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Amber Nectar
Amber Benson has been enjoying the sweet smell of success since she left Buffy in Season Six. We catch up with Tara’s alter ego to hear all about her latest spellbinding projects...
By Abbie Bernstein
The room is filled with literally thousands of card mailing tubes and manila envelopes, labels and tape. Is this a small postal supplies shop? No, it’s Amber Benson’s living room, where Amber and her mother Diane - with help from Amber’s artist sister Danielle and Diane’s visting sister Janice - are at ground zero for distributing Chance, the offbeat comedy film that Amber wrote, produced (with Diane and Danielle) and directed.
Amber plays the title character, who tries out a love-’em-and-leave-’em approach to her sex life while oblivious to the romantic interest of her best friend Simon, played by James Marsters (Buffy’s Spike), as Grant Langston’s strolling troubador comments ironically on the action. Andy Hallet (Angel’s Lorne), Jeff Ricketts (Watcher Weatherly and the sewer monster in Angel), Christine Estabrook and Nicholas Brendon’s wife Tressa DiFiglia co-star; Buffy/Angel producer David Fury has a cameo, while Joss Whedon contributed a song.
Although Chance has nothing to do thematically with Buffy, its personnel on both sides of the camera clearly make it must-see viewing. Amber is giving away free copies (there’s a choice of DVD or VHS videotape in NTSC or PAL format) to anyone who buys one of the film’s posters, designed by Danielle and signed by Amber, or a likewise signed photo of Amber on the set. The reason for this, Amber explains, is simple: “It was the only way people were ever going to see it. People [kept] saying, 'When is Chance going to be available?' I didn’t have an answer. So it was like, 'Well - now! It’s available now.'”
Amber filmed Chance in the spring of 2001 primarily as a means of flexing her creative muscles. Accoring to Diane, Amber’s fans are responsible for helping raise the funds to complete editing. “We could never have finished it without people buying her picture and thank-yous on the end credits that we were making Chance,” she says, “and we will be forever indebted to them.”
Amber determined to distribute Chance, she says with a modest laugh, “When I realized it was actually pretty good! We started watching the dailies, and it wasn’t some vanity project - it actually had a story and was Annie Hall-esque, talking to the camera and with all these weird situations. We started having screenings at the house when we were putting the film together, and people were watching it and laughing, and it was like, “Wait a minute, we actually have a viable product here.”
“I knew we had good performances, because we have wonderful actors, and we have a great director of photography and our production designer is wonderful. But I didn’t know if I had the chops to deliver something that was usable. But when we started putting it together, we realized it was really funny, and people responded to it.”
Initially, Amber explains, she did try to go the more conventional distribution route: “We started trying to do the whole [film] festival thing, and we ran into a lot of politics. Everybody wanted to see the film, but nobody really wanted to take it on. It was like, 'Oh, well, It’s digital.' So are a lot of other films. Or, 'Oh, well, the whole Buffy thing...' That means you’ll have people in the seats. 'Yeah, but it’s not really very trendy...' That’s because you get these very pretentious people that run film festivals. Luckily, the people who run [the] Sidewalk [Film Festival] in Birmingham [Alabama, where Chance had its big screen premiere] are not like that - it’s about film. But at other independent film festivals every film is from a major studio that’s fronting through a small production company.”
The catch was that in order to sell Chance, Amber first had to pay various deferred production costs - and there seemed to no way to get the money to pay the costs without selling the film. However, no rules prevent her from giving copies away. “If you’re kind enough to buy a picture or poster from us,” Amber says, “we’ll send you a copy, so you can see it.”
Making Chance available to the public is far from the only thing Amber has worked on since playing the late, much-lamented Tara on Buffy. After collaborating with Christopher Golden on two Buffy comic books, Wanna Blessed Be and Wilderness, Amber reteamed with Chris on the script for the BBC Internet fantasy series Ghosts of Albion, which Amber directed. “I didn’t really direct the animation part of it,” Amber clarifies. “[Production company] Cosgrove/Hall took our script and did what any comic book artist would do - they created pictures to go along with the script. What I did as a director was I put together the audio [acting]. So we went into the studio and recorded it like a radio play. We had Leslie Phillips and Emma Samms - both wonderful people - and Anthony Daniels, who’s just amazing. I knew exactly who he was. I was just like,” she whispers in recalled awe, 'C-3PO!' He was so supportive of the whole process. He and Chris and I worked on it and he came up with some of his lines. He paid us such a compliment. He said, 'When I read the script, I didn’t know if someone from the UK had written it or someone from the States.' And working with Chris is awesome. He’s my mentor as a writer. He’s really helped me develop my skills at outlining and putting things together. I could not have asked for a better teacher.”
The fact that Chris and Tom Sniegowski were the writers on the project is one of the reasons Amber agreed to vocally reprise her role as Tara for the new Buffy videogame Chaos Bleeds. Amber reveals that certain choices the player makes can bring out a different side of Tara. “We went back and forth between doing kind of sexy stuff and the normal Tara, saying helpful hints to whoever is playing the game. We recorded the dialogue on a soundstage at Fox - the guy that was directing, the producers and gaming guys were standing together, and I was at the mic in the middle of this giant room. They actually had a British gaming television show recording it while I was recording - it was very odd.”
Amber likens the experience to doing automatic dialogue replacement, or ‘looping’, with the bonus of not having to precisely match her words to the character’s lip movements. However, according to the actress it wasn’t hard returning to play Tara. “It came naturally,” she admits.
Some lucky fans at the Moonlight Rising convention earlier this year witnessed another brief incarnation of Tara when Amber and fellow Buffy star Anthony Stewart Head did a live duet, with piano accompaniment, of their song ‘Wish I Could Stay’ from the Buffy musical. “It was nerve-wracking,” Amber recalls. “I actually started listening to Tony and got lost. ‘Oh, Tony sounds really good - oh, I need to be singing, don’t I!?!’ Tony’s a sweetheart. It was really cool to get to sing with him, because we recorded [the song in the episode] separately. So this was the first time I’d ever sung with him other than working on his album Music for Elevators. But [on that] this other girl and I were just doing little bits and pieces and I wasn’t actually singing with him.” Amber admits that she was initially worried about singing at the convention: “Tony said, ‘Come on, get off your butt; let’s do this.' And he was totally right - it was a lot of fun. The audience were really excited.”
More recently, Amber exercised her vocal chords in the one-act musical Fortune Cookie Man as part of the Young Playwrights Festival, for which she also directed the play Women Are The Weaker Sex. She is currently working with Christopher Golden on Astray, a novella follow-up to Ghosts of Albion. The writing partners are also scripting a horror movie that Amber hopes to direct in Ireland next year. And she has two acting projects pending in films, which she couldn’t discuss as we went to press.
Amber would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight on a minor myth that has sprung up around Chance: she never planned to play James’ role of Simon, who was always conceived as a guy. “It wasn’t until after I had written the character that that was me,” she explains. “That is who I am. Even though it’s a boy, it’s my sensibility. All the little eccentricities that that character has are my eccentricities. It’s who I am - very much like the character that James plays.”
Then again, Simon doesn’t seem driven enough to make a movie himself, much less make sure that it’s available to those who want to watch it. “Go see Chance, buy some popcorn,” Amber counsels. “I’m proud of it. People want to see it, and I’d like them to see it.”
The Chance posters and photos (along with the free DVD or video) are available from chancemovie.com
Edited to add: Apparently, this interview is also scheduled to appear in the March 2004 issue of the UK edition of the Official Buffy Magazine (which goes on sale in February).
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"I want to be Byron... because I want to date young boys." Amber Benson
Thankfully it focusses on Chance, nothing new really, but no less nice to read. She has every reason to be proud, this really is a cleverly made and fun movie, not trendy enough my ass. Trendy does not equal quality. 
