Drive's nomination for outstanding visual effects in a special, mini-series or movie in this year's Emmys has led to it making history as detailed in a Variety article here.
With Drive pre-maturely cancelled, we took the opportunity to catch up with executive producers Tim Minear and Craig Silverstein about what would have happened had the series continued.
Jackal: Firstly, who would have sponsored each character and what would have been their motives?
Tim Minear: The sponsors for each character/team would differ, as would the motivations. Some of the sponsors would have nefarious/revenge motives for some of the players, others would have more “Great Expectations-esque” benevolent motives. We’d learn, for instance, that John Trimble was his own sponsor, and that Wendy Patrakas’s sponsors were an older couple who discovered that the infant child they adopted was actually Wendy’s first child, whom she was told had died.
Craig Silverstein: Winston and Sean discover (in the last episode produced) that their father, Fernando Salazar, is Winston’s sponsor. Later we would reveal that Fernando’s trusted advisor, Esteban Masferrer, is the real sponsor, and was using the race to take out Fernando and his sons… and take over the family business. Intrigue! Another idea was that Ivy, Leigh, and Susan (and some of our background/atmosphere racers) were not sponsored at all, but were selected by the race company to liven up the competition. Sort of like non-player “bots” in a multiplayer videogame. Imagine the fury when Leigh finds that out.
J: Who would have won the race?
TM: Somebody.
J: I remember you telling me in April what would have happened to Ivy. What would the fate have been of her and the other characters?
TM: Our story with Wendy/Ivy was well on its way (with the two episodes that didn’t air.) Wendy ended up escaping from Ivy and returned to Ohio to rescue baby Sam from Richard’s clutches -- but, because of something Ivy inadvertently does, Wendy ends up getting grabbed by Richard and forced to return home. Ivy, who all her life has been self-centered, would have ended up going back to Ohio, rescuing Wendy and Sam from Richard, and the two women would have continued the race together -- with the baby. Thelma and Louise as same sex couple. We wanted to explore the idea of how WOULD someone do this race with a baby along. Ivy would have ended up bonding with Sam, and when the moment of truth arrived, she would end up sacrificing her life to save his. That was one thread.
CS: Another would reveal that Ellie was more than just an annoying girlfriend. She was an evil, conniving girlfriend having an affair with Bill, our blue-eyed ground monitor working for the race. Rob turns himself in for court martial, but Bill forces Ellie to help him break Rob out of a military brig, because the soldier has a special skill that will help them win the race. Our All-American apple pie kids were actually going to be our way in to a film-noir type thread. Given some time you may have actually liked them. Also, Rob and Leigh were going to get together somewhere down the road.
J: We found out over the course of the six episodes that Alex Tully used to be a get-away driver. What other character secrets did you have worked out but didn’t get the chance to reveal?
TM: Well, the above Wendy story: she would not only have gotten Sam back, but in the end would be reunited with the child she thought was dead.
We would have learned that John Trimble was not really sick -- the meds were making him sick. Part of the game of the race. His believing he was a doomed man changed him and made him capable of things he normally would be capable of. Once he realized that he was not going to die, he’d be instantly hit by a bus, ‘cause, funny.
CS: This is more alternate universe, but I remember in the first draft of Tim’s pilot script, Susan went into a gas station bathroom and took a piss standing upright. I thought that was a pretty good surprise. Guess FOX didn’t.
J: What’s the story with Alex’s wife? Was she working with the race organizers?
TM: All the way to their first meeting and courtship. At least that was one notion -- nothing was in stone by episode six.
J: Had the series gone on, how would the premise have adapted each season? TM: New races, old players taking new roles, new players introduced.
J: How much backstory had you worked out about the people behind the race?
TM: Some.
J: I recall in one of the script drafts, the killer who off’d Susan was set up to be a menacing Duel-esque serial killer. What further plans/ideas were there for this?
TM: The killer four-by truck was going to be someone who had been injured in an earlier competition, and was getting revenge. That was one version, though we had others.
CS: One version was a young, hot, sociopath to be played by Eliza Dushku. Although the image of a half-paralyzed guy, driving the killer truck using specialized hand controls was pretty hard to resist.
J: What stories did you want to tell but due to the six episodeness of it all never got around to?
TM: All of them. I really wanted to do the story of Rob being sent back to Iraq and in the middle of the desert finding a race clue then being sent back by a high ranking official to contiinue the race -- and him ending up teaming up -- race-wise and romatically -- with Leigh. For instance.
J: Anything I’ve missed that either of you want to reveal about future plans for the show?
TM: I was so busy trying to address network notes and production concerns that it was hard to get too far ahead. And now that I don’t have to, not gonna.
CS: Certain stand-alone high concept ideas for episodes, like one that took place during a vicious storm or in the aftermath of a thirty car pile-up. Also, Ivy sacrificing herself for Wendy’s baby would have been great to see. I hope the last couple shows get uploaded to the internet, because there’s a fantastic scene in show five with Wendy driving the wrong way down a packed freeway at night, calmly explaining to a screaming Ivy why she has to drop out of the race.
J: What future projects do you both have lined up?
TM: Craig and I are working on something together, and developing other ideas as well.
CS: I’m planning on seeing Ratatouille when I get a second.
The final two air episodes of Drive will air back to back on FOX on July 4th.
Also, apologies for the lack of updates to all who rely on this site for Drive new. Both Kevin and myself have recently had real life stuff to deal with and have also been suffering burn out.
The ratings for 104 are in. The episode got a 3.0/5 with a 1.8 in the target demo. It came in twelfth place of all the network shows that aired that night.
These are, unfortunately, well below expectations. The good news is that what viewers *did* tune into Drive mostly stayed around for the first 3 episodes, which means the show is of a quality to make people come back for more. Or, in other words, the viewers generally like what they see, but not enough tuned in to find out what the show is like.
If you've already seen the first two episodes of Drive, head over to our forums where we're discussing the Canadian airing of Drive on CTV! Obviously, FOX viewers need to hold off for now as there will be spoilers abound.
First it was Ben Queen, my co-creator, who had the idea. The studio put me together with Ben and he came to me and said -- actually, he pulled out these old Matchbox cars and put them on the table when we met, and he said, "Here's my idea. It's an illegal cross-country road race with regular people in their own cars." And I said, "No. No thanks. I have to go." And then I thought about it, and the thing that really appealed to me was the specificity of the idea, a secret, illegal cross-country road race. Like I can tell you in a sentence and you get a sense of what that might be. But the thing that really appealed to me about it was that this specific concept could bear the weight of any story that I wanted to tell. It could be comic. It could be a thriller. It could be melodrama. It could be all these things with literally any kind of character could exist in this universe. And after doing things like "Wonderfalls" and "Firefly" and "Angel" and "The Inside," there were things in all those shows that I loved. And I just felt like here was a concept that could bear the weight of all the things that I loved about all my other shows, and I could put them all in one show. And that's what really got me excited.
On how to incorporate all the characters in the ensemble:
The thing about our show is that they're all involved in the same situation; they're all involved in this race. So you have this unifying situation where all the characters have a similar goal. But they all have different reasons for that goal, and then the individual character stories are their own stories, so they're interconnecting. It would be like on the freeway, how if you go into every car, it's its own little universe. And so what we've done is, we've taken these little worlds and we have them pinging off each other, and that creates new patterns and new, interesting conflicts. ... We don't service every story in every episode, so usually one or two threads might fall out in an episode and then return in the following episode.
On reuniting with Nathan Fillion:
Nathan Fillion, he's become a revelation for me again. He was on "Firefly" for me, and then I watch him in this and I'm just thinking, "Okay, I thought you were Harrison Ford. Now I think you're Harrison Ford and James Garner put together." He's just absolutely the quintessential leading man for me.
On the mechanics of filming the series:
There is a stretch of freeway, it's actually out of the shooting zone, but not too far out of the shooting zone, where they're building the 210 Freeway. And there are a couple miles that aren't finished yet and we've gone down there quite a bit to shoot. But we also find other roads that we can reserve or where we can shoot on location. And then the other thing is that much of the work that's done in the interior of the cars with the actos is done on the green screen stage. So we're taking our hero cars, our live action cars out onto the highway and such and shooting the logistical interplay between the actual vehicles. And then, with the help of Zoic, we are going onto green screen stages and we're going from live action second unit cars into our green screen cars on the stage. So it's a combination of visual effects and second unit stunt work.
On the influence of "The Amazing Race":
I hadn't seen the show before we started developing this. And then as we were deep into development, then I went out and picked up some DVDs of "The Amazing Race" and was completely hooked on it. I would say the way that it influenced us was that you can't compete with that. You can't compete with reality TV and what it does, and particularly when it does it as well as "The Amazing Race" does. And even though we partially sold this concept by saying, "This is to 'The Amazing Race' what 'Lost' is to 'Survivor,' the difference, of course, is that we really are a race. We really are closer to "The Amazing Race" than "Lost" would be to something like "Survivor." So we conscientiously tried to avoid doing certain things that they would do on "The Amazing Race." However, when you are doing a competition like this, there will be certain crossover elements, and at some point you just have to say, "What does the story need?"
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