Joss Whedon found a cult following when he created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But now he's directing Hollywood's biggest superhero movies – and Shakespeare. Emma John meets the fanboy who has turned his obsessions into box-office glory
Both his grandfather and father were TV screenwriters, so one imagines that TV was an elevated artform in his home. "Nope! My father and mother divorced when I was about eight and my mother had had quite enough of that." Whedon was only allowed to watch BBC shows, so he consumed a diet of Masterpiece theatre and Monty Python. "To be honest," he says, "I was a little bit ashamed of American TV because I thought, 'None of the shows my father works on are as funny as my father.'" When his mother, a history teacher, took a sabbatical in the UK, Whedon enrolled at Winchester College, where his ability to quote Pythoncame in useful for making friends.
His career began on the TV show Roseanne. Writing for Hollywood is, he says, a "brutal, soul-crushing" experience. "I've described it to students as like climbing to the top of the mountain and finding out it's surrounded by more mountains and there's no view at all." Actors mangled his lines, directors and producers rewrote entire scripts. "You have to be Prometheus and have your heart removed every day."
