of rather notorious "creatures of the night" representing lawyers! According to Greenwalt, who jokingly confesses that the duty of consulting producer consists of 'going downstairs and watching videos', but Marti expands upon that by including the discussions of story ideas. "They [the Angel staff] will come up here sometimes and give us a hand on stories and then we'll give them a hand when any of us get stuck. That pretty much is what it comes down to. I did very little rewriting on Angel last year, which I had done a little bit more of the first year. They have a great crew down there and they really have a lot of solid hitters now so they don't exactly need our help as much as they used to."
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