Bruce Seth Green tends to not stay in any one place for very long. With two decades' worth of experience wandering through virtually every television genre, Green's MO is to do the best job he can and then move on. The only exceptions to that self-enforced rule are fantasy and SF shows, where he has been able to leave more of a mark. With such credits as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and seaQuest DSV, Green has found an arena to call his own.

"Science fiction tends to be much more creative for a director," he explains. "Television directors are put in place well after the producer formulates a series. The producer hires the cast and key personnel, so many times when you start working on a regular series, much of it is set in stone already. There isn't much creative input that you can offer. With SF, it doesn't matter how many years a show has been on, there's usually a certain amount of creativity required because each episode is different and takes imagination [to realize]. On a police show, a line in the script might read, 'The detective gets out of his black-and-white and walks into an office building'. and everyone knows what that is. If a line in a SF series says,'The wizard materializes,' what the wizard looks like and how he materializes is up for grabs."

Green originally planned to be an architect before picking up a movie camera in college and deciding that filmmaking [sic] might be a more enjoyable career. After earning a graduate degree in film from USC, he quickly landed a job at Universal making industrial films, music videos and a version of the video disc, one of which was nominated in the early '80s for a Grammy.

Genre Nomad

Green's big TV break came about thanks to the Screen Actors' Guild strike in 1980, which was settled with unexpected swiftness, but made a shambles of production schedules just weeks into the new season. "What happened was, the directors who were lined up for Magnum P.I. weren't available because they had to go on to other things after the strike, so I got my break. I did one episode then, and didn't do another show for three years, because I had a lot of learning to do. The reason I chose television was because I knew that they would need new shows every season, and I like the speed. Three years later, I finally got an episode of Knight Rider because I kept at it and kept asking."

Television work continued, including episodes of Air Wolf, Automan, Swamp Thing and MacGyver, as well as such TV movies as Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker and The Laker Girls. Among his early genre efforts were "V": The Series and the TV movie Running Against Time, in which Robert Hays and Catherine Hicks travel back to 1963 in order to prevent President John F. Kennedy's assassination. "I had a lot to do with the development of that project, because the script needed work and the producer wanted the best show. We both worked on it together and added quite a bit to the script, which is always satisfying. It was a USA cable show, so the budget was very small. Attempting to create a period piece like that is very difficult, but I'm happy with the end result."

As for "V" Green had no idea that he would be working with co-star Michael Ironside years later on seaQuest DSV. "I worked on the second and third seasons, when it was shot in Florida, and enjoyed it a lot. When I was shooting 'V,' Michael was going through a dark period, and all I ever saw him wearing was black. He might have been a little depressed at the time, but one day, I was shooting my second or third episode, and I was wearing a shirt which was kind of purple. Michael said, 'Gee, I like that shirt!' So at the end of the show, I gave him the shirt; I figured he should have something other than black in his wardrobe.

"Fifteen years later, I walked onto the set of seaQuest and Michael was wearing my old purple shirt! He had kept it all those years, and said he would never give it away because it was one of the nicest things that had happened to him in those years. It pulled him out of a little funk, so he ended up holding onto the shirt, which was very out of style. I was amazed it had lasted that long."

From Hercules to Buffy, director Bruce Seth Green's "unchained" talent helped fashion numerous legendary SF and fantasy journeys.

One of Green's first visits to fantasy came about when he was booked to work on the then-fledgling series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. His debut effort, "The Warrior Princess," introduced Xena. Finding the right actress to play the character, though, was no easy task. When the director began prepping the episode just before Christmas, Vanessa (TV's Weird Science) Angel had already been cast as Xena, and the two met briefly before Green headed to New Zealand. "I prepped the show between December 5 and 17, and then the producers said I could either stay in New Zealand for the interim and they would fly my family over, or I could come back to the U.S. So my family came over and we spent two weeks touring the island, which was very nice.

"When we got back to New Zealand on the 30th, I had a call waiting on my machine from the producer who said that Vanessa had basically backed out of the project. I'm not quite sure why, but she couldn't do it, nor could they cast anyone in the United States, because it was the holidays and they could not find anyone satisfactory. The producer in New Zealand said we would have to cast the show locally, so we looked at tapes of different actresses and one of them was Lucy Lawless. She had played a minor part in a previous episode and was very good, so we thought she could do it."

Lawless had already gone on holiday with her family, but agreed to come home early in order to film the trilogy. "Because of her scheduling, we had to reorganize so we wouldn't have to shoot any of her scenes the first two or three days. Finally, she appeared, was fitted for wardrobe and we did the first episode. I don't know if anyone considered this a spin-off at that point, but after the dailies went back to the United States, they said, 'There's a spin-off here!' But that wasn't until well after I did the third episode."

Ironically, the next time Green worked with Lawless, she was reprising her earlier Hercules role as Lyla, the centaur's wife in "The Outcast." The character was initially killed off early in the episode, but it didn't remain that was. "The studio felt that was not a satisfactory ending, so they changed it," explains the director. "I don't think it was the studio so much as the marketing people in syndication. I believe they felt that,'Gee, she shouldn't die.' But this was a character who had been established in a previous episode, before I cast her as Xena."

Thanks in part to Green - and Lucy Lawless - Xena leapt from a guest stint on Hercules ("The Warrior Princess") to eventual stardom.

Green's final Hercules was "Mother of All Monsters," which introduced Bridget Hoffman as the reptilian Echidna, one of the series more popular creatures. "Bridget was a real trouper in that one. The amount of prosthetic work that some of these actors have to go through in incredible. In many cases, they're on hand at 4:30 a.m., going through three hours of prosthetic makeup before they're on the set. It usually includes the makeup plus contact lenses and teeth; you wind up pretty much mummified. Bridget was a terrific sport about it. She has known [Hercules and Xena executive producer] Rob Tapert and those guys in the 'Michigan contingent' for a long time. While I was doing those shows, I got close to them and they were very open."

Renaissance Man

The director's relationship with the Renaissance family later continued on the short-lived CBS thriller American Gothic. "I did episode nine or 10 and I had a great time, but the show was a little inconsistent as far as where they were going to take it. I don't think it had the clarity that perhaps it should have had, but I never know what's going on with the writers, the producers or the network. It could be that the writers and producers had one vision and the network asked for something else, but I saw a number of episodes and thought there was an inconsistency."

Green also worked with Lawless again, this time as star of Xena: Warrior Princess, when he came in to helm an early first season entry, "Dreamworker." "It was a tough episode," he recalls. "We were doing it during their winter, which meant there was a lot of mud in New Zealand, so much of it had to do with the weather. They were shooting episodes in one day less than Hercules, at least when I started, but it was great to see Lucy again. They were very nice people."

The director is less enthusiastic when discussing his work on Babylon 5, four episodes in the first season ("Born to the Purple," "Mind War," "Deathwalker," "Signs & Portents"). "That was one show I could not wait to get off of," he declares. "It's funny, but I recently worked on Martial Law on the old Babylon 5 stages in Sun Valley, which is not one of the nicest places in the world. The thing about Babylon 5 was that all the scenes for every single show were shot on that stage. They had a large warehouse that they cut in two and made two stages, and basically, you did all of your prep in an office that was part of the warehouse complex, and then shot all of your scenes on the two stages. Nothing was ever shot outside away from that stage, and it became extremely claustrophobic. After I did my third episode, couldn't wait to stop that one!"

One of Green' longest directing stints was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, working on the series off and on throughout the first two seasons. "I did eight episodes out of the first 20; which is a lot of episodes. What happened is, I came in and did the fourth episode of their first season ["Teacher's Pet"], and I guess they had gone through three other directors by the time I got there, and they weren't getting what they wanted. They couldn't make the show on time, the action wasn't the kind of action they wanted, a lot of the humor wasn't being realized as well as some of the drama. Since I had a background in comedy, drama and action, I knew what the producers wanted, perhaps more than someone who wasn't disciplined in those three areas. After that first episode, they made room for me to do another one, and then a third, and the next season they hired me to do four to begin with and then added a fifth."

For Green, the reason for sticking with Buffy was simple. "The scripts are excellent," he insists, "and Joss Whedon is very articulate. It's not that I always agreed with him, and my relationship with those guys was whenever I walked into their office, they would say, 'OK, what's the scene?' What they meant was, 'What is the scene that Bruce is going to have trouble with?'because there will always be one scene that I don't understand, which they can't explain to me. If I understand the intent, I can direct it, but if it was cloudy, I needed clarification."

Green's first Buffy, "Teacher's Pet," sees Xander taken prisoner by a substitute teacher, who turns out to be a man-eating she-mantis. The director soon discovered he had a head star of sorts, having already worked with the seven-foot animatronic mantis. "It's true," he admits, "it was from Babylon 5, so when they wheeled it in, I knew exactly what it was. It was comforting when I saw that praying mantis, because I knew this was an episode I could do."

It was on "The Pack" that Green really began to his directorial stride, with a story about a group of students possessed by vicious hyena spirits. Needless to say, coaching a group of teen actors on the finer points of hyena acting presented a unique set of challenges. "That was one of my favorites, so that's why I say I really felt good about my second one, and then it depended on the scripts. When I read the script, I said, 'How am I going to do this?' On paper it's one thing, but it can look ridiculous when you bring it to the screen.

"When I was casting, there was one particular actress who came in and I realized it would work because it just made sense - the animal edge was there - and I said, 'This is going to be nice .' It was wonder fun directing them to be hyenas."

Green wrapped his first season on Buffy with "Nightmares," where the residents of Sunnydale find their bad dreams beginning to come true. "It was the episode where I had more creative freedom than any other. It starts with the writing; everything should be handled differently and each one of the nightmares was different."

When Green returned for the show's second season, he found himself directing an incredible cross-section of episodes, including the high-school Frankenstein pastiche "No Assembly Required," the seasonal chiller "Halloween," "The Dark Age," featuring a demon-possessed Jenny Calendar (Robia La Morte); and "Ted," which guest-starred John Ritter as a too-good-to-be-true suitor/evil robot. Looking back, the director is hard-pressed to choose a favorite or two from those two season. "I particularly like 'The Pack' and I liked 'Nightmares,' 'Halloween' and 'The Dark Age,' but then there was also 'Ted.' I'm very proud of the work I did on Buffy."

Charmed Life

Not a bad record, but Green ran into a few problems on "Phases," which marked the end of his involvement with Buffy. Although Green is reluctant to go into any detail, it's reasonable to assume that the issue in question was the Oz werewolf's costume, which was making its first appearance. "It was the last episode I did for those guys, and basically I had no control over the werewolf, no say in the fact that is was designed before I came on the set. It was a werewolf that they weren't happy with and I was sorry they weren't, but I was happy with everything that I did. My ideas about what the perfect werewolf would be and Joss' ideas are each their own, but it's his werewolf, as it always will be.

"One of the original descriptions they had was that the werewolf was going to be running down the school hall, and my suggestion was, put it in the woods at night to try and hide it. Unfortunately, I couldn't hide as much of the werewolf as I wanted. It was a werewolf head and a fluffy teddy bear body that I couldn't hide, and in a way, I took some heat for it. But it was time for me to leave the show."

This also seems a good time to ask Green the obvious question; Is he related to Seth Green, who plays Oz? "Everybody asks me that now!" the director chuckles. "They used to ask Seth that, and now, the reverse is happening: Everyone asks me, 'Is Seth Green your son?' Seth is a great guy. I saw Radio Days recently, and I had heard he had played [the young] Woody Allen, and it was wonderful watching him in that movie. When I did an episode of Angel, I was able to ask him how things were on the set, all the fond memories, and he said it was a very funny set." The two, by the way, are unrelated.

Although Green's involvement with Buffy ended in the second season, he did direct the very first Buffy crossover episode of Angel ("Into the Dark"). "I never thought I would work with those guys again and was very surprised when they called me in to do Angel. David [Boreanaz] is terrific, a wonderful actor, and we had a wonderful time together."

Having worked on both Buffy and Angel, the director points to the stylistic differences between the two shows. "Buffy is a 'stage' show, and a backlot show," he elaborates. "Almost everything in Buffy is shot in Santa Monica, on their little street or on a stage. It's Sunnydale, it's a small town and they build a lot of sets. On Angel, they go on a lot of locations, so it's a very different feel and you have much more to play with visually."

One of Green's most significant genre credits may well have gone unnoticed by fans. The director was asked to work on the pilot for Charmed, featuring three sisters who discover they're witches. "That was very interesting in that I did the pilot with an actress named Laurie Rom, but once the show was picked up, she decided she didn't want to do it, and they brought in Alyssa Milano to replace her. Part of my pilot was the material in the first episode that didn't include Laurie, but it accounts for only about 20 percent of the first show. What I did was a 'presentation pilot,' not a full episode, it was like 38 minutes, which established the series' style and got the show sold."

In recent months, Bruce Seth Green has continued to wander in and out of the genre, working on such diverse projects as Angel, Martial Law and Jack and Jill. "I stay as long as I can contribute and as long as I'm interested, and then it's time to move on. I've been lucky, but I think I have certain talents that are marketable. I have plenty of energy and I really enjoy what I'm doing, so I'll keep working as long as I want to."

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