Justice League star Ray Fisher has accused director Joss Whedon of "collaborative gaslighting" during the troubled reshoots for the DC film. Fisher stars as Cyborg, a young man enhanced by technology after a horrific accident leaves him near death. Justice League was originally meant to center much more around Cyborg than the theatrical cut would suggest. Amid clashes with the studio and a family tragedy, original director Zack Snyder stepped down from the project mid-production, replaced by Avengers director Joss Whedon.
Whedon radically overhauled the film's script, reshooting massive chunks of the film. That version of the movie essentially pleased no one, bombing at the box office and taking a critical drubbing. What's become more apparent over the past few months is that not only did Whedon direct a turkey, he also engendered a toxic environment while making the movie. Indeed, past collaborators like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel star Charisma Carpenter have come forward to suggest a pattern of behavior with Whedon revolving around the director's coarseness and casual cruelty on set.
Fisher has been the most vocal member of the Justice League cast about Whedon's alleged transgressions, reiterating in an interview with Vanity Fair that the director engendered a toxic environment on set and was dismissive of notes from actors and crew. Fisher states that Whedon had a chip on his shoulder over the polarizing response to Avengers: Age Of Ultron, mistakenly referred to Wonder Woman as "Natasha," and was quick to shoot down any collaborative efforts on the parts of the actors. Fisher's full comment can be read below:
What ended up happening, I think, was a bit of a collaborative gaslighting that we got from Joss. We ended up getting an email prior to the reshoot, I think it was sent out to the entire cast. It was an email saying, “Hey, we’re really trying to pull this together. Obviously this is a tough situation. Any questions, comments, blah, blah, blah, feel free to pass them along.” We learned pretty quickly that that was not the case at all. That was just the niceties for what was really going to be happening, which is, well, I’m not going to get too much into that. The thing is, there’s an ongoing investigation with respect to that, and we’re trying to get everything back on track with that.
There were some things that did not happen to me that I bore witness to, that I can’t speak about right now. That’s for the people that it happened to, to speak about. You could tell very quickly that [Whedon] was very upset that people did not like Age of Ultron very much. This is what I gathered from the first conversation that I had with him. There was a bit of this sort of egotistical narcissism that ended up going into everything that he was trying to do.
You can see it in some of the scenes that were produced. Flash falling on Wonder Woman’s [chest] is something that he yanked out of Age of Ultron and just copy-pasted here. In my first conversation creatively with him, he kept accidentally calling “Diana” “Natasha,” which is crazy stuff. This was in the conversation that they made me have with him prior to giving me the script. There was a lot of belittling on set. There was a lot of mocking, both of previous work and of actors and people.
He compared me at one point to Robert Downey Jr. And said, “Listen, I don’t like to take notes from anybody, not even Robert Downey Jr.” And I said, “Well, okay. Be that as it may…”
That was the first phone conversation he and I had had about the actual script. And so, two notes in, he cuts me off flat out and goes, boom. This is what it is. And I go, “Okay, the email that you sent was not what I’m getting right now. So I’ll take the cue and just back off it.” But you can tell he had a lot of resentment for what the situation was with the Marvel side of things. It just felt weird and odd. But we ended up getting the brunt of a lot of whatever he was going through at the time. I don’t know what that was, but whatever it is, can’t continue…. This kind of stuff can’t keep going. I mean, I said it before: If this is the only film I’m blessed to do, I’ll take it and go, because there’s never going to be another film that happens like this.
Fisher's were just the first of a floodgate of accusations of troubling behavior by Whedon. As mentioned, Charisma Carpenter recounted a horrific meeting she had with Whedon while starring on the TV series Angel, where he berated her for becoming pregnant and interfering with a storyline. Carpenter was fired the next season. A bevy of Buffy and Angel actors have come out in defense of Carpenter, some disavowing Whedon more forcefully than others.
The story has something of a happy ending, of course. HBO Max is allowing Snyder to finish his version of Justice League, which will be a massive four-hour epic that uses very little footage from the theatrical cut. Fisher notes virtually all the footage of Cyborg in the theatrical cut was from Whedon, so the character will essentially have a brand new character arc in the Snyder cut. Whedon's allegedly abusive behavior can't be undone, but at least fans will finally get the movie they've been clamoring for all these years.
Source: Vanity Fair
