Jun-14-1998
Express
Chris Carter comes clean
Louis B. Hobson
The truth about the X-Files
HOLLYWOOD — There are a few truths Chris Carter is willing to share about The X-Files, the phenomenon he created five years ago.
The series, in which special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate mysterious occurrences, has spawned The X-Files movie that opens Friday.
“Fox and Dana, as played by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, are the reason the show is so popular. They are the ones who make the stories connect with the audiences,” insists Carter.
“At the original auditions, I saw dozens of people but the moment David and Gillian walked in the room, I knew I’d found my Mulder and Scully. It was as if the skins I’d created fit these two people like gloves.”
Much has been written these past two years about the strained relationship on the set between Duchovny and Anderson.
“When you work together, day after day, month after month as David and Gillian do, you form a relationship that is not unlike a marriage.
“It’s a relationship that’s bound to have its stresses and strains and it’s understandably complicated. What’s important is that this particular relationship has passed the test of time.”
Carter hopes that moving The X-Files production base from Vancouver to Los Angeles will help ease whatever tensions were there.
Duchovny has been insisting on the move for three years and announced that if the show stayed in Vancouver, he would terminate his contract.
“I think the move will rejuvenate all of us. It may even feel like a new experience.”
Carter says that there are still no scripts for the coming season. Once The X-Files movie opens, he will begin working on them with his writers. At the close of last year’s season, the X-files branch was torched and Mulder and Scully’s official fates are left up in the air.
What happens in the film may change all that.
“Scully has all along refused to even consider the possibility of alien life forms. I think it’s safe to say that after what happens in the movie, she will begin to believe there is some truth to Mulder’s obsession.”
Carter says this next season may return a little to its monster-movie roots of the earlier seasons.
“When I was a 13-year-old boy growing up, The Night Stalker was my favorite TV show. I always wanted to make The X-Files as scary as The Night Stalker was for me.”
Carter has invited Darren McGaven, the star of The Night Stalker, to appear in four episodes of next season’s The X-Files.
As far as The X-Files movie is concerned, Carter says his conscious influences were “Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock. These are three filmmakers who’ve had the greatest effect on me. There are definite homages to each of them in the movie.”
Carter promises that fans of the series will “learn a little more about what happened to Mulder’s sister (who was abducted by aliens) but not everything.
“We need to keep people guessing into our seventh season as well.”
Fans already know that the storytelling in The X-Files is purposely obtuse and Cater hopes that general audiences will enjoy this approach.
“We only give away fragments. The viewer has to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
“When it comes to The X-Files, you can’t be a passive viewer.
“That was our one worry about releasing The X-Files as a summer movie. This is the time of year when movies traditionally ask the viewer to be inactive, but not us.”
Tags: chris carter, ftf, x-files