After a long list of accusations of abusive and unprofessional behavior, director Joss Whedon defends himself and charges the cast of The Justice League
The director of The Avengers, Joss Whedon, was at the center of a major controversy in 2020 after the actor who played Cyborg, Ray Fisher, accused him of behavior “disgusting, abusive, unprofessional and completely unacceptable” during reshoots of the League of Justice of 2017. This invited other castmates such as Gal Gadot to affirm that the filmmaker threatened to “end his career”, and various cast members from buffy the vampire slayer joined the controversy by sharing their experiences during the filming of the series.
The director at that time decided to remain silent but now responded during a long interview with published in vulture now that Ray Fisher stoked the controversy, in it Joss Whedon takes no responsibility for the accusations, dismisses Gadot’s claims entirely: “English is not his first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech”, and even goes so far as to suggest that there might be some sort of “malevolent force” conspiring against him from the beginning. He doesn’t accuse him directly, but suggests that Zack Snyder is behind goading Fisher into making the accusations.
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That year, Whedon took a job doing rewrites for the Warner Bros. movie Justice League, a DC property directed by Zack Snyder. For two white men in their 50s who make comic book movies, he and Snyder could hardly have been less aligned creatively or philosophically. While Joss Whedon’s superhero epics were steeped in irony and puns, Snyder’s were melancholy and self-important, with a visual style that combined the artificiality of a video game with the fascist aesthetic of a Leni Riefenstahl production. Snyder’s fans were just as ardent as Whedon’s, but his previous effort, Batman v Superman, had failed at the box office and offended critics, with AO Scott going so far as to claim that Snyder and his corporate backers “had no apparent motive.” ” to produce such a sad spectacle of power “beyond his own aggrandizement.” Now those backers were worried about how their new company was shaping up. An early evaluation did not reassure them. “They asked me to fix it and I thought I could help,” Whedon told me. He now regards this decision as one of the biggest regrets of his life.
Joss Whedon was initially told by studio executives that his role would be limited to writing and advising, but Whedon soon realized that they had lost faith in Snyder’s vision and wanted him to take full control. (A Warner Bros. representative denied this. Snyder has publicly stated that he left the project to spend time with his family; his daughter had committed suicide two months earlier.) Whedon, now ensconced in the director’s chair, oversaw nearly 40 days of reshoots, a complicated and time-consuming undertaking. From the beginning, things were tense between him and the stars.. It wasn’t just that he wanted to impose a completely new vision on his work; introduced a completely different management style. Snyder had given the actors exceptional license with the script, encouraging them to improvise dialogue. Whedon expected them to deliver their lines exactly as he had written them. “That was not good at all”a team member told me. Some actors criticized his writing. According to Whedon’s account, Gal Gadot, who played Wonder Woman, suggested that he, the director of the highest-grossing superhero movie at the time, did not understand how superhero movies worked. At one point, Whedon stopped filming and, according to the crew member, announced that he had never worked with “a ruder group of people.” The actors fell silent. Whedon stopped filming and, according to the crew member, announced that he had never worked with “a ruder group of people”. The actors fell silent.
The actors, at least some of them, felt that Whedon had been rude as well. Ray Fisher, a young black actor, played Cyborg; it was his first major role. Snyder had centered the film on his character, the first black superhero in a DC film, and had treated Fisher as a writing partner, soliciting his opinions on the film’s portrayals of black people. Whedon downsized Cyborg’s role, cutting scenes that Fisher felt defied stereotypes. When Fisher expressed concern about the reviews in a phone call, Whedon cut him off. “It sounds like I’m taking notes right now,” Whedon told her, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “and I don’t like taking notes on anyone, not even Robert Downey Jr.”
Gadot didn’t care about Whedon’s style, either. Last year, she told reporters that Whedon “threatened” her and said he would make her “career miserable.” Whedon told me that he did no such thing: “I don’t threaten people. Who does that? He concluded that she had misunderstood him. “English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech”. He remembered arguing about a scene that she wanted to cut. He jokingly told her that if she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to tie him to a train track and do it over his dead body. “Then they told me that he had said something about her dead body and tying her to the train track., He said. (Gadot disagreed with Whedon’s version of events. “I got it perfectly,” she told New York in an email.)
As for Whedon’s claim that he doesn’t threaten people, an Angel actress told me that wasn’t true when she met him. After her agent pressured her for a raise, she claims Whedon called her home and told her that “I would never work for him again, or for 20th Century Fox”. Reading Gadot’s quote, he thought, “Wow, he still uses that line. (Whedon also denied this.)
Justice League was released in the fall of 2017. It was a critical and commercial debacle. Snyder fans blamed Whedon for his failings, accusing him, as one tweet put it, of turning Snyder’s godlike heroes into clowns. The power of the fandom, a force Whedon had done so much to cultivate early in his career, was now wielded against him. Fans launched an elaborate campaign pressuring Warner Bros. to release the version Snyder had originally planned, chartering a plane to fly a banner over Warner Studios. Just as Whedon had once used message boards to bond with obsessive Buffy, Snyder used the Vero social media platform to rally his followers, sharing footage of his morning workouts alongside images that seemed to stem from his version of the movie. Several months into the pandemic, the studio, desperate for content, announced that its cut would air on HBO Max. At an online fan event celebrating the upcoming release, Snyder stated that he would set the film on fire before using a single frame that he had not shot himself. “Our Lord and Savior Zack Snyder!” someone wrote in the comments below the live stream.
Around the same time, amid worldwide protests against racism, Fisher posted a series of tweets accusing Whedon of abusing his power and accusing studio executives of “enabling” the director. In a Forbes interview, Fisher said that he had been told that Whedon had used color correction to change an actor’s complexion because he did not like the actor’s skin tone. “Man, with all that 2020 has been, that was the turning point for me,” Fisher said. (Fisher did not respond to multiple interview requests.)
Whedon was stunned. He had given the entire film a lighter look, lighting everything in post-production, including all the faces. He said that the claim that he disliked a character’s skin tone, which Forbes eventually retracted, was false and unfair. Whedon says that he cut out the role of Cyborg for two reasons. The story line “logically made no sense” and he felt the acting was poor. According to a source familiar with the project, Whedon wasn’t the only one who felt this way; at test screenings, viewers considered Cyborg “the worst of all the characters in the film”. Despite that, Whedon insists he spent hours discussing the changes with Fisher and that their conversations were friendly and respectful. None of the claims Fisher made in the media were “true or worth arguing about,” Whedon told me. He could think of only one way to explain Fisher’s motives. “We are talking about a malevolent force,” he said. “We are talking about a bad actor in both senses.”
Some of Whedon’s defenders proposed a theory: What if Fisher had been following Snyder’s orders? Without providing evidence, they speculated that Snyder had misled Fisher into thinking Whedon was racist. Or maybe Fisher knew perfectly well that his accusations were nonsense. Either way, the actor and director had “manufactured a controversy” that made Snyder seem like a progressive ally while drawing attention away from the fact that his initial cut had been a disaster. Joss Whedon’s supporters believed that this campaign had poisoned Carpenter against Whedon, causing her to see the complicated history of their relationship as a simplistic narrative of abuse. “Once someone lights a fuse and people see there’s a flame, they run up to it and throw things at it,” said one person from Whedon’s circle.
In our conversations, Joss Whedon was somewhat more circumspect. “I don’t know who started it,” he told me. “I only know in whose name it was done”. Snyder’s superfans attacked him online as a bad feminist and a bad husband. “They don’t give a fuck about feminism,” she said. “My ex-wife made me a target, and people exploited that with cynicism.” As he explained this theory, his voice sank into a hoarse whisper. “She sent a letter saying some bad things she had done and saying some untrue things about me, but I had done the bad things and people knew I was accessible.”
When Snyder’s four-hour cut was finally released, it was critically acclaimed. His fans pored over both films to analyze the differences. Some clung to the belief, first advanced by Fisher, that Joss Whedon had intentionally erased people of color from the film. A remarkable change had taken place. Fifteen years earlier, Snyder’s work was widely seen as the epitome of troubled cinema. His major effort, 300, a sword-and-sandal epic about the Persian wars, was “so overtly racist” in the view of Iran’s UN delegation that it threatened to incite “a clash of civilizations.” Now, the internet had recast Snyder as a progressive hero while branding Whedon, their progressive hero of yesterday, as villainous and bigoted. “The beginning of the Internet lifted me up, and the modern Internet brought me down,” Whedon said. “Perfect symmetry does not escape me.”
Whedon clearly tries to play the victim with his words, what do you think? You can read the full article at this link.