Day Camp

What does James really think about Sarah? About Juliet? About it being like day camp?....

"The thing is," says James "everyone really enjoys working with each other. It's past a happy set. It's like day camp!" James

"In college they told me I'd run into a bunch of whiny people (in L.A.), but I've been fortunate. There are no spoiled stars around here. Sarah is a complete professional and a wonderful person. People are so happy to come to work each day and are proud of the work they do." -James

"They are a very tight crew who work hard and are really an inch away from burning out. They spend half their time on location which is harder to shoot than working on a soundstage [like Buffy] and they shoot the living hell out of scenes. Television has a language of shots, a master shot, over the shoulder, close-ups, but the Millennium crew shoot so many angles they get twice the footage most shows do. It was like shooting two hours of television for a one hour show." -James

"Buffy is so much better than any [feature] script I've gotten so far. I'll read the new Buffy episode and it's brilliant, and then read these movies and think, 'I don't need that, why step down?' That's the thing. I came to LA to make a good chunk of money and then go back and do theater. I didn't want to die poor. I wanted to have something in savings first, and Buffy has given that to me." -James

"Sarah is unbelievable. Juliet [Landau], who plays Dru, and I were in our eighth episode and we didn't have director's chairs. The problem is that if you don't have one of those you don't have anywhere to sit. So, finally, Sarah said, 'I'll pay for them. Get them some chairs.' Basically, she makes 22 one hour movies a year and she always knows her lines. She's in almost every shot. I can't say enough about her. I like her a lot as a person and a co-worker."

"I miss Juliet [Landau] very much. We had a really good working relationship and I thought the stuff we came up with was very interesting."

"Joss said, 'I would never put you out there without a net. Of course I don't know if logistics will back me up on that, but sure.' I think he was kidding. He loves to make jokes that make actors insecure; he thinks it's really funny. He loves to say, 'By the way, you're fired,' and then he gets a chuckle out of it. Then he says, 'Every time I say that to an actor, they never laugh.' 'That's because it's really not funny, Joss.' No security whatsoever. What's wrong with a boss that gets a chuckle out of making you think that any minute you could get fired? He's sick, but that's why he's so good and why he's a genius, I guess. David Greenwalt is off his rocker, too, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It keeps things exciting." by Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia Chase) in SFX Magazine

"I haven't had as much time filming with the other members of the cast as you might think," he says. "I'm kind of a newbie on the set.. It's my fourth year and I'm still the newbie! I have much more time off of the set with the cast members than on the set. And it is such a fun set to work on, but a hard-working one. We have fun getting it done, but at the same time, if you get off the set and you go to the trailers, it's a madhouse. A madhouse in a good way! Like Pee Wee's Playhouse.")

"Tony Head is the absolute bomb as an actor," enthuses Marsters. "He is effortless. He is able to give weight to a line without doing much. He's kind of like Anthony Hopkins that way. Most actors when they try to be serious, lower their voice and speak in a way that lets everyone know they should be taken seriously. Tony doesn't do any of that. It's his job to tell us who the villain is, where they came from and why we're supposed to care. Exposition is the heavy lifting. Any stage actor who has that horrible first scene in the first act, sometimes the second, is potentially boring because the plot hasn't started yet. Nothing is really happening. It's back information, but Tony just hoists that every week effortlessly."

They're different people. Sarah is a machine. Sarah doesn't know this, but she's actually a method actor. She is the biggest combination of method acting but also with the proficiency of the other side that I've ever seen. She's able to switch gears very quickly which I'm not. I tend to live in the reality while we shoot. She can flip in and out. Michelle is a very talented actor who's still keeping her eyes open. But they're very similar [in that] you don't realize how much they're doing until they see it on film. They're very subtle."

M: No. Not at all. It's just that she makes me look tall... which, you know, I love that! When she was paired opposite Angel and Riley, she had to stand on an apple box to kiss. Also, Marc Blucas is a very handsome guy but because when you shoot from each character's perspective, but when you shoot Marc, you shoot from Buffy's perspective, which is right up Marc's nose! So, he's like, "My nostrils! there's my big nostrils again!" He hated that because it's called being shot high-to-low and it makes you look taller. They often shoot me high-to-low to make me look taller... oh, by the way, I am 6'5". (laughs hysterically) Yeah, but they have to accentuate even that enormous height.

I didn't believe that David was scared of chickens. Someone mentioned it to me and I thought it was a joke! I did not know that. You say that Emma [Caulfield] told you that she tied frozen chickens to David and made him cry? I would never tie chickens to David. I love him too much. I mean, I would never really have thought to tie chickens to him anyway, but now I know that I will really steer away from it. Of the rest of the cast, Sarah doesn't really particularly like graveyards. It makes it tough. She has to overcome a real fear every time we shoot graveyards... which is all the time. That is my definition of courage, overcoming fear and the hero is not a hero because he doesn't feel fear, that's an idiot. A hero is someone who is afraid and acts anyway so she heros it up every Friday night when the tombstones are out and we're walking around. She has to get buried under earth sometimes in a graveyard where the decomposing bodies have been seeping into the soil for hundreds of years. It's a freaky thing. (laughs and shakes his head). chickens.

"David [Boreanaz] and Sarah [Michelle Gellar] are not ego-driven as actors," he defines. "They care about the work. They don't like to screw around; they like to have fun working, which is what I like. I do have enormous fun working, and if I feel we're just screwing around and telling jokes I get antsy. I think a lot of people take their cue from a lead in a series and if the lead is a good actor, if the lead is professional, turns up on time, knows their lines, then the work becomes focused. What struck me more than anything was the professionalism on both sets.

"I'll tell you a story about David. In the episode I was in he was actually chained up [in the studio] for 15 hours. Right before that he had been rushed to the emergency room because he got rear-ended on the freeway. Somebody hit him at 50 miles an hour. The man would not admit to being in pain. He is like a stunt guy; he could have his ribs broken and he would say, 'I'm fine, let's get this shot'. That's David in a nutshell; I only knew he was really in pain because I saw him wince when he thought no one was looking at him."

"I've enjoyed working with these people enormously, especially Tony Head, who I consider to be one of the better actors that America has right now. We would do well to keep him around and not let him go back to England. He's really fabulous!"

"If you are fighting Buffy or kissing her, you know you are in the middle of things!" reasons Marsters. "Getting to kiss Buffy was great. I got the script and went, 'Oh my God!' The problem was I was still smoking cigarettes at the time and Sarah hates smokers' mouths. So I was feverishly brushing my teeth in my trailer at all times."

"The thing that I appreciated about Joss Whedon before Hush was the dialogue," says Marsters. "I think you'd have to go back to the 1930s to find dialogue that sparkles like that, frankly. Something interesting is said with such frequency on the show that you, in fact, miss a lot of it. It starts to bubble and has effervescence; right on the heel of something interesting, something else happens.
"I thought that was the man's strength. I think he showed everybody that he has a lot more in his pouch of tricks than just the dialogue. He knows that the show is known for the dialogue and the quipping so he went, 'Hey, let me flush it! Let's just drop it and show you what I can do without it'."

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