Joss Whedon: "My biggest professional disappointment is Firefly being cancelled"

From The Telegraph:

Joss, who wrote and directed Buffy The Vampire Slayer, said: "My biggest professional disappointment is Firefly being cancelled: that's how I learned what real grief is. And that will never go away.

"Part of that sadness is that I didn't know how to fight. Now I look back and go, 'You know, if I'd had just a little more moxie, maybe I could have read the signs'.

"But I came to understand that grief is like losing a limb. You don't grow another arm, you learn to tie your shoes differently."

I loved Firefly, it was, hands down, one of the best dramas out there but I think it really says something that Joss Whedon considers its cancellation his biggest professional disappointment, considering his reaction to Alien Resurrection.

The following is from an interview with Joss in 2005:

It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they [the producers of Alien Resurrection] changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable. (Joss for a minute: A brief chat with Joss Whedon, via Wikipedia: Alien Resurrection)

After viewing a particularly horrible movie I've often wondered: What were they thinking? How could it have gone so wrong? Well ... that's how!


Photo link: Sean & Nathan @ the Flanvention.