Tim Minear

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.

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 the 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 kind of a technique that they use that’s literally rear-screen projection. It’s fairly inexpensive and easy to do 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 Peristere, 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 Gutanis 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 car, 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 of 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 these 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 on 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.