Tim Minear

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 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 want 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 cool 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.

GEEKMONTLY.COM: Something that would entice the network.

wendy.jpg 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 of these cars in about 40 seconds. When we get to the head of the 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. The 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 episodes 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 Peterson. We’re going to go back and follow those stories as those stories start to constrict around our 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.

GEEKMONTLY.COM: Of course.

ellie.jpgTIM: Although I will say on Wonderfalls I wasn’t planning on success. We were pretty deep into the order before we ever went on the 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 closer 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 could 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.

rob.jpgTIM: 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 road 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.

GEEKMONTLY.COM: Why do you say that?

TIM: Because 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 that 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 about a bunch of normal people who start to realize they have extraordinary powers.

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

TIM: I’m saying that my show is as easy to transmit conceptually to an audience as that show is. Whereas Wonderfalls - based on the name you would have no idea 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 can 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.