I agree that an interviewee should be an active participant (though not being is fine too given the state of interviewing), however attempting to drive it thems

I agree that an interviewee should be an active participant (though not being is fine too given the state of interviewing), however attempting to drive it themselves can really backfire if the interviewer isn't expecting it and/or is bound by policy to actually ask certain questions or go through some process. I still remember one guy who wanted to drive things a bit too strongly, which for most of my section was fine with me because I was still able to get the data I wanted out of it and hopefully he got some of his, though at a point I really insisted he actually code a working solution to a problem in the IDE setup for him (requires like 15 lines of code, it's embedded in the context of a larger program) rather than continue to whiteboard/pen-and-paper general thoughts. He did, and I gave him a positive recommendation. But in the after-meeting my coworkers were less happy with their sections (one of them even brought up the sense he was trying to 'run the clock'), and some of them were still new to interviewing and didn't know how to handle a more 'aggressive' candidate and apart from not enjoying the experience couldn't get the info they wanted, so the eventual decision was to say no to him. I still think he would have done fine, but hey, it's just another element in how broken our interviewing practices can be.