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With the “I Want To Believe” Director’s Cut coming out next week, Chris Carter is doing interviews with the active fan podcasts. The main thing that comes out of this is that he is certain that he will be able to continue the show’s mythology and give resolution to his “My Struggles” arc (the word “unappreciated” comes up several times), while he has no involvement with any other project using the X-Files brand (namely, the Coogler reboot).

Here are the details for the interview with the “Hey Danny It’s Mulder” podcast. [My comments are in brackets.]

The My Struggles and the future of the mythology

“I was given a couple of directions when I was asked to reboot the show.” He had to reintroduce the series to new viewers, the characters, their “entanglement”.

[Based on these constraints that were external to Carter, we got much of what fans have been complaining about: a soft-reboot of both the mythology and of the Mulder-Scully relationship. Over the two seasons there is a clear evolution of the MSR, but I can’t say as much about the mythology; hence Carter’s tease that a season 12 would have given answers to the mythology.]

For “My Struggle I” he had gone to a convention on the secret space program. “Mulder’s struggle is weeding through all this conspiracy business.” Tad O’Malley was an Alex Jones-like character. He wrote this in 2015, before the current world where conspiracies are everywhere, this too is “unappreciated”.

[As I wrote in my review, MS1 presents us a world full of wild conspiracies, and I expected that what would follow would be Mulder separating the lies from the truths, finding the truth in all this confusion. Apparently this was Carter’s intention too. However, frankly I don’t see this reflected in the rest of the Struggle episodes at all.]

He met with Frank Spotnitz “subsequent to the series finale”. Frank said “you didn’t give them what they wanted”, Chris replied “what I gave was more than what they wanted, I think that was unappreciated by people.”

[For all my reservations about these episodes (and they are many!), I have to salute the artist in Carter and his strive for something more ambitious than just fan service, meaning not giving us a predictable and by-the-numbers evolution of the mythology or of the MSR but inserting complications. It is these complications that can end up making us more obsessed after all, which is what he means by “more than what they wanted”.]

“I had a bigger idea in mind and it played out through four mythology episodes, I’m hoping we can come back and explore that idea.”
“It took four hours to add up to the revelation of the meaning and purpose for all of it, which is two words.” “That will tell you the tale that when TXF returns, and I have no doubt someday it will return in whatever fashion, that will be what we will be exploring.”

[The confidence of the man is amazing! Of course he is trying to generate interest for continuing his story in a self-reinforcing loop. I am ready to believe he has clear ideas for what comes next, but I am not convinced at all that Disney will give him the chance to do it.]

“It really turns into the science fiction show it always promised to be with those two words”, which are the tagline that appears in the beginning of MS4, “Salvator Mundi”.
“The CSM’s struggle was that he helped father a child who he calls his own, the damage he did to that child, and how that child who turned a mobile as an infant, had powers that were harnessed and abused, and how he, that character William, will fit into the bigger larger picture of the mythology, and what the unborn child of Mulder and Scully will represent and come to know.”

[On “Salvator Mundi”: this is Lating for “saviour of the world” and is used for Jesus Christ in Renaissance iconography. Time and time again Carter has hinted at the clue that nobody has caught on for what comes next, and I have theorized at length here (and been disproven by Carter!). If the tagline is the clue, then of course many, many fans have thought of this already: it is hard to miss! What does this mean? William is the “saviour of the world”, as prophesied in earlier episodes (7X04: Amor Fati, 9X11: Providence), and in the context of “11X10: My Struggle 4” he did save the world from the CSM’s and the Syndicate’s plan by killing them all. What can come next, and be very science fictional? I can only think of something related to William’s genetics and powers, which might be a precursor to changes in the larger human population, bringing the world closer to a revelation of some kind. Carter had already hinted at something related to the alien genome and about Scully; here he also adds her second child in the mix. All of this sounds very X-Men-like (which is a direction hinted at by episodes like “10X2: Founder’s Mutation“, the Ghouli.net website or even the post-s11 book “Perihelion“. The other thing I can think of is that season 12 would have seen the return of the aliens and their colonization plans, and William’s genetics and powers would play a role in humanity’s fate in this heavenly struggle. Here I am saying all of this when I was already saturated with the religious iconography all the way back in “8X21: Existence”…]

On the mythology and making the series

• “So many series that have a mythology, it feels as if they’re winging it. With TXF we really tried to build a perfect house a perfect tower, it has a foundation, structure, artistry, all those things. That’s what made our mythology work, it wasn’t sloppy, it was complicated.” [This is his defense against the widely held view that nothing made sense, a view that is unfortunately still the mainstream even among many fan circles. It is quite ironic how many people would use the same words Carter uses to attack other shows, but they would use them instead to describe TXF’s mythology!]
• In the first season, he met at a party a professor who was working on the Human Genome Project. This was the inspiration for his work with Anne Simon on “The Erlenmeyer Flask”.
• “The mythology from season 2 on became the work of Frank Spotnitz and myself.”
• Critical response impacts him a lot.
• On the importance of Scully’s science, he adds: “Science is a spiritual journey, trying to understand God.”
• His scientist brother changed in the pilot script the word “time is universal constant” into “invariant”, he was “always there in the background”.
• His dad was a fan of Burt Reynolds, working with him was a dream come true (“Improbable”).
• He underlines how making the series was a group effort, “everyone combines to make it better”.
• On current movies: “Nothing scares me like “The Exorcist” scares me”.
• Monica Reyes was originally written as “a flaky character”.
• When they left Vancouver, a writer in the LA Times said that TXF is going to fail because it is losing what made its atmosphere. “For me, it was just a new problem to solve.” It was the same for adding the characters of Doggett and Reyes.

Remembering Mark Snow

• Before he died, Carter was able to tell Mark Snow that “those six notes would live on” (about TXF main theme).
• When Mark did the music for IWTB, he gave Chris a sheet with the inscription “Thanks a million and then some”.
• “I always said that we would bring to Mark the finished episode as a corpse and he would breathe life into it.”

On the Coogler project

He spoke with Coogler only once. He hopes his big idea and Coogler’s are “not in competition with one another”. Carter praises Coogler for his past work and the fact that he was awarded and recognized for it. The idea of a TXF project where he is not involved “keeps you on edge”.
[It does sound like he is a bit uncomfortable with it all. If Coogler’s project has different lead characters and actors, then how could there be any tension between Coogler’s potential series and Carter’s potential season 12? Only if Coogler’s mythology, instead of focusing on something new altogether, also involves elements that Carter wants to make use of, like the Syndicate’s plans/the aliens/William; or if Coogler plans to involve the characters of Mulder and Scully in a way that would contradict what Carter has in mind. Any of these options sure sound exciting and I hope something out of all this materializes so that we can learn more of them.]

The IWTB Director’s Cut

[The Director’s Cut is coming August 14, a trailer for it has been released with no new footage as far as I can tell.]

• Carter was impressed with season 11 editor Eleanor Infante. For “This” she did something not in the script, just with her artistic instinct. For “MS4”, he shot the script in order it was written, and she rearranged it completely, it was “magical”.
• “Eleanor is the first person I would go to, it would have been Rob Komatsu but he was busy.” [Rob is another season 10-11 editor]
• And so Eleanor was there to “review” the Director’s Cut. [If she was fully involved, then “review” sounds like an understatement.]
• The film was cut back due to Fox’s fear it was going to be “torture porn”; then censors further “eviscerated” it.
• “It’s a Frankenstein movie.”
• Inspiration: he read about a doctor in Cleveland, Ohio who said he successfully transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey. He flew there, he had a drink with him and the doctor described him the procedure. What you see in the film is “sort of science fact”. [This was Robert J. White, nicknamed “Dr. Butcher” by animal rights activists, whose crude experiments were done in the 1970s.]
• Post credits scene of Mulder and Scully rowing in a boat: They worked in brutal environments, in snow, cold, wind. He wanted to give the characters an escape from that hellish environment.
• The new cut is “tighter, scarier”. “It’s essentially the same movie it was, but I think it’s the movie it should have been.” [Let’s see: one week left!]

Queens For A Day

[As revealed here on Eat The Corn, Carter and wife Dori have finished shooting a feature film in Vancouver earlier this year!]
It is “unlike anything I’ve ever done”. It is unlike TXF, except for one science fiction element. it features 102 Canadian actors.
When he first met again Craig Wrobleski for this movie (the director of photography for TXF season 11), he bought him Rick Rubin’s book on art for him, and Craig was going to get him same book.
He is working with a Tracy Temple (Temple? Trebble? Trouble?) for the movie’s music, she is a “terrific composer”.
Chris and Dori are going to hit the festival circuit with the movie.
[I have no idea what this is, but I really hope they make it all the way to finishing it and finding a distributor. It looks like post-production is quite advanced already.]

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode13