Tim Minear

GEEKMONTHLY.COM EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

When Drive debuts on April 15th, audiences will meet a number of disparate 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 stolen 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 Amazing Race. Our show isn’t really about race car drivers. You have a soccer 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 definitely 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 definitely 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.