By David Server

You've probably been hearling a lot of buzz about this 'Serenity' flick lately, and let me tell you, having seen (three times!) and reviewed the flick, it's buzz you're gonna want to listen to. A continuation of writer-director Joss Whedon's extremely poplular (but quickly canceled) television series Firefly, Serenity returns fans and newbies alike to the ongoing story of a rag-tag renegade spaceship crew under Captain Malcolm Reynolds, as he tries to keep the psychic River Tam out of the hands of a very angry government. Being such big supporters of the flick here at Development Hell, we wanted to give you guys a chance to learn a bit more about what went on behind-the-scenes of what will hopefully be the next breakaway sci-fi hit. And to that end, we finagled a chat with Chris Buchanan, former president of Whedon's production company Mutant Enemy, and Executive Producer of Serenity. Without further ado, here's what Chris had to say about his life in Hollywood, the history of Firefly, the triumphant return of the Serenity 'verse, and what it took to make that happen!

DV-H!: Could you tell our readers a bit about the history of your career in the entertainment industry?

Chris Buchanan: The first entertainment gig I had was working for a consulting firm in New York, and one of their clients was Columbia Pictures International Home Video. I left the consultants to hgo to programming, which is a marketing/sales function, for that company. And then I started doing acquisitions for them, so I would go to film festivals and markets and buy rights for the home video company, and for the motion picture company and television company. And when Sony bought them, they moved me out to L.A. to do acquisitions and change the way we were doing business. So I left and went to UTA [The United Talent Agency] to set up the independent film department in, heaven help me, 1993 [laughs]. Stayed there for three years, and then left to do what I'd always wanted to do, which was go be a development-producer-type. I ran Jerry Weintraub's production company for four years, and where I developed, Ocean's Eleven, which was a great success story except that it didn't have my name on it, [laughs]. But I had a good run there, and this brought us up to the year 2000, where Ileft to go start an entertainment marketing company that was internet based and venture capital financed, and we raised several million dollars to put this company togetgher, and it did really well until the bottom fell out of the capital market and we couldn't raise the funds we needed to keep operating. I left that world and came back into more traditional entertainment was the president of Mutant Enemy, Joss Whedon's company. We were based at 20th Century Fox television over on the Stewart Street lot, which is where we shot Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And when I got there, we had Buffy and Angel on the air, and were developing Firefly, which I think Joss had come up with in '98 or '99.

I came in right at the stage where he was getting ready to write the pilot. And he did so, and we loved it, it was great. We gave it to Fox, and they thought it was awesome and decided to order... I don't know if it was their *most* expensive pilot to date, but it certainly was one of their most expensive pilots to date. We were north of $8 million dollars for a two-hour pilot, which the network had requested. And the rest is history!

DV-H!: And unfortunately a sad part of that history is the show's fairly quick cancellation. Were you guys surprised at all when that happened?

Chris Buchanan: It didn't come completely by surprise, in spite of getting really nice reviews and actually having a pretty decent audience that was building. We felt like we were almost over the hump. And right before Christmas, we got the word that we were cancelled. And they had just ordered three more episodes, so it was kind of a confusing, weak message... 'We want more... but you're cancelled.' [laughs] But we loved making the show. I ran into Morena Baccarin (Inara from the cast) today, and we were just talking about how as much as we keep saying it, and it says in the press that we're all a big family, it's totally true. Everybody just said, 'this can't end!' And the person with the biggest bullhorn saying that was Joss, and he said, 'this is the best creative experience I've ever had, I love my cast, I love these characters. I love my crew, I love this world - what are we going to do, how can we keep this going?' So we had a pow-wow with his agent and his lawyer, either the next day or a couple days later, and really just started saying, 'can we do it as a mini-series, can we do it as a direct to DVD movie, can we do it as an indie movie, can we move it to UPN or Sci-Fi or USA or another network', and really just started pursuing all of these avenues simultaneously. Our good fortune came in the form of Mary Parent, who was then the co-head of the studio Universal. She wanted to be in business with Joss and, for a couple of years at least, had been actively pursuing him.

And she heard the show was canelled, gave him the proper amount of mourning time, and then said, 'so, do you want to do a movie?' And he said, 'Yes I do, and the movie I want to do is Firefly.' To her credit, instead of saying, 'but that's a show that just got cancelled, and we don't make cancelled shows into movies' she said, 'OK. Let's see if we can get the rights. You think about what the script is, and we'll go from there.

DV-H!: What was your reaction when Joss approached you with the idea of turning Firefly into a film? Making the leap onto another network or even to a straight-to-DVD movie may seem like one thing, but a movie is a sizeable committment. Did it seem feasible?

Chris Buchanan: it seemed impossible in the sense that even if Universal wanted to do it, Fox owned it, and they're competitors. And we did go to Tom Rothman at Fox with it first, even though we knew we had interest at Universal, we had to do it that way, and he passed. It still just seemed like the impossible dream. I put together a lot of independent films, and I said to Joss, 'it's not that expensive, if we can save the set, there might be a way to do it...' And he said, 'but I told Mary this is what I want to do, and she said OK.' I've known Mary for a long time, and I really respect her, but I was thinking 'OK, that's a really cool idea', but I was just not going to believe this until we started exposing film. My friends at different studios kept saying, 'they're not gonna make this! Nah! They're never gonna make it.' And I'm saying, 'No, I think they are going to make it... I was just in this meeting, and Mary said Universal is making it, and I believe her...'

DV-H!: So, in terms of the development process, could you talk a bit about your working relationship with Joss Whedon? How is he a collaborator?

Chris Buchanan: Y'know, development's not that collaborative a process with Joss. Joss is very much an auteur, on the writing side especially. He pretty much has his vision, he mulls it over for a period of time, he outlines, he sits down and writes the script. He thinks in pictures, and translates it into beautiful prose, and beautiful dialogue. And he presented us with the first draft of the script, which was entitled 'The Kitchen Sink' [laughs], and was about 190 pages long. And we looked at it and said, 'wow, Joss... if we *had* $190million to make this movie, we probably could do this!' And he was like, 'yeah, I know...' So let's let the cutting begin! So, Barry Mendel and I and Alisa Tager all gave notes. And Mary Parent and Universal gave notes, and Joss took that back to his writing place, and produced a draft of the script that was about 50-60 pages shorter, and came in, and we said, 'ok, this is it'.

It's not your typical development process, where there are 14 sets of notes, and 12 different drafts and polishes. We got that draft in and we said, 'ok, this is the movie', and we went out and budgeted it. Of course, tweaks were made throughout the production process, which is pretty typical, especially when the director is the writer, but Joss pretty much made exactly the movie that he wanted to make.

DV-H!: So it sounds like you guys pretty much escaped a lot of creative conflict, which is even more impressive considering the complexity of the project.

Chris Buchanan: The big thing is that Joss is an enormous creative force, and we all respect that, and just want to support his vision. When there are production issues,then it's 'we can't do this scene, because it's going to cost X amount of money, how do we fix that?' and there are always questions of tone and whatnot. One issue that got addressed in the script and then the movie all through the process was the accessibility to non-fans, to the unintiated. We, [the creative team] are deep in the world. I know these characters, I know this world, inside and out; I've been living it for three and a half years now.

But that's what we were concerned about, that somebody who didn't know anything about it was going to go, 'I don't get it, I don't get what's going on, I don't get the relationships...' And I think the two big challenges Joss had was how to make this a standalone movie that did not feel like a really expensive episode of the show, and how to completely honor the mythology that existed and that our hardcore fans out there love, and yet give the uninitiated a clear entry point into the story. I think in reading the final script, he really delivered on that. Somebody that's a fan of the show is going to have a very different experience with the movie than somebody who's seeing it and meeting the characters for the first time. Hopefully, both very enjoyable experiences, but different [laughs].

DV-H!: What were some of your responsibilites and challenges as the executive producer of Serenity? How were they different than the ones you had on Firefly during its time as a television series?

Chris Buchanan: Well, the first one was mostly staying out from in front of the camera, cause [director of photography] Jack Green kept saying, 'your head's in the shot... sit over there against that wall!' [laughs] The thing that was very different was that on the show I wasn't a producer, I was running Joss' company. I was more concerned with staffing the show, putting out fires with the studio and the network, dealing with marketing research, slightly different areas. On the film, I got my hands pretty dirty on the production side of things. Because of our limited budget, we had a tremendously important pre-production schedule, because we really had to figure everything out, because we didn't have any money to waste. So everything from production design to visual effects to special effects to locations... I got to participate in that process in a significant way, and that was a really important learning experience for me. Throughout production, one area with which I was very involved was the visual effects side of the film, and I'm really proud of that because our team did a fantastic job on it.

Our visual effects supervisor is Loni Peristere, who has a company called Zoic. There are over 400 visual effects shots in the movie and Zoic did the lion's share of them. Rhythm & Hues also did some fantastic work for us, as did PMP and Illusion Arts. We basically had a really great group. But that was difficult because as the number of shots escalated, which it did in a significant way on the movie, the money didn't escalate. So it was really a producer's nightmare and wet-dream at the same time, of how do we squeeze the most out of every dollar?

DV-H!: Was there ever any pressure fron the studio to bring in a "movie star" onot your cast? While the main cast is obviusly pre-established from the show, did Universal ever come in and try and force a celebrity into the role of the film's villain, The Operative (a role played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in the film), for example?

Chris Buchanan: I have to tell you, it again was that process; I kept waiting for, 'y'know, it'd be really great if we could get Ben Stiller in as The Operative, because he's really popular with the kids.' No offense to Ben! [laughs] But I kept waiting for that, and they said, 'No, this isn't a movie that's about movie stars - this is about great acting and these characters. I mean, are we going to fight you if you come in with some great name for The Operative? No, that would be great. But that's not what this movie's about.' It was awesome. And so Joss really had an opportunity to cast the best actor and the person that he thougt was right for The Operative. And I think it turned out fantastically.

DV-H!: This is probably the largest film you've worked on as a producer - is the job harder when the project gets so much larger?

Chris Buchanan: Y'know, it's funny, you actually have some of the same problems that you have on a no-budget movie. It's remarkably similar in many ways. It's just that there are more moving pieces, and when you're dealing with two or three hundred people in your crew, downtime is so expensive..., on a little indie movie, 'oh, we can't shoot tomorrow' - well, that's gonna cost us a few thousand dollars, let's move it over to your buddy's apartment. On Serenity, if we had a delay, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there's more pressure in that sense and there's more of a ripple effect; when there's a problem, it kind of amplifies.

DV-H!: The television show spawned a sizable and die-hard fan following (known as 'Browncoats') - is it satisfying to be working on material that elicits such an extremely strong reaction from your audience?

Chris Buchanan: It's awesome. And even today, without the fans, we don't really have much. You make movies so people got see the movies, and you make TV so people see it. And when the people that do see it say, 'we love it. We love it so much that we're gonna travel across the country to be an extra, or to go to a screening, or to meet the cast', it's just really flattering, and makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. And what's it all about! We could sit in our respective homes and write plays that we perform for our friends. But we choose to make big, expensive movies that (hopefully) millions of people are gonna go see.

DV-H!: How important are the fans to the survival and continued success of a project like this?

Chris Buchanan: They were hugely important in the succes. They were always there. When there was any moment of doubt for the executives involved and they think, 'wow, this seems crazy, why ar we doing this?' It really helps that we got eleven thousand postcards today thanking us for doing the movie, and we have a fan screening that sells out in nine minutes, just because we mentioned it online. Not only did it keep us all going from when we were cancelled to when we could actually make the movie, but it also really provided significant support in the sense of marketing the film, promoting the film, providing a story behind the making of the film. We have fans, and they care, and they're telling other people about this.

DV-H!: Marketing this film is a somewhat unique challenge, and a big part of that was Universal's series of advance fan-screenings across the country that you've mentioned - could we talk a bit about those? Do you feel they served their intended purpose?

Chris Buchanan: They really did, and it wasn't so much in the original plan, with a calculated schedule of how we were going to do this. It was more that the movie got pushed back, we wanted to have some screenings, and let's see how it goes. Okay, we had overwhelming success. Well, gee, let's roll it out to a few more cities. Should we do this again? How soon should we do it? Well, let's do it in a month. There was kind of an organic thing to it that really worked. And it actually ended up kind of impacting the entire marketing campaign. And that's why we have spots that have Browncoat testimonials. And we have a significant online presence from the official site, and all the fan sites. It snowballed in a really positive way for the movie.

DV-H!: Now that the film is finished, how do you feel about the finished product?

Chris Buchanan: I'm just beside myself; I think it's great. I think it's an awesome E-Ticket ride, not to date myself [laughs]. But it's exciting; it's fun, and I'm just hoping we get to do it again!

DV-H!: If this film spawns a sequel or potentially a trilogy, will your involvement continue?

Chris Buchanan: Oh, we're all there. I was with the cast not too long ago, and everyone was, 'OK, we're in. When is it? Can we put it in our calendars now?' I think everybody involved in this movie wants to do it again, because it was just such a great experience.

DV-H!: Looking ahead, are you involved with the rumoured Spike TV movie Joss is working on, or any other possible returns to the Buffyverse that are under consideration?

Chris Buchanan: I am not involved at this point. Pretty much when Joss closed down Mutant Enemy, that ended my association with the television projects. But I definitely think some things are happening. I'm not privy to it, but I hear things! [laughs]

DV-H!: What other projects do you have coming up?

Chris Buchanan: I'm just starting up a new company, and right now, I'm pitching out television, because it's that time of year. I've got a project with Zoic and Tim Minear that we're really excited about. We're taking it out in the next couple weeks, and we'll see if it sticks!

DV-H!: Sounds interesting! Thanks again for taking the time to talk to us, Chris!

Chris Buchanan: Yeah, absolutely!

We'd like to thank Chris Buchanan again, both for taking time out from his schedule to talk to us, as well as for the flick itself. Serenity opens nationwide September 30th. And keep it here at Development-Hell for all the latest movie news!