“Minority Report” is one of several films this year making its way to the small screen. The new series on Fox is essentially a sequel. The movie will focus on precogs: individuals with precognition, or psychic ability to perceive information about crimes and murders before they happen.
The cast and executive producers of the TV series met with fans at Comic-Con, and they also took time to talk with SpoilerTV about the show. Meagan Good, Stark Sands, Wilmer Valderamma and Laura Regan chatted with us about their characters, where the series is headed and what viewers will like about the show. ***Our cast video interviews are below the article.
But first we didn't want you to miss the series lowdown from executive producers Max Borenstein, Kevin Falls and Darryl Frank. They tell us the show will be a procedural with serialized elements. But they also promise unpredictability and surprising twists. They say the TV show is set 10 years after the movie and will include a lot of future technology.
Steven Spielberg directed the original film and his production company, Amblin TV, is behind the series. The executive producers tell us how involved Spielberg was with the production, how the series relates to the film, if the main characters will be romantically paired, and what they think of the cast.
How is the series different than the film?
Max Borenstein: It has that [same] kind of epic scope but [also] the ability to dig deeper and really live with these characters going forward and explore some of those themes that the movie was able to only touch on. It’s very character-driven. In the movie the precogs are the center of PreCrime (a specialized police department that apprehends criminals using precog knowledge). We’re taking the [focus] of what would it be like to be a precog [after] PreCrime, still having these visions but trying to act on them on your own.
After PreCrime ended at the end of the film, there’s that amazing shot in the film that kind of pulls out of their cabin where these three characters who are almost like walking fetuses have no life other than living in the milk bath. Now they have to learn to be human. We get to explore what came before, much of the precogs’ own history that they are unaware of, and the fact that they’re living in anonymity and secretly need to stay below the radar so as not to be taken advantage of by potentially even more nefarious people than simply the PreCrime program that helped them before.
And then there’s the fun of what’s it like to be someone who’s a genius but has absolutely no social skills because you were never raised with people. [We] explore that world. We have this rich back story where the film is a piece of that.
Where do the main characters come in?
Kevin Falls: Meagan Good’s character, as the cop, has to team with Stark [Sands’] character, who is a precog. But in the movie there was an infrastructure in place. There was due process and you could arrest somebody. These two have to team up without any type of judicial infrastructure and stop crimes in the margins without being detected.
Is there a romantic connection between them?
Kevin Falls: Max and I want to resist the automatic forced romantic coupling. That could happen down the road but it’s not something we are setting out to do. We want them to be an odd couple and follow the logic of it. He’s a precog. He hasn’t dated. He may be a virgin, we don’t know. She’s a cop. And teaming them together and seeing what would happen, we’re trying to make it realistic. They’re gonna have fun together. There’s a lot of humor in the show.
What do you think of the cast?
Max Borenstein: Dash (Stark Sands) is the initial point-of-view character as a precog. It’s an incredibly difficult role. You have to portray this person who’s an adult, living in a world in the future, who spent the first 18 years of his life essentially a vegetable hooked up to a machine. And now he’s come out and his desire to connect with people meets the impediment of the fact that he can see murders of the people around him before it happens. So the complexity of that role is insane. And [Stark] does it with charm. It’s really amazing.
And Meagan Good is balancing that out as this shrewd, hard-driving detective who has her own sort of haunted history that she’s seeking to get beyond. The two of them working together and redeeming each other has been amazing. [Also,] Wilmer Valderamma is the most charming guy you will ever meet.
Darryl Frank: Laura [Regan] has this sort of ethereal and maternal quality to her and it’s just amazing when you see it in the pilot. [The precog character of Agatha is] sort of a hard role to follow up from Samantha Morton. She does a pretty awesome job at it.
Tell us about the technology in the film.
Max Borenstein: From touch screens that we saw in the film and the gestural interfaces (the laser-like see-through screens in front of them), now we evolve that into 3-dimensional space. The effects that we’ve been able to realize have been really exciting. Plus it’s 50 years from now. You can’t just have a cell phone. You have to think, ‘What’s that next iteration of communication?’
What were the challenges in creating this show for television?
Darryl Frank: Production, scope and visual effects. I’ve worked for Steven [Spielberg] 20 years and this is the first film that he directed that we’re making into a television show. It kept all of us up at night. You want to do it justice but you have television money. We had great money from Fox but the question is how you do those production tricks to make it look as big as the movie when you have television money.
How involved was Steven Spielberg?
Darryl Frank: Very. He doesn’t put his name on any show that he doesn’t get intimately involved with. In fact, two days after we finished shooting “The BFG” (an upcoming fantasy adventure film directed by Spielberg), he was in a room with [the other EPs] pitching them story arcs for the whole season, and giving them notes on props: ‘Why don’t you do this with the gun or do this with the set decoration?’ So he gets really involved. He told us even the little things, like the murder visions. It took them a long time to fine tune how to shoot the murder visions for the movie. We were originally going to go one direction and it didn’t work. And he gave us a lot of good tips on how to do it so that it would work. Even the gestural interfaces, when they have the things on the screen, [Steven said], ‘You can’t just have [the actors] doing [actions] unless they know what they’re doing.’ It’s just those little things that you wouldn’t know if you hadn’t gone through the movie process. It’s invaluable to all of us. We call it sprinkling the Steven pixie dust, and we’ll take as much of it as we can get.
Now that you've learned all about the show, make sure to check out our interviews with Meagan Good, Stark Sands, Wilmer Valderamma and Laura Regan below:
