“My whole mission statement was a sort of ‘70s Western kind of feel to it, which is very much like a lot of TV shows these days with hand-held cameras and a sort of sloppiness. It was always meant to look dirty and have a quality of, ‘Oh, they happened to have a camera there,’ still controlling everything people were seeing very specifically, pretending that you’re not. That was done to get away from the science fiction and the pomp; the stately, sterile morality tales that I felt were a little dull. I wanted to do something that felt contemporary.”

“If the show’s about anything, it’s about the way in which we create a civilisation in a void. What we bring with us, what each one of us brings with us that we need, which we touch on sometimes. It gives you a chance to tell what is ultimately a big immigrant story, which is ultimately what America was. The original germ of the idea of the series came from the Civil War, based on Reconstruction as an era. The great thing is you read about Jewish freedom fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, it’s applicable. All of history gets mashed up and served out, that’s how the world works.”

“We did the flashbacks and they were just sort of histrionic and didn’t feel right, and we didn’t have the one with the two little kids. It started out with River already in trouble and I said, ‘Let’s see the two of them together.’ Then we couldn’t get the original people who played the father and mother, because they’d already been booked for something else, so we had to cast that again. It was all very complicated and strange.

“And then we felt, ‘We’ve got our big damn heroes, we’ve got the crucible, we’ve got our witch hunters and everything is coming together, but we really could use a shot of humour.’ So I said, ‘Lock the thing, give me 30 seconds in this act and 15 seconds in this act, and I’ll write some Jayne scenes and we’ll do them to time.’ At the last minute, days before it was supposed to air, Adam Baldwin came in and did the scenes of him going through Simons stuff, knowing that he had about 16 props that he had to work with, one after the other, and exactly 30 seconds. It was so complicated, but he did it. That’s the time you’re very grateful for professionalism. It’s hilarious and it helps to thematically say they’re not part of the group.

“Sometimes we get cuts and we just go, ‘This sucks’ and it’s because we haven’t communicated with the director or they haven’t captured what we were looking for, or structurally we were missing a piece and we didn’t get it until we saw it. You never know, even if you’re on set a lot. Something could still come out wrong".

“On Firefly we were hearing pitches and would have had more opportunities to do stuff that came directly from the writers, but Ben is one of those guys who comes up with ideas – and he’s doing it on Angel, too – where you go, ‘Uh… yes. Wait a minute… Never mind, I’ll just be over here.’

“I also think that Jayne is an amazing character. To get underneath the character without lying; without saying, ‘No, he’s the sweetest man that ever lived.’ Basically just somebody who’s decent enough to be frustrated that people think he’s more decent than he is. That, to me, is a fun character to write.”

“Tim just wrote an amazing script, [director] David Solomon, who’s been with me since the beginning of Buffy, shot it very beautifully. I don’t think anything got to the heart of both what we wanted the show to be and what the show was. “Apart from the flashbacks, just the very ending of seeing Serenity from across a crowded room and falling in love, it explains so much about our characters and who they were and what they wanted. It was such a simple premise: ‘The ship is gonna break, we’re all gonna die because of something really little and mundane.’ I just think there was more emotion, surprising humour and a perfect kind of structure to that thing than anything else we did. To me, it’s the most moving episode that we did.”

“To me, after ‘Out Of Gas’ what I needed to see was Simon and River and their world, what they had, what they lost. Really see Simon sort of taking charge, which he pretty much did. I also wanted to see Jayne betray them, because you can only be irascible so long before you’re just loveable.”

“What was great in ‘War Stories’ was being able to play the conflict of marriage without making it whiny and insufferable. They’re both incredibly funny and charming, and then to play that out during the torture scene – well, juxtaposition is pretty much the benchmark of my career. It doesn’t get bigger than that.

“Here’s the thing with a show. You have to understand that you are collaborating with somebody, and they have the right to the kind of show that’s right for their network. You also have to understand that you must run that show, not them, and that it must be your show. You cannot make a show to please a network, and if you start taking a show and changing it to please a network until it loses all meaning you’re not going to please the network, because ultimately the show that works is the show that has a vision. That doesn’t mean that everything I do works. I’m sure there are shows that were built by committee, but the fact of the matter is, for a show to really work, you have to run it. Every time the network gave me a note, like, ‘Make Mal more likeable’, I can do that. ‘Have more action?’ I can do that. Those things don’t destroy what it is that I’m trying to do. ‘Make them not married’ – now you’re telling me you don’t want to make the show I want to make. That’s when you walk away. If you’re desperate to get a show on the air, you shouldn’t be trying to. That’s just not a way to live. I’m very fortunate in that I can walk away. And I would have walked away from Buffy if they’d tried to mutate it into something I didn’t believe in. You have to know where to draw the line and where to pick your battles. You want to collaborate, but you don’t want to be bullied into making a show that’s not your own, because ultimately you’ll hate it.”

“Obviously we like to hit a few issues, and I was interested in Saffron’s psychosis and I liked breaking it down like that, and seeing what was behind it. It doesn’t mean you catch her, doesn’t mean you win, but her interplay with Mal speaks a lot about both of them. It just came out fun.”

“On the DVD, it comes with the most pretentious, repetitive and probably incoherent commentary I have ever done. I really tried to explain exactly what it was that I was trying to do, and some of it defies explanation. The ecstasy of meaninglessness is something that you can’t really explain very well in a boring commentary. I think the episode itself does it beautifully."