The Underbelly Of The City
What follows below is the rush transcript (although I think it’s completely accurate) of what Joss had to say about Goners during his appearance on Fanboy Radio today, which ended about half an hour ago, followed by a couple of other remarks which might be relevant.
Goners is a film that also brewed in me for a few years, and then after I finished filming Serenity, I just up and wrote it, because I’ve been wanting to for so long. It’s a supernatural thriller.
There’s not much I’m gonna say about it, because I have no idea when it’ll happen, and every piece of information will get chewed over so thoroughly that I’m afraid if I talk about it at all, by the time the movie actually comes out people will be tired of it.
It’s about a girl named Mia, people know that, who sort of sees in a mystical way the underbelly of the city and of human society, and goes through a kind of extraordinary hell, and we all have a lot of fun in the process.
It’s very much the kind of fiction that I tell. That is to say, I love this character and I’ve been seeing a lot of horror movies that are torture-porn, where kids we don’t care about are mutilated for hours, and I just cannot abide them.
This is much more a story about — literally about human connection and whether or not it’s possible.
But it’s told on a very mystical scale and, in a way like everything I’ve tried to do including Buffy, it’s an antidote to that very kind of film, the horror movie with the expendable human beings in it. Because I don’t believe any human beings are.
Later in the interview, he was asked about his favorite horror films, and in contrast to the “torture-porn” which he criticized in the above, he almost immediately zeroed in on early John Carpenter movies such as the original Halloween and his remake of The Thing, referring to them as “elegant and compellingly simple”. He also mentioned seeing Alien when he was fourteen without any spoilers and how good that was.
Given that Joss has referred to Goners both as “fantasy thriller” and “horror fantasy”, those remarks conceivably could end up having some bearing upon Goners.
To get to some of the chewing, I do find it interesting that while Joss has said that thematically Goners will be “in the Buffy-mode of discovering strength”, here he mentions “the underbelly of the city” which makes me think that Goners might be more like Angel in tone (if not in subject matter).
Not so incidentally, it’s the matter of tone (or mood, or feel) which is addressed by the question I’ve been keeping to myself in the event Joss shows up at Flanvention.
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