PANEL Q&A
Mr. Batscha chose this to be the opportune moment to turn the questions over to the audience. With a pleasant mix of both Angel fan and industry type present there was an intelligent thoughtfulness to each question addressed to the panel along with the occasional poke in the side offering.
Audience Member: "I'd like to know what your definition of a soul is? And what distinguishes Angel from the other vampires, because it becomes clear from both Buffy and Angel that vampires have human emotions and human attachments. So is that a conscience? And then what separates vampires from humans if it is a conscience?"
JW: "Um, very little. (laugh) Essentially, souls are by their nature amorphous but to me it's really about what star you are guided by. Most people, we hope, are guided by, 'you should be good, you're good, you feel good.' And most demons are guided simply by the opposite star. They believe in evil, they believe in causing it, they like it. They believe it in the way that people believe in good. So they can love someone, they can attach to someone, they can actually want to do things that will make that person happy in the way they know they would. The way Spike has sort of become, an example is Spike obviously on Buffy, is getting more and more completely conflicted. But basically his natural bent is towards doing the wrong thing. His court's creating chaos where as in most humans, most humans, is the opposite, and that's really how I see it. I believe it's kind of like a spectrum, but they are setting their course by opposite directions. But they're all sort of somewhere in the middle."
Audience Member: "What you're favorite gag-reel moment from this season?"
JW: "I think you just saw it, I believe it had to do with Wang Chung."
DB: "I agree. [It's] where all the Karaoke stuff came and they told me about it I was, well very excited about it, but I wasn't sure my voice would be."
JW: "That day we did tell him, 'Sing worse.' Because he was going in there and he would sing really -- 'No, no you have to suck!' "
JAR: "David can sing. David can also beat-box and pop-lock. He's talented." (laughter)
ER: "The first ending of the second episode I ever did, David and I are running after this bad guy. We're running with my gun, and all of a sudden David totally falls flat on the ground and I go down with David or whatever I was trying to do, and the two of us complete fall on our butts after this guy. That was very funny."
CK: "I was doing a scene with (Stephanie) and she's trying to frame me. And she has a microphone inside her blouse and I'm to pull it out. We're rolling film and somewhere along the course of the scene the thing had fallen down. (laughter) I had to get down in there and get something from her."
Audience Member: "After doing such quality work for so long how do you deal with being constantly ignored by the Emmys?"
JW: "You know, I'm hanging out with these guys all day, who cares about the Emmy's." (applause)
MN: "Joss got nominated for Best Writing last year for 'Hush.' "
JW: "I think the Emmy's are cool, and would like to have several of them and wear them about my neck. But I mean, a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer - and to make a show about a vampire. You're not going to speculate, if any to us to get any attention at all, it's an extraordinary boon. It's an incredible compliment."
Audience Member: "What in fact has the avid devotion of the fans had on your life?"
JAR: "I get free coffee at Starbucks." (laughter and applause)
TM: "We actually just had our Posting Board Party which was great fun. Where we actually go and meet a lot of these people that speak on the Internet. I think however, recently that I've been avoiding it for the last . . . 48 hours and 6 minutes! It's really hard not to go on and read that stuff although no good can come from it in some ways," he stated jokingly. "So now I've been trying to avoid it, I found a really bad review of one of my episodes."
JW: "He's got a problem. It's an addiction, it's a problem I had for awhile. Go on the Internet and there's praise and then there's more and you think, 'I invented television!' and 'Why doesn't my wife think I'm cooler?' (laughter) and then one person goes 'It's no good!' You have to find the balance, listening and observing. It's a great thing. It's great, I love to hear the opinions of people and it does effect the way I think about the show."
Audience Member: "I have a quick question about LA as a setting. Did you do it out of convenience? Why did you pick LA and how do you pick the places in LA that you're gonna separate?"
JW: "LA was going to be the character in the show. There are very cool things about LA but then we'll end up shooting on the back lot which begins to look like Newark. (laughter) It was really out of convenience, we knew we would be shooting here. We didn't want to pretend to be somewhere else. We wanted to give the feeling of a broader scope and not shoot everything on the same street. We didn't want to pretend it was Toronto and we certainly didn't want to go there. (laughter) We do feel like that's always something we're trying to define is the character of LA and trying to define in terms of what it's means for Angel. Tim actually wrote some great stuff about, 'Why do you live in LA and drive a convertible?' So it's something that's still evolving and hopefully . . ."
DG: "It's a character that will hopefully become a regular at some point. But we like LA so much we're going to leave it for the last three episodes of this year and go to another place."
TM: "Spoiler!" (laughter and applause)
Audience Member: "You have a tendency to mention things early on and then bring them back at the really most interesting times, like Jonathan. How do you get these kind of ideas? And When is Buffy ever gonna realize that she slept with Angel?"
TM: "When she gets a rash." (laughter)
JW: "Very specifically in terms of huge -- arcing these things out as far in advance as we can. Some of them are fortuitous acts and as we look back and say, 'Oh you know we had this and it will connect this with this and that.' Eventually, and some of them come from disasters. For example, one that we did on Buffy, 'Lovers Walk,' the episode where Spike came back and Drusilla had left him. Juliet was shooting a movie and they were gonna come back together. They were Spike and Dru and we couldn't get her and we said, 'Well, what if they broke up?' So eventually, as I've said before, the story's telling us what's going to happen. There a symbiosis between what we're doing and what the story's doing to the point where when we come up with something, even if it surprises us we look back and go, "Wow, we've been building towards that and we didn't even know it.' The Xander and Cordelia romance -- a long time on Buffy. The intensity of their arguments had been increasing and increasing and we had not thought about giving them a romance. When we looked back and it was like we had been trying to do it from the second episode. So it really just takes on a life of its own and some of it's planned, some of it isn't. Some of it comes from the trouble but it's like riding the rapids. And we keep going and it all seems to fall together . . . sometimes."
