Originally Posted by groovrbaby

"Your art...was the prettiest art...of all the art"

My side still hurts from that line.

Originally Posted by The Onion AV Club

AVC: How did your episode of The Office come about?
JW: I knew Greg Daniels a little bit, because he's married to Susanne Daniels, who is largely responsible for Buffy ever being on the WB. And I know Jenna Fischer because she's married to James Gunn, who briefly worked for me, and is a friend and an awesome guy. I saw him at a con, saw his wife, and said, "What do you do?" She said, "I'm starring in an NBC sitcom." I felt really dumb. So I rushed off and watched it. As it happened, I also took offices, briefly, right next to their writing staff, pre-season, and I became chummy with all of them. It was sort of a giant group of chum. So when somebody suggested it, it was kind of like, "Well, the comfort factor is pretty high, because I already know the writing staff and a bunch of the cast, and I adore the show. This will be a completely new thing for me, a real departure." And then they said, "It's about a bat, and there's a vampire." [Laughs.] I was like, "You have to be fucking kidding me." They were like, "Your stunt meeting is here, and your CGI meeting is here." I was thinking, "Didn't I just leave this party?" That was just coincidence. But that's how that happened. God, it was fun.

AVC: Did you have any input into the script, or freedom to alter it?
JW: I wouldn't say freedom to do things with it, because that sounds disrespectful. [Laughs.] But way more input was asked for than I would have ever anticipated. They wanted my notes on the draft before they went into the rewrite. There was a lot of physical stuff, especially when the bat appears, that I got to pitch. I got to pitch a ton of stuff. Some of it, they were like, "Great!" Some of it, they were like, "Hmmm… try it." The physical stuff made it in pretty well, and there was some stuff where I was like, "We're not going to shoot this, we don't have time, and I know that it's not going to work." They're incredibly open with their actors, and they're shooting improv. There was that thing about Pam's art. I got to the set and saw Pam's art, and I was like, "This is not right." [Laughs.] I held up production for an hour while they frantically made new art. That was the one time when I felt the power of the visiting director. What are they going to do, fire me? Somebody was like, "You're really working to protect your vision." I was like, "No, no, no, no, no. This is in the script. This is Greg and Brent Forrester's vision. They've written down a very beautiful thing about exactly what her art should be like, and that's what I'm going to put on the screen." The fact that they were that open and collaborative, and the fact that I was always completely respectful of their process and their world, I'm just going to do my best. Obviously, as a director on that show, all you want to do is hide. If anybody notices that it was directed, you've kind of failed. They gave me way more freedom than I can remember giving people. Ever. [Laughs.] I'm not going to lie about it.