There are moments in history that become so familiar they can feel almost distant. The Drive looks at one of those moments from a far more intimate perspective.
Set on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, David Arrow and Amber Paul’s short film follows Liz (Paul) on what begins as an ordinary school carpool. As news of Kennedy’s death slowly reaches her, the routine journey becomes something far more unsettling.
Inspired by a little-known story from that day, The Drive explores the uncertainty of experiencing a national tragedy without the instant access to information we have today. Following a festival run spanning more than 40 festivals, the film is now qualified for consideration for the 99th Academy Awards.
I spoke with David Arrow and Amber Paul about discovering this forgotten piece of history, recreating 1963 and finding the human story within a defining moment.
The assassination of JFK is one of the most documented moments in American history. Where did the idea for The Drive come from, and what drew you to this particular story?
David Arrow: I was doing a lot of research because I was writing a play about Robert Kennedy and his campaign in 1968. I had read so many books and, at one point, I picked up another book continuing my interest in the subject. I found this story about what was going on with the president’s daughter on the day of his assassination.
I thought, “Wow, I’d not heard of that story.” I thought it was a fascinating footnote to history. It’s not, in a way, an essential part of the narrative of that day, but nevertheless fascinating and compelling.
Even though it’s Caroline, I really saw the woman, Liz, Amber’s character, as the real story. I jotted something down and showed it to Amber, and she just said, “You gotta pursue this.” I also knew that she would be able to really act the hell out of it. And she does.
So it was a combination of wanting to share a unique part of the history of that day and knowing that I had the perfect person to collaborate with.
Rather than focusing on the political implications of the assassination, The Drive puts us inside one woman’s very personal experience. What drew you to that intimate perspective?
Amber Paul: I’m very lucky in that my husband writes incredible scripts for me. I’m very, very lucky in that aspect.
But I also think about how it’s a seminal moment in American history, as 9/11 was. What happens in those moments is that all of our barriers fall away. Your background, your political affiliation, what language you speak, it all falls away, and you’re just left with the humanity of people going through this moment together.
I love how David created this space where she is in this fraught situation, yet she’s watching the people around her and getting clues from them. The intimacy and the detail of it are what ground that story.
That intimacy came from the attention to detail. Every single person was working towards the integrity of telling this historical story properly. From the buttons to the vintage gloves, every detail had to be right. There’s nothing worse than watching a period film and seeing a water bottle or an Apple Watch.
David Arrow: We wanted the outside world to creep in. The car, the passenger driving by listening to his radio, the African-American woman hearing the news. That element was important because we could watch someone who was able, because she didn’t have children in the car, to fully express her emotion. But Amber’s character can’t.
It was also about showing the contrast. I wanted that to be a character of colour because that community was very much impacted by Kennedy’s presidency and, of course, his death.
So the sum-up answer is that it’s trying to share a universal experience through a singular person.
The film also explores the idea of innocence, particularly through the children in the car. How important was that theme to the story?
David Arrow: It’s thought of often in articles as the death of innocence. We represent that a little bit with the children being the embodiment of innocence.
Amber Paul: The Kennedy administration was called Camelot, and it represented hope. Not just for the African-American community, but for people moving forward and new ideas.
That’s why his death, followed by Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s death in ’68, was the loss of innocence for the country.
I spoke to my father, who was alive in 1963, when I was researching the experience. He said, “Everyone remembers because we felt like we had lost our innocence.”
There was such a sense of hope, that things were changing, and then that was lost.
I also think about the personal experience. The nation lost its innocence, but a little girl lost her father that day.
That’s what was very present in my mind. It’s a true story from beginning to end. I think about this young girl having her first sleepover and the excitement of that, and they were going to Lord & Taylor to have a tea party. They were having this normal childhood experience, and then that was taken from her.
So there is the world impact, but also the individual impact on this one child. Liz has her own daughter in the back seat, and she has to think, “What do I have to do, whatever it takes, to keep these children safe and to keep her identity hidden?”
No one knew what was going to happen next.
“What happens in those moments is that all of our barriers fall away. Your background, your political affiliation, what language you speak, it all falls away, and you’re just left with the humanity of people going through this moment together.”
Amber, what did you find most challenging about playing Liz, particularly because she is experiencing something so extraordinary while initially just going about an ordinary day?
Amber Paul: That’s actually what I loved about the role, because I was able to bring parts of my own experience into that frame.
I did the research, which helped me understand her station in life and what she was allowed or not allowed to do as a woman. Because I had done that, I could forget it in the moment. I used things from my own background and focused on the protection of the children at all costs.
So she has this dichotomy going on. I didn’t find it challenging. I was prepared. I was very well prepared. And also working with my husband, who knows me better than anyone else, as a director, helped.
People always ask, “What’s it like to be directed by your husband?” I say, “It’s wonderful.”
We talked about the arc of her character and her experience. If we were shooting out of sequence, I just had to ask David, “Where were we in our arc?” And I knew exactly how to drop into those moments.
The car becomes almost a world of its own as Liz processes the news. How did you use that confined space to explore her emotional reaction?
Amber Paul: I would go back to speaking about our director of photography, Mark Raker, who I actually introduced to David. He and I have done four films together now.
He knows how to find the shots for my face and eyes. We have all those extreme close-ups of my eyes.
We were in a 1962 Ford Country Squire station wagon, which was the actual car that she was driving. The driving of that vehicle is so different. There’s no air conditioning, no power steering. You have to roll the window. The brakes take a lot of work to use.
The way that I chose to do it with the process truck was that the second I get in the car, I’m driving. Because you can always tell in films when actors are pretending to drive. I thought, from the second I get in, if I reflect everything that’s happening, putting it in drive, putting it in reverse, we have these hilarious shots of me reversing the car every time the process truck backed up.
That gave Mark the reality and the intimacy to do whatever shots he needed. They were all strapped in on this process truck with the car, and he used no lights. He used only reflectors.
I made it real for them all by always driving. Whatever was happening, I did it.
David Arrow: The very first couple of shots we did were Amber actually driving, so she already had the feeling of what the car actually did. We also went to a rehearsal studio and sat some metal chairs up and put Amber in the seat.
I wrote the script because it’s so visual. I wrote it more from a shot list, so the script reads kind of like a dramatic shot list. We figured out our possibilities and then, of course, we had to adapt because we didn’t have the actual car.
We lit it entirely with reflectors, again trying not to bring an artificial world into this natural experience.
Were you inspired by any particular filmmakers or films when creating the look and feel of The Drive?
David Arrow: If I had all the money in the world, I would have shot this on film using cameras from 1963.
With that in mind, my extraordinary DP, Mark Raker, and I came up with a visual plan to make it look like that. It’s shot on traditional digital cameras, but the colour grading has grain put into it so it looks like film and has that rich tone.
We shot it with anamorphic lenses for the same purpose, to have that widescreen feel of movies of the time.
From a filmmaking perspective, the one film I watched a number of times was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
It’s about the same time, early ’60s, and there are a number of shots where Tippi Hedren is driving to Bodega Bay. Although they used some techniques that were different, we didn’t want the modern look.
We drove, or pulled, the car so Amber could be safe and play the scenes fully, and the kids could be safe, but we used techniques that were in harmony with that period.
The other thing about Hitchcock is that, although I wouldn’t call our film a suspense film, there is an element of suspense. We don’t know what’s happening.
For me, it was important not to reveal the story. How do we tell this story and make it interesting? We make it unwind.
What Hitchcock does so well, particularly in The Birds, is that it’s really about what the characters see. From this perspective, it’s about what Amber sees and not necessarily what is happening.
We don’t show the assassination. We don’t show too many things outside of her car. We stay close to her car. We’re with her the entire time because it’s what her character perceives and sees that’s interesting.
It’s more the reaction than what you’re watching.
You are married as well as creative collaborators. How does that relationship affect your filmmaking process?
Amber Paul: It’s easier. Every festival we go to, they say, “How is it to be directed by your husband? It must be awful,” thinking that we’re fighting.
But it’s not like that. How we are emerges on set. If we work with integrity together, so does the whole team.
We have a shorthand. We’ve also worked on the pre-production aspects together, moving towards the filming. Then, when I step on set, I’m just the talent. I know exactly what David is looking for.
David Arrow: We’re both actors also, and we actually met on a set. Our relationship began as a professional one. It became a romantic one a little later.
We have respect for each other as professionals. I think that’s the key. If you don’t have that, whether you’re married or whatever your relationship is, that’s going to be an issue.
Because I shared this story so early with Amber, we talked about everything, from the costume to getting in and out of the car. We used vintage costumes, but we had to build Amber’s costume because we couldn’t find the absolute right thing.
Amber was saying, “If the skirt flared this way, it’d be easier to get out of the car.” Things like that are the kind of collaboration you wouldn’t necessarily get otherwise.
We live in New York. We might be going to see a play and I’ll say, “Hey, you know what? That little moment where she looks in the mirror, what do you think about that?”
We can have a 20-second production meeting on a subway ride that then we can let go, but it’s there and it’s happened.
Amber Paul: And there’s a connection because we’re able to turn off the work. I don’t feel that way at all because David is always creating new ideas, so he likes to bounce new ideas off me.
We both love to work. We love this process of creation, and we love doing it together.
As a woman, I’m safe on set. I have David and Mark and our producer, Leon, and they all work very hard to make sure that everyone feels included and safe and well taken care of, so that I can just relax and focus on my creative work.
Not all sets are like that.
I hope they feel that they’re transported back, but they’re not transported out of their own humanity.
You’ve spoken a lot about collaboration. How important is that sense of working collectively to the filmmaking process?
Amber Paul: I’m there in service of the script.
If you give the director their vision, then sometimes they give you an improv take, which is incredible. But you have to have what feeds their story in the script first.
David Arrow: “In service of the script” is a really important phrase because, in a way, even though I wrote it, the story, the script, what we’re trying to tell becomes its own entity.
We’re all really in service of that. There’s no ownership, really. The ownership is in the making.
With all my collaborators, and Amber first and foremost, we make each other’s ideas better.
If I have an idea, Amber will take it in and turn it into her idea, which then makes it better. Then it gives me another idea for how to shoot it. I say to Mark, “You know what? We were going to go this way, but what if we came that way?”
Then he might say, “Good idea, but if we actually turned it that way, I think it’d be better.” It just builds.
That can happen very quickly. In small films and short films and lower-budget films, one of the things you don’t have is time. You don’t necessarily have time to play.
But if you’re all thinking the same way, you can make up for time because the decisions can happen in seconds rather than hours or minutes.
Finally, what do you hope audiences take away from The Drive?
Amber Paul: I hope that they take away a sense of, after hope is lost, what does survival look like? How do you recover from something that brings the country to its knees?
It’s about the sense of community that we can all have in those moments and how barriers fall away in moments of trauma.
It’s also about how it reflects today. How does that huge impact continue to ripple through the present, and how can we treat each other differently and better so that our shared world becomes better?
When we show this film, I have both ends of the age spectrum come to me afterwards.
The people who were there and remember that day come up to me crying. They haven’t thought about it. They tell me their personal stories: “I remember where I was”, or “It was the first time I’d ever seen my mother cry in public.”
Then I have younger people, late teens and early twenties, saying, “I want to know more about him. I didn’t know why he was so important.”
They’re on their phones looking things up because they want to learn why this historical event was so important to American history.
So it opens a dialogue on both ends of the age spectrum. I love that, both the remembrance and the curiosity.
David Arrow: I certainly agree with all of that. I hope people are fascinated by the historical element of the film and the reveal of the story, which we very much hide.
We never tell people about who’s in the car. We let that happen only for the audience that sees it.
But then there’s the mixture of history with the personal. Anyone can hopefully relate to what Liz goes through.
I hope they feel that they’re transported back, but they’re not transported out of their own humanity.
