Whedon discusses gender, femininity and metaphor

There's a brief but interesting interview with writer/director Joss Whedon at Shebytches.com, focusing on his affinity for strong female characters, the concepts of masculinity and femininity in his work, and the role of metaphor:

When I was writing Alien: Resurrection, I began to understand, on a level that I hadn’t before, what I was trying to do. Before it was even metaphor, it was simply, "What experience are these people going through that people can relate to? What is the thing that's going to make people say, 'I am Ripley,' not just, 'There's Ripley'?" ...

And the moment in the movie — and I loathe the movie, and have said so publicly many times, often when I shouldn’t — but I look at it now, and I see the germ of everything I’ve tried to do in my career. It’s the moment when Winona Ryder, who is such a porcelain beauty, looks at herself and says, "Look at me, I’m disgusting." And that’s when I said, "OK, now I understand what I’m doing with my writing."

Buffy came right after that. They said, "Do you want to do a show?" And I thought, "High school as a horror movie." And it really was. And so the metaphor that I had begun to strike at in Alien: Resurrection became the central concept behind Buffy, and that’s how I sold it, and that’s what they bought, and they got it, and they let me do it — and after that, everything was about it.

And then we came to Firefly, and Serenity, where I took away the metaphorical aspect — but science-fiction always opens you up to every element of history that you want, because the future is just the past in a blender. And so rather than a straight-on metaphor, it was more an idea of, "I can take anything from the human experience that I’ve read about or felt or seen — like, what is it like after a war? And it doesn’t matter which war or which country — what is it like for the people who lost?"

He also touches upon the Wonder Woman movie, which he's just begun writing.

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