Joss Whedon has recently been making the press rounds at the Toronto Film Festival for his low-budget Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing, but people are unsurprisingly also interested in a few other projects he’s working on at the moment.  Whedon recently signed a deal with Marvel to stay at the company through 2015 and not only write and direct The Avengers 2, but to also creatively consult on the studio’s other films.

The creative mastermind recently elaborated a bit on his role in the Marvel films not titled The Avengers and also talked about his plan for The Avengers 2.  If that wasn’t enough, he also revealed that the S.H.I.E.L.D. series that he’s developing at ABC will be made up of new characters separate from the film universe.  Hit the jump for all the goods.

First off, regarding his work on Marvel’s in-development films, Whedon told 24 Hours Vancouver that he doesn’t want to overreach:

"Very talented people are writing and directing these movies, and what I don't want to be is the guy they dread, who's going to come in and say" - here, Whedon affects a pompous British accent - "'Oh, well I have the power to say change this.' I'm not that."

As for The Avengers 2, Whedon cautions that the end of the first film does not signal that everything will be hunky-dory when the team re-assembles:

"The creation of the team is not the happy ending. It is the beginning of something that is complex and difficult, and now I get to dig a little deeper. And maybe, while I'm digging, just twist that knife. And that's exciting for me."

Twisting the knife?  Well we wouldn’t expect anything less.  As part of his deal with Marvel, Whedon is also returning to television to develop a pilot for ABC that centers on S.H.I.E.L.D.  He previously spoke about his enthusiasm for the show’s premise, but in an interview with MTV he cautions viewers not to expect too many familiar faces:

"It's new characters. It needs to be its own thing. It needs to be adjacent [to the MCU] but you don't want to do a show where you're constantly going, ‘Iron Man just left, but he was totally here a minute ago.' You want them to do their own thing."

It remains to be seen if the show will feature any familiar faces either from The Avengers or some of the S.H.I.E.L.D.-centric short films, but Whedon seems intent on using mostly new characters.  He noted that what appeals to him about turning S.H.I.E.L.D. into a TV series is the (surprise!) underdog nature of their position:

"Well, what does S.H.I.E.L.D. have that the other superheroes don't? And that, to me, is that they're not superheroes. But they live in that universe. Even though they're a big organization, that [lack of powers] makes them underdogs, and that's interesting to me."

The pilot is still in the development stage, but Whedon is onboard as a co-writer and may possibly direct the pilot when the time comes if his schedule allows for it. You can watch MTV’s interview with Whedon below.