Tim Minear on "Drive".

GEEKMONTHLY.COM EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Part 1

For those who miss the writing of Tim Minear (and who know of him from Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls and The Inside), he'll be back on April 15th with the new Fox series, Drive. The series follows a diverse group of Americans driving for their lives (or the lives of their loved ones) in a cross-country road race. "Some of them have been coerced into joining The Race," offers Fox. "Others have sought out THe Race themselves, hearing rumors of a $32 million prize. Each has a reason to compete. And each must win." Geek sat down with Minear to for an exclusive interview to talk about the new show.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Just from the description, it would seem that this is the toughest show you've been involved with.

TIM MINEAR: In some ways it's easier and in some ways it's harder, because we're doing a cross-country road race and we're shooting it all here [California], so we have to create different regions of the country here. But because technology has advanced to where it is, it is possible to have very realistic looking driving sequences and never leave the greenscreen stages.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: That's surprising, because you're so used to greenscreen and driving not necessarily going that well together.

TIM: There are different techniques. On most shows, there's kinds of a technique that they use that's literally rear-screen projection. It's fairly inexpensive and easy to di and it kind of looks fake. But on most shows, that's okay, it's not about the driving. When you're doing a show called Drive, you kind of need the driving to look real. When we did the first pilot, I did the effects with Loni Pestere, who did all of our effects on Firefly, Angel and Buffy, and we had looked at War of the Worlds. There's a sequence where Tom Cruise is escaping with his kid and Spielberg swoops down under the highway, moves right into the car, moves around the car, falls back into traffic - it's this one continuous take and he's moving all the way around the cars speeding down the highway. I asked Loni how they did that and he said it's all on a greenscreen stage. The way they accomplish it is they get the background plates that will be used for the environment by going out onto a highway in a camera car with 360-degrees worth of cameras on top of it. So they're getting 360-degree plates; it's not just what's behind you, it's everything that's around you in the environment. In that way, on the greenscreen stage you can look any direction you want, and you're moving realistically inside a CG environment and it looks incredibly real.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Looking at that sequence from War of the Worlds, you'd never know it.

TIM: Exactly. And when Greg Yaitanes came on as director, we talked about him doing the first five or six minutes introducing all of the characters in the different cars without cutting. It would mean landing on a highway, the camera fighting its way on to the hood of a car, through a windshield, falling out of that cart, fighting its way back inside of that car, actually moving around inside of that car, letting that car speed out of frame and leaving the camera in the middle o f roaring traffic as the next car races up to us, then going up the hood of that car and into it. And we did it and it looked amazing. It cost a lot of money, but it looked amazing. Because of the continuous nature of that particular sequence, it was rather expensive. But the truth is, there are cost savings in other ways. For instance, on the first day of our re-shoot, we shot 13 pages in one day and we didn't go over. Normally you would shoot anywhere from six to eight pages, and eight pages is kind of a lot. But 13 pages without taking any penalties is a lot. You can do that when you're shooting greenscreen scenes in cars, because there's really no blocking. They're people in cars and they're pretending to drive and they have dialogue and they're in and they're out.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Which I guess goes back to why in some ways it's easier and in some ways it's harder.

TIM: There is a lot of location work and it is a complex concept in terms of telling a story, because there are a lot of characters.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Which is tough. In some ways you're asking a lot of an audience when you ask them to keep track of a large number of characters.

TIM: Yep. It's tricky. But I've had some experience with that. There were nine principal characters in Firefly, and they were all pretty much serviced in every episode. But it's different because they were all on the same spaceship, basically, so their stories were interacting. Here you have an illegal cross-country road race and people in different cars. Really the only way for them to interact is by running each other off the road, interacting at the different check points or at a motel or gas station or that kind of thing. So they really are separate stories that weave in and out of each other's storyline. It's a real juggling act.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: I don't know if you watch Heroes, but they've played with that kind of approach.

TIM: Heroes is fantastic. The difference with Heroes is that on my show, when the leg of a race begins, everyone is sort of in motion at that point, so you have to try and find different ways to tell stories.

Kristin Lehman in 'Drive'

Tim Minear on "Drive" - Part 2

GEEKMONTHLY.COM EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

When Drive debuts on April 15th, audiences will meet a number of disperate characters, among them a man thrust into The Race in an effort to find his missing wife; a single mother competing under great strain or possibly something much more strange; a buttoned-down scientist and his rebellious 15-year-old daughter; two brothers in a stoeln Caddy that carries secrets of its own; and beautiful and mysterious female stowaway who may well hold the key to the secrets of The Race. What follows is the second part of our exclusive interview with executive producer and co-creator Tim Minear.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Do you see a wide range of possible stories?

TIM MINEAR: You can have the mystery of the missing wife or the mystery of the sick father. You know, the different mysteries, the different information being transmitted about the different characters, the different agendas they have and the sort of larger story character stuff for each. But once the starting pistol is fired, the agendas become the same and it's difficult to cut away and do something different because they're all racing towards a goal.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: When I first heard the name Drive, I thought of The Fast and the Furious, but then knowing you were doing it, I felt it wouldn't be some dopey racing show. Do you think the audience is going to have a weird perception of what this show is going to be?

TIM: Probably, although they'll probably think about The Anazing Race. Our show isn't really about race car drivers. You have a soccor mom in a minivan. You have a single father and his daughter in a Ford Taurus. And you have, initially anyway, nathan Fillion who's got a landscaping business and is in a beat up Ford pick-up truck.. so we're not talking about race cars here. We're talking about normal people in their own cars.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: With something like The Amazing Race, there's definately an appeal to a show like that with people who are on the run.

TIM: When we were first developing this, I had never seen The Amazing Race and I purposely avoided it while we were early in development. Eventually I watched it because I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing the same show. And it's not, though there are definately elements in common. But for me, this was a little bit less about The Amazing Race and a little bit more about the characters. I actually compare it more to something like North by Northwest, which is another adventure on the road.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: When you were describing that opening shot with the moving camera, my thought was - which I decided not to share - that it was like a Hitchcock wet dream. Like he did in something like Rope, with these long scenes with a moving camera and without a single cut.

TIM: I think it's a weird amalgam of all the things that I love. The closest thing we have to a standing set is we#ve created a franchise of roadside diners, with gas pumps, souvenir shops, and so on. We're calling it Preston's in ode to Preston Sturgess. So I really do think that it's everything that I love from the old days.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: What was the genesis of this concept?

TIM: It was actually my co-creator's original idea. The studio actually hooked us up together; we didn't know each other. He had an idea that we could make a TV show about an illegal cross-country road race, and that's where we started. Initially I said no. Not because I didn't think it was a good idea - I thought it was a great idea - but I just wanted to do something on my own.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Was that because you hadn't created your last show, The Inside?

TIM: The Inside was something that I came in and doctored and recreated. Before that I was instrumental in turning Bryan Fuller's pilot with him, into a series, which was Wonderfalls. I was not a creator on that show. It was a similar thing to Firefly. It was Joss' show and I helped run it with him. So I wanted to do my own thing, but this felt like it could be a good fit and it was.

Tim Minear on "Drive" - Part 3

GEEKMONTHLY.COM EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

In the final part of our exclusive interview with Drive co-creator and executive producer Tim Minear, we continue our look at the evolution of the concept and how it's being brought to the screen and the challenge of grabbing the audience's attention right from the start.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: You mentioned earlier that you had to do a lot of reshoots on the first episode?

TIM MINEAR: We're basically reshooting the whole pilot, for a whole host of reasons. Again, as you say, the concept is unusual. Now the studio and network were very enthusiastic about the project and they all really love the pilot and they wanted to give it the best possible chance. That's why we [Minear and co-creator Ben Queen] rewrote the first act so that we could get into the story a little differently. As coo, as that four minutes on the highway was, there really wasn't anything to hook you in emotionally because there wasn't anything to hook you into these people emotionally. You didn;t quite know what they were doing and it was funny and quirky and absolutely a joy to look at, but we were creating, at that point in time, a sales tool.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Something that would entice the network.

TIM: Even though I probably would not have said that to you at the time; I thought I was doing the first episode. But a lot of choices that were made on that pilot were made to demonstrate a, the technology; b, the tone; and c, what the show could be. It was very important for us to demonstrate right out of the gate how this would not look or feel like anything else. That's why we front-loaded it with all this stuff. NOw that it's a beginning of a long journey with a bunch of characters, we want to get into it with the characters as opposed to the driving. We're actually doing a little bit of both, because we start on the highway as we did. We do fly through all the cars, but instead of it going on for six minutes. we're flying through all these cars on about 40 seconds. When we get to the head of then line where we find Nathan Fillion, we kind of go into his head and we cut back to his life in Nebraska. We then end up back on the road and do that with all of the characters, and sort of place them in their own worlds and then show the moment of crisis when they ended up leaving to go and be in this race. That's kind of the first two acts. We're not ruling out flashbacks, because I've been doing them way before Lost, but I'd like to not do that as much as possible. They way these stories are told is in fact by going back into the worlds that these people left behind.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: So you;re seeing the worlds that they've come from, but from a present perspective.

TIM: Exactly. And in subsequent epiodes we'll focus on one or two worlds left behind, and the people left behind by the people in this race. They're all in this race and it's all a secret. It's like a wife is left behind with her child, a man whose wife has disappeared has left and is starting to look a little like Scott Petereson. We're going to go back and follow those stories as those stories start to constrict around or people on the road.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: This is a really cynical question and I don't mean it badly, but given what's happened with your shows - Firefly, Wonderfalls, The Inside - are you imagining these 13 hours with a beginning, middle and end, just in case?

TIM: I'm not doing that cynically. I'm not planning on this show not succeeding; I think you want to plan on success.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Of Course.

TIM: Although I will say on Wonderfalls I wasn't planning on success. We were pretty deep into the order before we ever went on air, and we could kind of see the writing on the wall. So I wasn't expecting that we would get past 13. Not cynically, but it was a safety zone to think that. On Drive you want to feel that you're going someplace; that there is some kind of finish line. That there is some kind of goal that is met. Now it's a TV series, so you also want to design it in such a way that you can then roll it over to the next season and evolve into the next thing.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: And what kind of evolution would you be talking about?

TIM MINEAR: You could have a whole new race and you have a bunch of new characters, or you have some new characters, or some characters have died and some have been eliminated and new characters have been added as you get cloiser to the last couple of episodes. That's a question and we're working that out, but my plan is not to go out on a big cliffhanger or something like that. It;s a little bit like the last episode of Angel that I did, which was 'Home'. It was the end of season four and we didn't know if Angel was going to come back, so that episode was designed so that it would give you closure but then it could also key up a fifth season if there was one, and of course there was.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: My wife and I were really into serialized shows like The Nine, Daybreak and KIdnapped, but there's nothing worse than when a serialized show just ends without any kind of conclusion.

TIM: We're going to avoid that. I do think there are some differences between Drive and shows like The Nine and Daybreak. Specifically I will tell you what I think the biggest difference between them and Drive, and this can apply to my other shows as well, is that this show is about an illegal cross-country race. There, I just described the show to you. What we're talking about is a character ensemble that has action and humor and is in equal measure a thriller and a character drama and an adventure. What's great about Heroes? Many things are great about it, but I could have told you that that show was going to succeed before I ever saw a frame of it.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: Why do you say that?

TIM: Beacuse it's called Heroes and I could tell what the show was based on the print ad. And it delivered on what it said it was. So nobody had to explain it to me. Now I could not have told you exactly what the show was - I didn't know if people were going to be putting on tights and saving people - but I did know that it was a bunch of normal people who start to realize they have extraordinry powers.

GEEKMONTHLY.COM: So the fact that your show is called Drive...

TIM: I'm saying that my show is easy to transmit conceptually to an audience as that show is. Whereas Wonderfalls - based on the name you would have no idea what it was about. If I said Firefly, you might think it was a show that takes place in the Deep South. When I say The Nine, it doesn't have any meaning to me. When I say Daybreak, is it about a morning weatherman? I don't know. One of the reasons the idea appealed to me is that you could literally have done anything you wanted with the concept. You could make it exciting, you could make it funny, you could make it heartfelt, you could make it a melodrama, and we're doing all of those things. But, I cans see the print ad and get it. I was sort of tired of having shows that people couldn't understand until they watched three episodes of them.