CraveOnline.com sat down with Dollhouse creator Joss Whedon, and thankfully for us, they asked more than just surface questions.  We all know now that Joss created the show after a luncheon with Eliza Dushku.  Now find out how Joss creates these sprawling TV shows.  The man doesn’t create a character or two.  He creates an entire world; or more accurately given Firefly, he creates entire universes.

Check out excerpts from the interview:

Crave Online: How do you go about creating these total mythologies in your worlds?

Joss Whedon: You know, I don’t think I have a show until I have that. I think the same goes for a movie. I think that’s one of the things that’s sort of a science fiction thing particularly. You go into it creating a world. Obviously, everybody creates a backstory for their characters but when you’re doing something that’s science fiction, you really do have to lay down a whole bunch of rules about how this universe works, even though this is very five minutes in the future kind of science. It’s more Gattaca than Firefly. It looks like now and it is now except with a twist. But if you don’t have that whole world, you just have the character, you don’t really have a TV show. I like to do it for everything I write so there’s real life, so that it breathes behind whatever seed it is but for a TV show, you categorically have to because every question you can be asked will come up at some point. In a story meeting, one of your writers will turn to you and say, “Well, how does? And when did?” And you have to have an answer for that, or have left it open to create an answer for it.

CO: Is it like a reclusive brainstorm session when you start out?

JW: Yeah, there’s a lot of those. When the show is first picked up, I spend a lot of evenings in my study just pacing and jotting things down on different notebooks and on my board. Just every idea I had and pursuing some, just building on the world and finding the moments and insights into that world that will really open it up for the audience, some of which obviously have changed since we went into production as they always do, but a lot of which are in there right now.

Now that you’ve got a glimpse of the questions, head to CraveOnline.com for the full interview.

Related posts

• Mystery solved! Alan Tudyk stars as Alpha in Dollhouse! (3)
• Close up with Dollhouse’s Harry Lennix (0)
• Zap2it: Interview with Dollhouse’s Tahmoh Penikett (0)
• Whedon on Dollhouse and sex appeal (0)
• Trailer of Dollhouse - Episode 2 - The Target (3)