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Oct
22
2008

MTV: 'X-Files' Producer/Director Frank Spotnitz Makes The Mythology Matter In New Wildstorm Comic Series

Oct-22-2008
MTV
Permanent Link to ‘X-Files’ Producer/Director Frank Spotnitz Makes The Mythology Matter In New Wildstorm Comic Series
Kiel Phegley

[Original article here]

X-Files comic books — in the ’90s, four color tales of Agents Scully and Mulder heated up the comics charts and nabbed scores of cash on the back issue market before the comics industry and publisher, Topps, took a turn for the worse…along with the whole “X-Files” franchise (check out Kurt Loder’s visit to the “X-Files” set here). Now in November, DC’s Wildstorm imprint looks to reignite the series’ comic popularity with a miniseries featuring something the ’90s comics never had: a direct tie to the show’s overarching mythos.

“They are connected with a part of the mythology that we introduced but did very little with at the beginning of season five,” said writer Frank Spotnitz, a longtime scribe for the series and co-writer of July’s “I Want To Believe” film. “We introduced this corporation Roush and so that was part of the mythology that we could have gone a lot deeper with but never got the chance. So the next two books connect with Roush. And I’m going to take a little break from writing comics after this and get back to my screenwriting career, but at some point I hope to get back to write more and do more with the mythology.”

But while Spotnitz’s direct exploration of the show’s most successful period will only last a few months, the series will continue for five issues after that, presenting new stories of Scully and Mulder in classic form mixing it up with FBI Deputy Director Skinner, conspiracy nuts The Lone Gunman and the villainous Cigarette Smoking Man, all of whom appear in upcoming issues.

“It’s just fun to play with again,” he explained. “This is kind of an interesting thing about the comic books – in my imagination anyway – [it’s] that they’re sort of ‘out of time.’ The situation is the situation that we found between seasons two and five of the series. And yet, they’re wearing clothes and using technology that is contemporary of today. It’s not like they’re period pieces. It’s sort of like they’re unstuck from time. I look at them as if that situation in ‘The X-Files’ were still going on today; a sort of parallel universe to the one that we have in the movie.”

With that last movie underperforming at the box office this summer, long time X-Philes will be glad to know that the creator’s plans for future comics series will continue to play in the show’s glory years with new stories focusing on various mythological elements not fully developed in the show. And if Spotnitz has his way, those tales will be penned by both past “X-Files” writers as well as some of his big name comic writing pals, including Brad Meltzer and Brian K Vaughan.

“We have some writers from the TV series who have expressed interest like John Shiban and David Amann, but they all have busy television careers. But in the meantime I’d love to see some other established comic book writers try their hand at the ‘X-Files.’ And that’s what’s great about comic book series is you’re a lot freer to explore and experiment and do things that are out there.”

And if readers get behind the expanded in-continuity comics treatment “X-Files” is getting, Spotnitz doesn’t rule out more series based on his friend Chris Carter’s universe of TV series. “I think it’s a great idea; I still love all those titles. Every single show we did with Chris at 1013 I have great affection for. Especially ‘Harsh Realm’ and ‘Lone Gunman’ I think ended before their time. And I have to tell you, everywhere I go people are always asking me if there’s going to be a ‘Millennium’ movie or something, so I suspect there’s a hardcore audience out there that’s still wanting it.”

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Sep
28
2008

Zone Horror: Exclusive Interview With Millennium Co-Executive Producer Frank Spotnitz

Sep-28-2008
Exclusive Interview With Millennium Co-Executive Producer Frank Spotnitz
Zone Horror

[Original article here]

On October the 4th cult television series Millenniun comes to Zone Horror. This terrifying drama series horror in its purest form with a leading man that really knows how to make the skin on your neck crawl, Lance Henriksen. Here we speak exclusively to Executive Producer Frank Spotnitz about his involvement with a series that changed TV drama forever.

Zone Horror: Is it true you began your working life as a journalist?

Frank Spotnitz: Yes. I was editor of my college paper at UCLA, then went to work for United Press International, first in Indiana, then in New York City. I later wrote for the Associated Press in Paris and freelanced for a number of magazines, including Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.

ZH: How did you get into television work?

FS: I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist anymore! I moved back to Los Angeles from Paris so I could study screenwriting at the American Film Institute. The X-Files was my first job in Hollywood.

ZH: When did you first meet Chris Carter?

FS: By chance. I met Chris in a book group shortly after I moved back to L.A. This was years before he created The X-Files.

ZH: How did you become involved with Millennium and can your recall your reaction when you first heard the basic outline for the series?

FS: I was very flattered that Chris asked me to work on Millennium as well as The X-Files – flattered and, in short order, exhausted! It was very tough doing double duty on the first season of Millennium and the fourth season of The X-Files. I remember that I only vaguely understood what Millennium was going to be about before Chris let me read the pilot script. I read it on the laptop computer in his office right after he finished it. I was, quite simply, blown away. I still think that pilot is among the very best things he’s ever written.

ZH: Is it true Lance was the first choice for Frank Black? If not who else was considered? (Personally I can’t think of anyone else who could bring his quiet intensity to the role)

FS: Yes, Lance was Chris’ first choice. There were other actors considered for the role, but I don’t want to risk making them uncomfortable by giving their names.

ZH: What was it like to work with Lance Henriksen and Megan Gallagher, two very different actors?

FS: It was great, although I have to say I didn’t really work “with” them very much. On Millennium, nearly all of my work was done in Los Angeles — breaking stories, writing scripts, editing episodes and so on. Occasionally, I’d fly up to Vancouver to help prep an episode, but usually I’d only see Lance and Megan when they were in Los Angeles (or during crew parties!).

ZH: The two leads brought so much depth to their respected roles, which other actors that appeared on the show stand out for you?

FS: Terry O’Quinn was, of course, amazing, just as he now is on Lost. I also thought Birttany Tiplady was an astonishing little actress, Sarah-Jane Redmond was fantastic, as always, and Klea Scott is one of my all-time favourite actors, period. There were too many wonderful guest stars for me to mention.

ZH: As Millennium was based totally in the real world how did you approach writing your episodes, as they were far different to what you were creating for The X-Files?

FS: It was very easy for me to get in touch with my fears on Millennium, because the things that scare me most are things that can happen in the real world. The challenge for me was finding interesting ways to involve Frank’s family in the stories. And I was also always looking for ways to find hope amid all the darkness. The things I would say The X-Files and Millennium had in common were our focus on tight plotting, and wanting to find interesting reasons for why the bad guys were doing what they were doing.

ZH: Why do you think the series has continued to generate interest and debate with the viewing public?

FS: I think it’s because it was very intense and uncompromising. That turned off some viewers, but the people who liked the show, really liked it. I remember the earliest meetings with the network concerned how dark the show was. They kept asking us to lighten up, to find more humour. But Chris had a vision for the series, and it was pretty intense. I also think the show touched on something fundamental about life – the split between the darkness of Frank’s work, and the lightness of his family and home life. Frank struggled to protect his family from the darkness – of the killers he hunted, and inside himself. That’s a very powerful idea to me, and I think it resonates with a lot of other people, too.

ZH: I know some critics disliked the show for its violent content but do you agree it needed to show the horrors of real life in such a graphic manner?

FS: I think there’s an even greater danger when you sanitize violence, or make it less disturbing in some way. I think the most responsible way to depict violence is to make it horrific, because that’s what it is in real life.

ZH: Do you have a favourite episode of Millennium?

FS: The Pilot episode and Lamentation. Among the ones I wrote, Sacrament.

ZH: There’s a legion of fans waiting the return of Frank Black, is there any chance?

FS: I’d say a small chance, getting smaller every year. We’d still love to revisit the character, but at this point I think someone would have to light a pretty big fire under the Fox executives to make it happen.

ZH: Congratulations on The X-Files – I Want To Believe, an intelligent and refreshing break from predictable CGI drenched blockbusters. Can we expect more?

FS: It’s too soon to say.

ZH: What other projects are you working on at the moment?

FS: I have a couple things in the works I’m very excited about, but the deals aren’t done, so I can’t announce them yet. Soon, hopefully!

ZH: Frank Spotnitz, thank you very much.

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Jul
31
2008

Los Angeles Times Hero Complex: Spotnitz on ‘X-Files’: ‘If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully…’

Jul-31-2008
Spotnitz on ‘X-Files’: ‘If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully…’
Los Angeles Times Hero Complex
Geoff Boucher – Gina McIntyre

[Original article here]

I haven’t made it yet to see “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” (I’ll blame those five days gobbled up at Comic-Con) and I think a lot of other longtime X-fans fell into that category on the movie’s first weekend of release. Maybe it’s the passage of time or this summer’s glut of must-see genre fare, but I just haven’t felt a great sense of urgency to get out to see the movie.

Gina McIntyre, one of my colleagues here at The Times, had a chance to sit down recently with Frank Spotnitz, the producer of the film and longtime creative presence in the franchise’s history, and here is her Q&A with him, appearing for the first time anywhere. Reading it does make me want to see the movie — not unlike reading a letter from an old friend — but it’s still a surprisingly faint urge.

You’ve said that the movie is a standalone story that doesn’t require people to be all that familiar with the show. Was there a sense that the mythology became too complicated to update or were you looking to create something outside of those narrative constraints?

If we’re lucky enough to be able to do more movies, at some point, we will be revisiting that mythology. In the show, we said that Mulder believes the aliens are coming in December 2012, so that’s a date we’d certainly hit if we’re fortunate enough to keep making these. But for this movie, from the very beginning, when it was first discussed six years ago, we wanted to do a standalone. We had to do a mythology movie last time. We were in the midst of the TV series, and the studio wanted a big event movie that would clearly be something you couldn’t get at home for free. This time around, we didn’t feel any of those constraints. We felt we could really do what the show did most of the time, which was deliver a scary supernatural mystery.

You’re keeping the film’s plot secret, but can you give any sort of broadstrokes description of the story?

It’s real time, six years from where we last saw Mulder and Scully. It’s a scary, creepy intimate story, a mystery obviously. It’s really more about them and their relationship than the show usually was. When you’re doing a TV show, you’ve got to do so many episodes that unless you want to risk becoming a soap opera, you really can’t spend that much capital on their personal lives week in and week out. The audience would get compassion fatigue after a while. So, we were very stingy about that in the TV series.

What’s the nature of their relationship in the film?

It’s obviously one of the big questions fans want to know — are they together? Have they been seeing each other these past six years? If they are together, what’s the nature of their relationship? Is it romantic or not? That’s one of the big cards that we’ve been trying to keep hidden until the movie comes out. But we didn’t want to take for granted that there would be any more movies after this. This could be it. If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully, we didn’t want to leave anything on the table.

Since the last movie was released and the series ended, there’d been talk of doing another film, so you must have had ideas in mind. Is this film based on one of those ideas or did the story emerge more recently?

We spent weeks in 2003 working on this. It actually was quite difficult to come up with something that was sufficiently different from anything we’d done on television. We came up with something that’s not 100% unlike anything we’d ever done before, but we felt it was different enough to justify making a movie about. We pitched the story back then to the studio. Deal-making started and then there was the threat of a lawsuit that stopped everything dead cold for four years. The issue got resolved in 2007, and suddenly we were back at work and we’d lost all our cards [plotting out the story] from 2003. At first it felt like a disaster, but it ended up being a real blessing because we had to start from scratch on Mulder and Scully and on the personal part of the story. In those four years, we had changed. We realized Mulder and Scully would have changed. We found we had a lot of stuff to say that was completely new and unlike anything we’d done before.

Have the intervening years affected the ways in which you and Chris Carter collaborate?

I’d say what was really different was the pressure was very different. There’s a certain amount of pressure you put on yourself all the time, the pressure to do good work. But it wasn’t like doing a TV show, where it’s not just this script, it’s the five others that you have to be working on at the same time. We sat for days at Pete’s coffee in Brentwood before we even started to work on the story again, talking about life and ideas. Then we spent weeks and weeks in his office in Santa Monica outlining the movie before we started writing. The writing we didn’t do together — Chris would write and send me his files from Santa Barbara, and I’d go over them and send them back. It reminded me of going back to my earliest days when I was new to television working with Chris on a story.

Can you describe the atmosphere on set?

It was a really nice atmosphere on set because everybody wanted to be there. David and Gillian wanted to be there, they focused so hard, especially on their scenes together. We had a great guest cast that were so much fun. We were laughing all the time. The hard part was being in the snow because we were in Pemberton, north of Vancouver, subfreezing temperatures, 14 hours a day for three weeks, often through the night and that was challenging.

Chris and I developed a great affection for a place called the Mount Currie Coffee Company. They make something there called a Canadiano, which is an Americano with maple syrup in it. After about a week, they ran out of maple syrup because they were not used to selling so many Canadianos. So we bought our own maple syrup and we stuck it under the counter and if you had the password, then they would bring out the maple syrup for you. The password was Peter Nincompoop.

Why did you decide to keep the film’s plot so tightly under wraps?

We realized early on that we were in an extremely unique position because it would have been six years since people had seen these characters and there was going to be many, many questions people would be asking about what Mulder’s been doing, what Scully’s been doing, the nature of the relationship. It seemed a shame to spoil everybody’s fun by telling all that before the movie has opened. There’s nothing like the experience of sitting in a theater and watching a story for the first time. It is not the same if you know in advance what’s going to happen. And everybody knows that. I have to say the attitude of the fans out there has been entirely supportive.

Having said that, it has been extremely challenging trying to keep it secret. We realized pretty early on that we actually had to engage in disinformation. What happened was we put out enough disinformation that even if something genuine did leak, no one would know the difference between what was fake and what was real so everything became suspect. We didn’t do that to mess with the fans. The one risk we had in the disinformation we put out was you don’t want to put out a false story that people get so excited about they’re disappointed when that’s not what the movie’s about.

How do you plan to appeal to new audiences who didn’t watch the series?

I don’t know. We’re certainly trying, and we’ve certainly written the movie to work for people who have never seen the show before. I still believe in these characters and their appeal and the power of this fictional world that Chris created, so I do think it’s a natural for audiences of any age, not just people who were born before 1980 or however old you would have had to have been to watch it when it first came on television.

The interesting thing is that “The X-Files” is its own little sub-genre. It’s such a specific thing the way these two characters go about investigating things. It’s not just the relationship between Mulder and Scully personally, but the fact that one is a believer and one is a skeptic and they’re such super-smart people. These stories can’t help but be smart and work on that level. I continue to find it fascinating and just hope other people do too.

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Jul
28
2008

TV Guide: Why X-Files 2 Nearly Didn't Happen (Frank Spotnitz)

Jul-28-2008
Why X-Files 2 Nearly Didn’t Happen
TV Guide
Frank Spotnitz

[Original article here]

Frank Spotnitz, The X-Files: I Want to Believe

It was January 2007, and I was about to give up hope.

It was six years since 20th Century Fox called, asking if we were interested in doing another X-Files feature film. Five years since the television series went off the air. And four years since creator Chris Carter and I labored over the story for the new movie and pitched it to the studio.

That was back in 2003. Since then, I had negotiated a deal to cowrite and coproduce the movie, and waited for David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to close their deals — only to have the whole process derailed when Chris and the studio got into a legal dispute over profits from the TV series. Fans and reporters kept asking me when the movie would finally be made. And I kept saying I was sure it would happen, just as soon as Chris and the studio resolved their differences. But by last January, it was starting to feel like that day would never come. And then…

The phone rang. It was Chris. His dispute was settled, and the studio was asking about the movie. “It’s now or never,” he quoted them saying. Back to work.

Which turned out to be a little difficult. We’d figured out the story by writing a description of each scene with a Sharpie pen on 4 x 6 index cards (just as we had every episode of the TV show). But now those cards were nowhere to be found. That story we’d worked so hard to figure out four years ago? We’d have to figure it out all over again.

Of course, we remembered the heart of it — a creepy, disturbing murder mystery that was different from any we’d told before. But we’d have to reconstruct the plot from scratch.

There’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind, and so — fortunately, I guess — we had to work diligently to make sure the script was finished before the impending writers’ strike began last November. Reconnecting with the characters proved effortless. It was like they had been waiting there, in our unconscious minds, the whole time. I felt a kind of opening-night excitement as I drove up to Chris’ house in Malibu on the sunny morning of October 26. David and Gillian were casually standing in his living room, about to do a “table read” of the script. We quickly realized we had a problem, however: Security on the top secret script was so tight, we didn’t have enough copies for all of us to read along. Chris and I decided we could follow along by reading the files in our laptops.

So we all sat down at the table, they opened their scripts and… it felt more like a seance than a table read. That mysterious chemistry between Gillian and David was instantly back, as if summoned from beyond. But I didn’t get the chills until two days later, when they returned for camera tests. David now had his hair cut like Mulder, and Gillian’s hair had gone from reddish-blonde to Scully-red. Forget the seance — this felt like a genuine X-File, resurrecting the dead.

Filming began December 10 in Vancouver, where the series started so many years ago. We assembled as much of our old crew as we could; it felt like coming home. Although we’d written the movie specifically for Vancouver, much of the story takes place in the snowy countryside of West Virginia. So for three weeks, we filled up all the hotels and motels around Pemberton, a ruggedly beautiful valley north of Whistler, British Columbia.

Pemberton provided incredible scenery, but shooting in below-freezing temperatures 14 hours a day was hard on the crew and the actors, whose on-camera wardrobe wasn’t as warm as ours. “Next movie takes place in Hawaii,” became a common joke on set.

Reconnecting with Mulder and Scully proved more challenging for David and Gillian as actors than it had for us as writers. After all, they’d spent several years trying to be anyone but Mulder and Scully. Now they not only had to embrace the characters again, but imagine them six years later, living under very different circumstances.

However, I think their scenes together became even more powerful because of their long separation. David and Gillian have always been incredibly disciplined, focused actors. But this was different. After so long an absence, they were determined to bring everything they could to their work together. Never more so than in their final scene, which was so powerful that it hushed the crew and brought tears to my eyes.

As I worked to finish the film these last few months, watching these same scenes literally hundreds of times, I continued to be impressed by the enduring power of these characters. I was also struck by the thought that this whole movie seemed so close to not getting made. And grateful that we never did give up.

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Jul
25
2008

Writers Guild of America, West: Something to Believe In

Jul-25-2008
Something to Believe In
Writers Guild of America, West
Denis Faye

[Original article here]

Since The X-Files ended its decade-long television run six years ago, our world has only gotten weirder. So hopefully, when The X-Files: I Want to Believe hits the big screen this week, FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully will yet again clear up a few things for audiences and finally prove that “the Truth” is indeed out there.

Among those cheering the characters return are series creator Chris Carter and series executive producer Frank Spotnitz. “I really had missed them,” confides Spotnitz, who co-wrote and produced the new film with Carter, who also directed, “which is a funny thing to say about make-believe people. We had spent thousands of hours writing these characters and then they were just gone when the show ended.”

Carter and Spotnitz talked to the Writers Guild of America, West Web site about returning to these long, lost friends and the realization that the more they help Mulder and Scully find their answers, the less they know about the world themselves.

What keeps you coming back to The X-Files?

Frank Spotnitz: I think it’s incredibly rich for storytelling. The subject matter is about the limits of what we can understand about the world around us. I think all of us, whether we are skeptics or believers, sense there is more to the world then what we know. Even the most ridged scientist is humbled by what science has not yet conquered. So it’s endless the stories you can tell about what’s beyond our understanding. And then Chris created such really beautiful characters, especially in Mulder and Scully who are perfect opposites and such a great vehicle for telling these stories about the supernatural, but also embody this incredible love story.

Chris Carter: What kept me coming back were the characters as they had aged and the time we had been away from them.


Photo: © 2008 Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Frank Spotnitz: I realized how fortunate we were and how unusual it was to be able to return to characters you love in Hollywood. Instances like that are so few.

What’s the difference, creatively, between having years to work on a movie script and having to bang out a new television script every week?

Chris Carter: When you do a TV series, you must parcel out the personal and professional relationships carefully or you’re going to tire the characters out, you’re going to tire yourself out, and you’re going to tire the audience out. Then it turns into something we never wanted to turn it onto, something more melodramatic then The X-Files wanted to be. We explored these relationships through the episodes now known as the “mythology” episodes, which represent a third of the 200-plus episodes. That was our chance to do what I think what made those characters very, very popular and what gave them depth that the stand-alones couldn’t — but the stand-alone episodes still made up most of The X-Files. What we’ve done with this movie is a stand-alone story, one that doesn’t depend on knowing the series or the characters, and yet we still wanted to do what we’ve done with those mythology episodes, which is explore the characters’ relationship in a new way.

Frank Spotnitz: The pressure in television is incredible because you’ve got to keep coming up with another script, another script, another script. The movie was completely different. We started work on the story in 2003, and then got derailed for four years by deal-making and the threat of a lawsuit. Then when we returned to it in 2007, we’d lost our notes.

Lost your notes?

Frank Spotnitz: We’d put them on note cards to pitch the studio, and we couldn’t locate them. At first, we were very unhappy, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise. We remembered what the case was about, but the emotional beats, the personal beats between Mulder and Scully, we had to start from scratch, and we had changed. Four years had gone by since we had last tackled the story and five years since the show had ended and we had different things to say about these people and about life — and it made it so interesting.

How important is it to appeal to the fans?

Chris Carter: We always listen, but we’ve always done what we think is the right thing. If you are driven by so many voices — and it is a large chorus out there now — if you’re driven to satisfy every one of those people, you’ll never satisfy anyone. You have to satisfy the characters — that’s who you have to satisfy.

How do you make the movie relevant to new audiences yet still appeal to seasoned fans?

Chris Carter: I’m talking to kids in college who say, “What’s the X-Files?” They were four or five when it first came on. We tried to do a popular movie, but the reason for doing the movie was the enthusiasm of the hardcore fans. So while we want to introduce the characters, we don’t want to punish the people who know the characters, their relationships and their journey, their quest, if you will, by going back over things, so we’ve hopefully integrated several of these things into the story.

Frank Spotnitz: That’s something we’re used to doing, honestly, having to serve several audiences. We had to do it in the first movie and as the TV show went on, it became increasingly obvious that that’s what you needed to do as well. As early as the third or fourth season, we started to realize that there were some audiences that knew every detail of the ongoing alien mythology storyline and were waiting for very specific questions to be answered and then there was a much larger audience that was vaguely aware of it and would be lost if you tried to answer these very specific questions. That was a balancing act we were engaged in for most of the life of the series.

But how do you do it?

Frank Spotnitz: It’s very much an emotional, intuitive thing. You need to figure out where your heart lies as a storyteller. What are the burning things that you must address? There are many questions of the mythology we had to sort of let go. There was no way of addressing them without losing the larger audience or getting bogged down in a side channel that wasn’t interesting to most people.

Is there anything you miss about working on television?

Chris Carter: I think that the big screen demands of a storyteller seems tyrannical to me. If there’s a moment’s boredom, a moment takes you out of the movie, the audience finds itself back in its seat. You can’t digress the way you can in television. I think some of the best storytelling is being done right now in television with digressions, explorations of character that are not a part of the artery of the plot system.

What’s your creative process together?

Chris Carter: We sit in a room and we just talk, actually, before we ever start really plotting. We come up with ideas. I think some of the best work we do is when we’re just talking about life and other things and about family and about the news. It’s almost as if you need to unhook yourself from the subject to find your way back to it. I’m not saying we actually do this in any conscious way, it’s just the way it’s developed over the years and it’s nice because it’s kind of social.

Frank Spotnitz: In this instance, we broke the story as we always do — very, very carefully — and spent a lot of weeks in [Chris’] office in Santa Monica. Scene by scene, we’d use 3×4, lined index cards — we were sort of superstitious about it. We use black Sharpie pens, and we use clear pushpins to put them on the board. It’s that precise. There’s a discipline for that precision for focusing your mind and making sure you’re really thinking about each card and each scene, what’s the conflict in that scene and where are the characters.

We did that and then Chris would write and send me the file, and I’d go through the file and send it back to him, and then he’d go through it again, and we’d bounce the file back and forth between Santa Barbara where he was and Los Angeles where I was. We never actually wrote in the same room.

Which one of you is Mulder and which one is Scully?

Frank Spotnitz: I think by inclination, we’re both Scully but both want to be Mulder — but we’re held back by our rational skepticism. But I’ve been humbled over the years by our research that there’s so much that we don’t understand. It doesn’t make me a believer, but it makes me humble in my disbelief.

But what’s interesting, in this movie, is that there’s an element of spirituality which may be surprising. Scully is a character of faith. She’s a Catholic. Chris is a person of faith. He’s not religious, but he does believe in God. I am not, although I’m very interested in religion and theology.

The movie has something to say about spirituality, and we spent quite a lot of time coming up with something that we could both believe in, that we both could say is true. That was the interesting challenging in this movie.

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Jun
23
2008

Shock Till You Drop: Scoring Stage Visit: The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Jun-23-2008
Scoring Stage Visit: The X-Files: I Want to Believe
Shock Till You Drop
Silas Lesnick

[Original article here]

On 20th Century Fox’s scoring stage, producer Frank Spotnitz and composer Mark Snow seem to share the energetic second wind of two artist who know they’re in the home stretch. Months after we were invited out to the set of The X-Files: I Want to Believe (read Ryan Rotten’s report here), the pair are overseeing the scoring of the same scene we witnessed with intense, booming notes that mark a decided departure from the television series to something much grander on-screen.

Snow, who scored the series from its very first episode (including 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future feature film), has evolved as a composer, moving across dozens of other projects since the series premiered in 1993. He concentrates on the images on-screen, syncing his orchestral sound with the picture.

By his side stands Spotnitz who – joining Chris Carter’s 10:13 Productions in the The X-Files‘ second season – has been working on the show for nearly as long. He wrote nearly 50 of the series’ episodes, shares a story credit on Fight the Future with Carter and co-penned/produced I Want to Believe.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: How much of this is starting something brand new and how much is returning to material you’ve already created before?
Mark Snow: That’s a good question, because it was 10 years ago that we did the first movie and this one is totally different. It’s a different time, musically, for the world and for me. And having the wonderful nine years of the show and the first movie, there were certain kinds of sounds and instruments that I’d use that have found their way back in this one, but morphed in a sense and a different perspective and a different creative sensibility about it. With this movie, there’s still so many complex musical motifs. For example, there’s a lot of percussion stuff that just plays by itself. There are some very, really emotional pieces of music that people might not associate with classic X-Files sounds. And then the combination of my own studio electronic stuff that I did on the TV show and now with this almost 100-piece orchestra. And we’ve got a live boy soprano singing, coming in later. We’ve got a second orchestra that just plays effects, not music. We had a session where I just conducted and gave them instructions on what kind of sort of sound effect things to do, not melodic pieces. There’s a fellow who’s doing a special percussion sample overdubbed. So, we’ve got two orchestras, all my synth master tracks, a singer and we’ve got the greatest mixer here, Alan Meyerson, who’s done every big movie in the last five years. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. He’s just amazing. This is a great scoring stage.

Shock: How has the musical world changed since the last movie? Is it bringing in those percussive elements?
Snow: I think mostly it’s about what the movie is about. I mean, after reading the script and I spoke to Chris Carter. The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘This is a love story, mostly, with religious sort of overtones and spiritual overtones, so just keep that in mind.’ But I’m reading along and there are some pretty wild things that go on. I’m trying to make sure that the love story really becomes apparent to the audience. And it’s a big part of it.

Shock: What’s your process? Where did you start?
Snow: Well, I start with my home studio stuff. And then, there are glorified demos of all the material so I can play it for Frank and Chris and get the this, or the this, or the this. I can adjust those. It’s interesting, because now we have the orchestra here. By the time the orchestra comes in, it’s just pure pleasure, because there are no surprises. Everyone knows what the music is going to be, but now it’s fleshed out with this marvelous group. After it’s mixed all together, it should be a great CD.

Shock: Do you assign specific motifs to the characters and themes? How do you come up with what the body of what the score’s going to be?
Snow: It seems – and actually with the TV show as well – there were mostly themes for situations, not so much for characters – oh, here comes someone, oh, this theme. I mean, that’s a little traditional, a little old-fashioned. I don’t think that applies to this. This is more of a standalone episode rather than the mythology episode that the first movie was, which is really kind of fun, because there’s a little more room to have a more creative palette with this. The mythology movie, there was a certain palette that I established in the TV show that flourished in the movie, but this one has really more latitude and room to do some crazy stuff.

Shock: How long ago did you start?
Snow: I guess it was as soon as there was the first rough cut, which was about a month and a half ago. The nerve-wracking thing about that is we had to sort of race to do a temp dub. I had to write music, myself and Jeff Charbonneau, the music editor, had to prepare music for this temp dub pretty quickly so the studio people could see it and start their discussions and how they wanted to shape the movie and work with Chris and Frank. But that was very helpful, because we saw what was working, what wasn’t, what areas needed help and it was a really good place to start. It was frustrating, because then getting to the final cut took quite a quite a while and we were all, ‘Let’s go. When are we going to get it?’ Anyway, it arrived and we’re here and it’s going to be great.

Shock: On the temp dub, was it existing X-Files music or did you get something new?
Snow: It was half and half. There was some existing X-Files stuff and stuff that I’d written. It was a short time to prepare for that, so I couldn’t do too much. But the music editor and myself got it together in time.

Shock: Had you read the script previously to get some kind of feel or idea for it?
Snow: It was the emotional part of the script that was most interesting, because then I could hone in on this melodic, thematic part. There are two major melodic themes that appear in the movie that I think, if people heard alone, they might not associate with X-Files, but in this particular case it just marries up beautifully. And then having that interspersed with all the mysterious atmospheric sounds and stuff.

Shock: Frank, can you talk about what your collaboration was? What kind of guidance did you give him?
Frank Spotnitz: Well, that’s the beauty of working with Mark, is that obviously he knows X-Files and the X-Files musical palette better than anyone, because he created it. So there’s not a lot, honestly, of discussion. It’s general, like you were saying. The love story is important or we talked a lot about atonal stuff, sections of the movie that aren’t melodic. But just very general, because Mark knows how to do it better than anybody. It’s more us reacting to what he does than providing guidance.

Snow: It’s always collaborative. The collaborative nature of it is always very, very exciting to me, because sometimes I think I’m dead-on with something and here’s something, and it’s like, ‘What the hell is that?’ No. Or vice versa. I’ll write something and say, ‘I don’t know if this is all right.’ And it’s like, ‘No, no. Just make more of that.’ That’s the excitement for me in film music, it’s that collaboration. You’re alone and you do it and then you bring it out there.

Spotnitz: My favorite part of the process is hearing his music, because I don’t do a thing. I just sit there and the movie gets fifty percent better. That’s not an exaggeration. It gets fifty percent better just from the music. And it’s also interesting because Mark is like this amazing barometer, and you can judge how successful what you’ve done based on his music. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what we did.’ It’s like a counterpoint to what you’ve done and in some ways it’s like, the better the score is, probably the better the movie is. There was this cue you did last week, Steve was there, and we were just sitting there and we were all silent afterwards and it was just like… [Spotnitz claps] It was so fantastic.

Snow: I’ll make a note. Which one was that? I’ll make a note.

Shock: You talk about the romantic theme, but Frank has mentioned there are a lot of scares. What’s the balance for you? Is it just seeing what the footage ends up being like or punctuating something that jumps out? How do you figure those moments?
Snow: I think it’s sort of the challenging part about that. Where you need a good sense of sophistication, there are moments where you could do so little and it could be so amazingly effective. And then, on the other hand, where you can really jump on something. When you see the movie in full tilt, you’ll see these sections where wow, the orchestra is just going crazy, you know. Other times where it’s just making these atmospheric sounds. But there’s action yet, it’s just sort of my feel for the material and the experience of doing the show from the get go, of knowing when to sort of hold ’em and knowing when to fold ’em.

Shock: Do you think modern technology could ever replace a live orchestra?
Snow: It’s getting close, but I don’t think so. I mean, what’s fascinating in this combination is there’s such cool mysterious sounds that I’ve sort of invented or altered, taken something that you might know as a, for a lack of any better word, a bell, and toned it down and taken the attack off, and it used to sound like “ding” and now it sounds like “wha.” All these kinds of interesting electronically treated sounds are laying in there in a special way for me, and the orchestra plays along. The combination is really interesting.

Shock: The level of secrecy that the filmmakers have had, have you had the same amount of secrecy?
Snow: Well, I guess there’s certain things I can’t reveal. You know, if I said something about a certain musical section.

Shock: Give us an example.
Snow: When I got the script, the cover was bare and I opened the first page and it had my name watermarked on each page. Underneath, ‘Dear Mark, you will be killed if this finds its way into the world somehow.’ So, you’d better shut up. Also, when I get footage it has my name on the film, “Mark Snow. Do not copy.” If one of my kids takes this thing and chucks it into the garbage and someone sneaks around, I’m in trouble. Anyway, that’s not going to happen.

Spotnitz: I have to tell you as an aside, I was flying and I had a DVD of the movie because I had to give notes and I was out of town. I’m in the airplane and I’m flying coach, and I’m about to load the DVD into my laptop and it dropped. It’s the second half of the movie. This is true. And it says, ‘Frank Spotnitz. Do not Copy.’ I’m reaching on the floor under my coach seat and I can’t feel the DVD. I look and the woman next to me is asleep, so I can’t sort of…I’m contorting around, trying to get the DVD, I could make the story go on for quite a while. I couldn’t find it, I asked everybody in the plane, all the way back to the back. It was about an hour and I was in absolute agony, and it turned out that it had fallen and slid like here, behind my seat. The guy behind me finally pulled it out. It was just like, I could see it happening. It would be on the Internet. Like, somehow the X-Files fan behind me realized what this was.

Shock: Can you talk about the atmosphere or tone of the music. Were there any classical cues or composers that you took inspiration from?
Snow: When I was in New York, a student at Julliard, I was a huge fan of avant-garde music, and I guess one of them… For me the most exciting thing about X-Files is when we did the pilot, they tracked music from other movies and Chris said, ‘I love the sparseness of this underscore, and I love just tons of very atmospheric supportive music under dialogue.’ No slick stuff, no melody, just pads and supportive atonal kind of mush, in a way. That was very successful at the beginning, and it got to be a little old at about episode eight or something. I slowly started to sneak some other things in it. It was based on my early experiences as a student being influenced by Ligeti, Penderecki, Xenakis, I mean all these really atonal composers. And the beauty of it is I kept sneaking these different elements in there and no one said stop. It was encouraged. Then eventually some melodic themes came in and it just blossomed beautifully. No one ever sat on me and said, ‘No, no, no. Go back to the original. Just tread water here.’ That was the most exciting thing that I naturally just followed my own instincts, and that’s so unusual, because most TV shows and films you’re sort of told what to do or here’s the temp music and please sort of copy it.
Spotnitz: And because the episodes were so varied, the score was so varied as well. It was just an incredible range.

Snow: From black comedy to all the scariest stuff possible.

Shock: Have there been any scenes in the movie where you thought this needed some score accompaniment and you saw the scene and you thought it would work better without music?
Snow: I don’t know. It felt like we were pretty much in agreement.

Spotnitz: Yeah. I think there are some cues we’re recording here that at the end of the day we might not be using. We’ll see. I think we’ve decided we’ll cover ourselves and then we’ll decide whether to pull back.

Shock: You basically design wall-to-wall music and then figure out what fits and what doesn’t?
Snow: No, I mean we’re used to a certain kind of working relationship where we sort of have an instinct with each other knowing where things should go. If you err on the ‘a little too much’ it’s much easier to take it out than to add at the last minute.

Shock: How was it years later to come back and revisit this franchise? Was it easy to get back into it or was it like an old friend?
Snow: That’s sort of the same thing. Was it easy to get back? Yes. Was it an old friend? Yes. It was just fantastic, especially that this movie was more of an individual standalone piece, where the palette…there was much more room for new kind of X-Files sounds, if you will.

Shock: Are there any fears that X-Files fans are going to not recognize it? Because what we heard sounds very broad and huge.
Spotnitz: Well, that piece might not be…

Snow: There’s another version of that, by the way, that is so totally different. But it remains to be seen which piece will survive. All I can say is from the very opening of the movie there will be no disappointed X-Files fans.

Spotnitz: I agree. If we can, I’d like to play that music without picture before you guys go. To me, it sounds unmistakably like The X-Files. It’s like we were saying…in the series Mark did such an incredible range of styles of music and he has something very personal that you recognize regardless of what it does.

Snow: But seeing, also, how the characters have grown and changed, just physically over the years, and what’s going on with their relationship in the movie made a big impact on me in coming up with these emotional pieces, because it couldn’t be over-the-top schmaltzy. It had to have a real super honest, emotional quality about it. I think the fans, it’ll help them get what they want out of this. They’ll be very satisfied.

Spotnitz: That’s the thing. I don’t know what the fans were expecting this movie to be. I said before, I don’t know what they think it is, but I can tell you it’s not a cynical movie. There’s nothing about it that is calculated, ‘Oh, they’re going to want this.’ I think you’ll see that when you see it. It’s a heartfelt film with integrity and I suspect people will respond to that, or not, but that felt like the right thing to do rather than trying to be calculating and handicapping, ‘They’re going to want this.’ The movie has none of that quality.

Shock: Sometimes soundtracks reveal spoilers in the titles of the songs. Are you guys taking any precautions?
Spotnitz: Track one, track two, track three. [laughs] No, it’s a good point, though. I hadn’t thought about that. But that’s a good point. We’ll have to be careful.

Snow: It’ll be in French.

Shock: How has the nature of composing changed since you first started. Do people want the same kind of music that they did then?
Snow: Well, this temp track thing is a big deal. Nobody wants to be surprised anymore. So they put temp music in these movies and it’s discussed with the composer and if the composer has a big reputation like John Williams, etc., they’ll always use his stuff, so he’s sort of copying himself. It used to be, when I would conduct the orchestras, the producers and director didn’t know exactly what was coming and there were always those moments I call walking the plank. It’s where you’d be out there conducting and you’d have to walk back into the control room and hear the comments or in your headset you’d get something like, ‘Mark, could you come in here please.’ And you think, ‘Oh, shit. I’m dead.’ Or, ‘Oh, man, you’re the greatest blah, blah, blah.’ And sometimes they’d fool me and say, ‘Mark, uh, we’ve got to talk.’ I’d go in there like, ‘Oh, shit.’ And I’d walk in and they’d go, ‘Yeah!’ Like, ‘What just happened?’ But I think for a lot of composers it’s been sort of frustrating, a safety net for the studios, that there aren’t going to be a lot of surprises and, like, ‘Wow, what the hell is that? We didn’t expect that.’

Shock: Putting you under the gun here, you’ve been around since day one, story-wise, what do you think about this movie? How does it stand?
Snow: I thought it was an amazing script. I had to read it at least twice, and I read it a third time. On the second reading, I started making notes, so I made sure I understood exactly what was going on. It’s very dense and complex. And seeing it on the printed page is so one-dimensional compared when the film is fleshed out. I had to re-read things and make sure, ‘Is that right?’ Because sometimes there will be literally a half of a line that’s like a clue to a big part of it, and if you just kind of fluff over it, the story is like, ‘What? What the hell happened here?’

Shock: How much of a break do you take between movies? Do they kind of overlap?
Snow: It depends on if you’re offered something. You can’t do too many things at the same time. I guess it’s a good question. The worst time of that for all of us, we were doing the X-Files series, the X-Files movie, Millennium and was there one more?

Spotnitz: That was it.

Snow: That was it. I remember, I’ve never seen this before, but Chris Carter’s a pretty mellow guy. He talks quietly, there’s nothing really flamboyant about him. I came out of the scoring stage and I saw him, like one of those keystone cop movies running from one end of the lot to the next. I mean, literally running. It’s totally unlike him. And he said, ‘Man, that that was the toughest.’ For you too? We were all dying. But we survived.

Shock: Was it hard to keep the music from overlapping?
Snow: That wasn’t too bad. Millennium luckily it had a sound of its own. It was in the dark realm as well, but it had this thing with this violin thing and that never showed up in X-File-land. That was kind of easy to keep that off to the side.

Shock: For the trailer, did you do the music on that?
Snow: That’s become a whole art form in itself. I mean, apparently, for good reason, that is so important, that the trailer get people to show up on opening weekend. Those trailer people, if they think some other music is right, they use it, or if music from X-Files is right, they use it, or a combination, and I think, in fact, my wife called me last night, she saw it on Fox TV, that they played the trailer and she heard [whistles X-Files theme].

Spotnitz: Weren’t there five pieces of music in that trailer? Five distinct pieces. They saved the little thing for the end, the best.

Snow: Which is going to be in the movie. [laughs]

Spotnitz: Surprise, surprise.

Shock: Is there a point where you feel like you’ve used it way too much? How did you decide how many times to put that in?
Snow: Well, there are a couple of times it’s used as you once knew it and loved it by itself. And, I don’t know if I can [talk about it]. Throughout the score, you’ll hear it mixed in with the score in variation. It’s sort of subliminal, but I’m sure, it’s such a simple tune, it will…

Spotnitz: It works on you, though. Like at times you’re watching the movie and you go, ‘I feel something,’ and you go, ‘Oh.’ It does have its affect.

Snow: You can use it, it’s six notes, sometimes it’s four or three. All you have to do is, ‘Duh dee.’ I mean, that’s it. ‘Duh dee duh.’ That’s enough sometimes. But there are a couple of really cool variations of it.

Spotnitz: There’s one, when you see the movie you’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s what they wouldn’t tell us.’ There’s one that’s very memorable.

Shock: Is the process of composing for you very academic? Is it literally constructing these pieces or is it kind of intuitive?
Snow: Because of the advent of the technology, electronics, I’ll sit down and I’ll have the movie synched up to my equipment, I’ll push ‘go’ and I’ll start sort of improvising and playing along with it. Then ideas come and they start to grow and form, and that’s really how it happens. God, I remember my first jobs where you’d go, you’d see a show, there was no video. They’d give you these timing notes where every tenth of a second someone jumps or runs or dialogue and you’re trying to imagine this and you’re writing it out, you know? There’s no keyboards. You have a piano, certainly. But things have really changed. I mean, John Williams still sits down and writes out his sketches and they’re copied just like the old days. He is, for that stuff, the best.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe opens in theaters on July 25th.

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