During these past few days, the entertainment world has been abuzz about a striking number of behind the scenes gaffs. While the spotlight is currently focused on the gripes of Megatron voice-actor Hugo Weaving, everything got kicked off earlier in the week when one of Hollywood’s top cinematographers Wally Pfister blasted The Avengers for the way it chose to shoot a number of its scenes. The specific sentence that everyone picked up on was, “I thought The Avengers was an appalling film,” when referring to an unnecessarily focus on sets over characters from a visual perspective.
Naturally, this seemed like complete sour grapes as The Dark Knight Rises was supposed to be the biggest film of the year. The movie grossed just over a billion worldwide, but that is still second fiddle to The Avengers’ $1.5 billion haul–enough for third all-time. Certainly everyone would just ignore this critique and go about their everyday business seeing how this is just a lowly cinematographer who no one has ever even heard of. Wrong.
When reached for comment, Avengers director and overall Marvel creative consultant Joss Whedon had this to say: “I’m sorry to hear it, I’m a fan.”
It is short, but sweet and indicative of why everybody seems to like the man. Joss Whedon is someone who never had this type of success before (the kind that brings with it a microscope) and basically worked his way up from the dark corner of television that is the CW. It took him decades to finally receive the level of adoration he experiences today, but when presented with another man’s garbage he greats it with kindness. This is just another reason to love Mr. Whedon and become a certified fanboy follower of someone once only known as the small screen liaison for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.