Daniel Minahan (‘Fellow Travelers’ director): ‘Gay people and queer people always find each other’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Emmy-winning producer and director Daniel Minahan wanted the period queer love story of “Fellow Travelers” to feel contemporary.  The Showtime limited series, based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, chronicles the decades-long love story between two men, beginning in the McCarthy era of the fifties through the AIDS crisis of the eighties. Minahan directed the show’s first two episodes and was one its executive producers. “We weren’t going to make it as if we were making an old fashioned movie,” he says in a recent chat with Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I wanted it to feel contemporary, and the story itself is so relevant to today that I wanted people to be able to say, ‘Oh my God. That’s what’s happening now.'”

Minahan says he tried to balance the chronicling of queer history with the relevance of the central love story. “I think you thread the needle by finding the truth of every single scene and making it a great, heartfelt love story,” he explains. “I think it’s incredible moving at the end of the first hour when Hawk (Matt Bomer) is left waiting for Tim (Jonathan Bailey) to call on the phone and watching this parade of gay life in San Francisco in the 1980s. He sees the life that he could have had and missed out on.”

In keeping the romance between the lead characters front and center, Minahan says that the always shifting power dynamic between the two helped give the characters empathy, even when their actions may not have merited such feelings. “We tried to thread [the power dynamic] through every scene,” he says. “And I think that’s what made it really compelling and made these otherwise rough around the edges characters very empathetic.”

Minahan hopes that the success of the series will help young queer people see themselves in entertainment in a way that older generations of queer folks never did. “One of the things that I think the series really puts across is this idea that gay people and queer people always find each other,” he says. “It’s important for young people who are looking to understand their history and to just recognize themselves in film and television.”

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