Dean Devlin on Entering the World of Documentaries: “Well, my father had one of the very first EV1s that came to California. At the time, I thought my dad was just being an old hippie, and I thought this was some goofy little golf cart he was buying. I got in it and my dad said, ‘Hit the gad pedal’ or, you know, ‘the accelerator.’ The thing took off like a rocket. I couldn’t believe it. It was the most fun car I’d ever been in and I said, ‘I’ve got to get one.’
I’ve been driving electric cars for 10 years now. When my father passed away in 2000 and I started my new company, I actually named it Electric Entertainment after the electric car. So I’d been wanting to tell this story for a long time. When I finally met [writer/director] Chris Paine and saw that he’d been working in starts and stops on this documentary, I said, ‘Look, man, I’m in. Let’s make this thing.’ And it’s been a really fulfilling and interesting adventure.”
On the Origin of the Slow Electric Car Stereotype: “I think people couldn’t really imagine at first the idea that a battery car could be anything other than a golf cart. The important part of the story to understand, because if you really want to understand why this is a story worth telling, it’s important to really grasp that none of the car manufacturers made this car because they thought it was a good idea. They were forced to make this car because California passed a law called the Zero Emission Mandate which said if you want to sell cars in California, a certain percentage of those cars have to be zero emissions. So the car companies had to make the car. The irony is they ended up making a car that was so good, it actually threatened the status quo and therefore created a lot of potential suspects, people who would have an interest in getting rid of this electric car. That’s why it’s a story worth telling.”
The Return of the EV1: Now that hybrids are the rage, is there any chance the EV1 will make a comeback? Devlin said, “I think so. The great news with the hybrid, especially if it can be turned into the plug-in hybrid, is it really gives people the opportunity to get used to the idea of driving an electric car. When you turn a hybrid into a plug-in, which of course you can’t do with the auto manufacturers, you have to do it in the secondary market. But the minute you do that, your first 40-50 miles of the day, you’re driving almost exclusively on electrics. I think when people do that they’re going to discover that they almost never drive more than 30 miles in a day - and that they’re driving really, truly electric and saving the gasoline portion for only when they have to do the rare long trip. Now, of course, the new electric cars actually get 300 miles to the charge, so you would never be in a situation where you ran out of charge.”
Documentary Work Versus Producing Feature Films: “It’s been a completely different experience. When you do the kinds of films I do, you start with a script and then it’s how do you get that script on screen? We started with an outline of the story we knew, but with every single interview we did, the story got deeper. It got more interesting. It took more twists and more turns, and we kept learning things. We thought we had the whole thing in our heads when we started and we realized we only had a very small part of it. So it was a very challenging experience trying to get the full story and then trying to find a way to tell it in 90 minutes.”
Does GM Hate Documentaries Now?: “I think documentaries are the least of their problems at this point. They’ve gone from the most profitable, biggest company to one that’s on the verge of bankruptcy. Recently, they were on 60 Minutes and they blamed their problems entirely on the workers, which I found outrageous. Because of the money they have to pay to pensions, that’s why they’re going broke? They didn’t even for one second say, ‘Well, wait a minute. We actually were the leaders in all kinds of technology that we threw away, and now we’re having to buy that technology back from the Japanese because we didn’t have the corporate vision to see the future.’ I think documentaries are the least of their problems. They really need to start looking at a longer term vision, in the same way other industries do, if they’re going to survive.”
Dean Devlin Shares His Own Conspiracy Theory: “My theory on conspiracies has always been: never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence. I think this is a story of incompetence and a story of deviousness.”
