It’s The X-Files: “Fight The Future” Day! The movie premiered…27 years ago already. On that topic, here is an excellent and comprehensive interview with one person that was important in the making of that movie but that we had never heard of previously: storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman, who has had a very full career since! Courtesy of the “Hey Danny It’s Mulder” podcast.
Some notes and highlights:
He did pencilling for comic books. He started doing storyboards when the comic book industry contracted in the mid-1990s. As a huge “Twin Peaks” fan, he went to a book signing with Mark Frost; in the line, he met a guy, they almost collaborated in doing a CD-ROM of what would have been season 3 of “Twin Peaks” [wow TP fans are just as dedicated as TXF fans!]; he introduced him to who became his agent, and got him his X-Files job. He was just 22 years old, it was the first big movie he worked on. The recommendations he got from working on FTF were what got his career going.
In a bungalow in the Fox lot that became Carter & Bowman’s office for the whole shoot, he came in to read the script for what was then called “Blackwood“, it was printed on red paper. He was essentially the first person recruited, and was present for all the shooting until the very last day (not just for pre-production). Robb Bihun was the other storyboard artist.
He draws visual storyboards, including camera cues, lenses, movement of camera, the frame… He submits an idea to the director, who gives notes, he refines it, does another pass… The storyboards were updated as various design decisions were being made. Nobody could come up with a good design for the big ship at the end; production designer Chris Nowak told him to give it a shot, this is the drawing that is in the making of book. He learned a lot from director Rob Bowman, practical things about filmmaking, visual storytelling tricks and ideas, how to design shots interestingly and economically.
He had a good collaboration with director of photography Ward Russell — but it can be that there can be tension between storyboard artist and DP. The DP was who said it was OK for him to direct the second unit. [This was great that he was given this opportunity!] What he shot was with a helicopter, driving the car in the desert, coming to a stop on a crossroads — the shots without the actors.
He got along well with producer Dan Sackheim — stories about Dan having trouble unboarding a helicopter, and about Dan being stung by a bee! He flew to the glacier for location scouting. Going on location makes it specific, allows to adjust the storyboards. Shooting the hives scenes: they needed a wide lens to show the big space, but it was impossible to capture the small bees at the same time. The bees ended up being computer generated, the shooting was complicated by the bees that ended up not being needed.
Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was a big visual influence: the shot of Mulder & Scully in the desert, pull out to reveal a road barricade; or the shot with kids going over a berm, revealing the secret base. There was going to be a car chase à la “French Connection” (Mulder after the ambulance that got Scully, instead of being shot in the head). The script specifically said “the car chase of Rob Bowman’s dreams”. But it got cut as there was too much in the movie already.
He still has the boards. They were pen & ink and grey marker on paper. The criterion was whether it could be photocopied and faxed well. For references for likenesses he only had some magazines and production photos — no internet, no computers.
About Carter: Carter stayed in a producer role, he didn’t get in Bowman’s way. Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” had just come out, and Carter was not thrilled, he thought Sagan got bitter at the end — it turns out 30 years later Sagan was correct. [That magnificent 1995 book about tending the fragile flame of scientific thought against lack of education and superstition came out shortly before Sagan died in 1996.]
Gabriel’s storyboards, in sequence, were included in the Blu Ray for the movie, the whole thing lasts for an hour and it’s like a mini-movie previsualisation itself! The intermediate level between script and what became the image that was captured by the camera.
Recently, the Millennium Group Sessions Redux podcast released two interviews that were conducted for the 25th anniversary of Millennium, which was in October 2021, so these are not quite recent intervews but they are newly released nevertheless. They make for some very interesting listening, Carter being his typical tight-lipped self and Spotnitz very well articulated.
If there’s one thing I’d highlight here is that Carter not only has (had?) high hopes for a Millennium revival, but that he has given thought to where the characters are and what the setting is, which…1) I want to know all about this! But also 2) How incredibly optimistic! Given how much time has passed, given how the XF revival was received, and given Frank Black’s age. I suppose it’s still possible with Jordan as the lead character, or as a complete reboot with a recast, but it’s quite a stretch.
Below, important quotes (made easy with automatically generated episode transcripts) [and my comments]:
Chris Carter
“[MM] actually maintained what I would call a solid audience through its three years. I think the show could have gone on, and for reasons that I regret, the show did not, but we had very solid ratings that could have carried us on.”
[On the 3 seasons] “I think of it as three different shows. I think of it as the first season. I think of it as the second season, when I had to step away. And I think of it as the third season, when we had to really respond to and answer to the second season, which was a departure. So I think the show benefited from that infusion of energy, and I think that, as I say, the fourth year and beyond would have been a very interesting continuation of something that I think still held a lot of promise and energy.” [Since this interview he has opened up that it was his call to cancel MM. We will be left wondering.]
[On handing over s2 to Morgan & Wong] “I don’t remember exactly what the hand-off constituted or what constituted a hand-off, but I know they had very strong feelings about the show, the characters, the relationships, and the storytelling.”
[IWTB and the rumour at the time that Frank Black would appear in it] “It’s funny, it has a Millennium theme to it, certainly a storytelling. The second movie was inspired by something that actually took place, and I met with a doctor in Cleveland at Case Western University who had actually conducted a head transplant on a chimp, and so that was kind of the inspiration. I don’t remember if Frank Black was going to appear in the movie or not, I’m not sure now looking back, he might have appeared in the movie. That said, I always look for any opportunity to feature Lance.” [He can’t recall for something as HUGE as Frank Black’s return? This is hard to believe.]
“You try to be an audience pleaser always, but you try to make sure that you are following your own instincts. Shows can be I think directed and misdirected by audience feedback. Looking at The X-Files, while we heard our audience, we were always true to the characters and the situations and the mythology, and I think the same could be said for Millennium.” [Completely agreed on both directed and misdirected by the audience.]
[Whether Peter Watts is actually dead or not?] “I actually can’t answer that question. It’s funny that in the season finale of the last reboot of The X-Files, Mitch Pileggi’s leg was the last thing you saw. So I think those are wonderful coincidences.”
[MM on streaming or Blu-Ray?] “I hope so, and I think so. I don’t know that it’ll come out on Blu Ray, which seems to be somewhat of a dying thing, but I think that it ultimately will find its way onto some platform, probably Hulu, which is owned by Disney/Fox.” [Still waiting.]
[TXF s10-11] “there’s a trick, and the trick is being respectful of the original fans, the fan base, people who have held the torch, but at the same time wanting to attract and entertain a new audience. With The X-Files that was the trick, we were responsible and receptive to fans’ desires to see the mythology and the stories within that mythology be continued, but at the same time we had to be mindful that we had a whole new audience.” [Nice insight — but whether he followed his own advice for the XF revival is up for debate.]
[A MM revival?] “If the show came back, I have some strong ideas about the direction of the show, the relationships, the characters, the situations, the circumstances, all those things are I think are have been on my mind.” [In typical Carter fashion, he doesn’t give us more — but it’s incredible that he has given it this much thought, he really thought there was a big chance for this to happen. Is this why he can’t answer whether Peter Watts is dead or not? It’s been 25 years! I think the boat has sailed, especially 4 years later after this interview. I hope he does open up eventually and will share these ideas with us.]
“Glen Morgan told me he had a meeting with some executives at a studio, I think it may have been Warner Brothers, and one of the executives says, if he had a show to bring back, it would be Millennium. Unfortunately Warner Brothers does not own the title, and so while that is always music to my ears it’s the wrong studio. That was recently.” [That’s impressive!]
[On continuing TXF without Gillian Anderson, possibly partnering Mulder and Frank Black in an episode] “I think that would be pretty cool. Actually, it’d be great crossover.” [That would have been very cool indeed.]
[On the TXF: Albuquerque animated show project] “I can tell you that, as it stands, that series is on the shelf, and for a variety of reasons I don’t think you’ll see it anytime soon, if you see it at all.”
[On what he’d do different in a MM revival] “You look at television now and people roll out 10-episode series, and we did 22 episodes a season roughly. […] I think I would look forward to doing a shorter run of the show and being able to write all the scripts before you ever went into production. […] It would be great to have the luxury of not writing while you’re producing and trying to stay one step ahead of this monster, this all-consuming monster who requires you to do way too many jobs at once. That would be a dream come true, and it would be make Millennium a better show.” [Good idea, although he still didn’t manage to do that with the 6 and 10 episode seasons of the XF revival, when he was still writing while shooting the episodes.]
[On offering Frank Spotnitz to run MM s2] “I had no idea about that. I don’t remember doing that. Frank was actively involved in The X-Files series and The X-Files movie. I think that would have been triple duty for him, so that actually is something I don’t recall. That may have been the case, but it has slipped my memory.” [see Spotnitz’s reaction below]
Frank Spotnitz
“the show didn’t reach the popularity of The X-Files, but the impact the show had on the people who saw it was really profound”
“Millennium was was really uncompromising in its way, and, honestly, I think that’s probably what limited the size of its audience, particularly in a network television landscape […] it was both what was great about it and also what probably kept it from being more popular than it was.”
“it was very much a movie type story every week”
[On his s1 episodes ‘Weeds’ & ‘Sacrament’] Weeds: “it was really about fathers and sons and the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons” Sacrament: “in a very different way in Sacrament I kind of explored the same idea, which was not so much the sins of the fathers, but sort of the gifts of the fathers, if you will, the gift that Frank had and how that affected Jordan. But that’s an interesting theme to me, just generations and fathers and sons.”
“it’s one of those shows that we found as we went along, and that changed dramatically each of the three seasons. So I certainly had no idea from the first episode what the show was going to become, I don’t think anybody did.” “I think that that first hour is as good or better than anything Chris ever wrote, which is saying a lot, because Chris is such an incredible writer. I remember seeing it in a in a theater in Los Angeles because Fox so proud of it that they rented out theaters for the for the premiere, and just being absolutely blown away by it as a piece of filmmaking and a piece of television.” “we certainly didn’t know where the show was going to go, that it was going to ultimately embrace some supernatural elements.” “each season, it was like a triptych, each was a different way of seeing this world”
“the studio and the network were frightened by the show […] they could see that we were limiting the size of the audience by our uncompromising approach to the storytelling.” “the reason the show evolved is because we were eager to grow and not repeat ourselves, so I think there was this restless creative spirit that kept causing the show to reinvent itself.” “from the beginning of the first season, Chris sort of let go the original creative team and so he and I ended up doing double time on X-Files and Millennium that first season. And then obviously Glen and Jim came to the rescue in the second season, and then Chip and Ken in the third season.” [I don’t recall this about the original creative team, I wonder what happened.] “the third season, we all felt really proud of the show and what it did become, and we were pushing so hard for that fourth season that we ultimately didn’t get, I think because the network believed if they put something else in there, the ratings would grow, which turned out not to be true.”
[On being offered to run s2] “I was really flattered and grateful. But honestly, I don’t think I was ready at that point, and I certainly wasn’t ready to let go The X-Files either. So it was a tough call because I really did love Millennium, but I think I made the right call.” [I also think that was the right call, especially since we got Morgan & Wong’s s2, but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to both MM s2+ and to TXF s5+ if Spotnitz had switched teams then.]
[On IWTB having some Millennium elements] “there’s a lot of truth to that. I think tonally it feels very much like Millennium, and it’s barely supernatural, so it could quite easily have fit into Millennium. But that’s where Chris’s head in particular was at at that point in time when we came back to The X-Files, he was more interested in the horror, psychological terror, and the thematic richness of it.”
[On the XF ‘Millennium’ episode] “we were so upset that Millennium didn’t get an ending that we were determined to give it an ending on The X-Files. I have to be honest, we didn’t appreciate how difficult that was going to be, because they are completely different shows, and we wrestled with that episode a lot. […] it was part of The X-Files, so it had to be an X-File first. I could totally get why some Millennium fans would be frustrated by that episode because it is more an X-Files episode than a Millennium episode. It’s an X-Files episode with Frank Black in it. […] it didn’t end up being the Millennium finale that we wanted it to be, but I couldn’t figure out how else to do it.”
[On Millennium compared to today’s television landscape] “X-Files and Millennium, to my mind, were both ahead of their time in terms of their cinematic ambition. In terms of the thematic element and the ambition of Millennium, it still gives all those [current] shows a run for their money, even twenty five years later, a lot of those shows don’t necessarily reach for the same complexity of theme and aren’t necessarily always as thought-provoking as Millennium was.” [Completely agreed, and that goes for all of Carter’s shows, it’s not ‘just’ good visuals or ‘just’ good plot, it’s a whole worldview, a philosophical stance.]
[Emma and Frank] “there was no social-cultural-racial agenda, it was like we loved Clea and what we thought she’d be bringing to the part and and that’s why we cast her, and I’m especially proud of that.”
“it was obviously influenced by Seven”
[About the three different seasons] “No, I don’t think it was a hindrance to the show at all. I think the show got as big an audience as it was always ever going to get, and it was creatively really strong and interesting all three seasons. […] What nobody realized in 1999 was that network television was already in decline, Fox [hoped to] recapture the X-Files numbers, which they never did. […] We were more a victim of changing viewership habits than of any creative mistakes or change of direction we may have made in the seasons.”
[On season 4 ideas] “I thought Chip [Johanessen] was going to do the fourth season and I think Chip really did have some ideas what he wanted to do. By the third season, it was not my show in any way at all. Chris and I would come in and make our contributions, but it was really Chip who was defining the show. I was really excited by what he was doing and was looking forward to, obviously, the actual millennium being on the show.”
“I really put my heart and soul into Millennium, like like I do all of these shows, and you do it because you’re hoping you’re going to reach other people. […] When people not only watch the show but like it enough to remember it and honor it and and keep it going for years, it’s incredible, I can’t tell you how gratifying that is.”
After the Gillian Anderson interview a few months ago, David Duchovny received Chris Carter on his podcast, to talk The X-Files and more. This time there’s a video version, and thanks to advancing AI and autogenerated subtitles it’s easier to pull quotes. I am also doing this to help people who prefer a text version instead of audio, or people who might want to automatically translate this page into their own language.
Overall a very enjoyable exchange with plenty of info. However, there are also some very weird parts. Once more, David tries to focus on how one becomes better after dealing with difficulties in life or in a career. Once more, Chris acts as if the world failure never applies to him and that the critics or the fans just don’t ‘get it’. There’s a lot of pop psychology that we could go into thanks to the many things said here, on why Chris has this attitude in life.
Here are the two highlights [with my comments]:
On the revival:
CC: “I thought, why why do I want to come back? What story do I have to tell? I don’t want to just come back and do a victory lap.” “I did a four part arc through two seasons to say all the things that I wanted to say. And the first story is a prelude to my point that I wanted to make.” CC goes on scorning New York Times critics calling ‘My Struggle I’ and ‘The After’ as “a dud” and “terrible”. CC: “[My Struggle I] was the episode that led us to the ending of the following season. And the big point which I was delivering, it was all a plan, was all veiled and complicated, and we get to the end and no one got the ending. I’ve already talked to you about this, that I laid it out there but no one got the ending. It’s a big, it’s a huge ending. Scully reveals that she’s pregnant, and I had a lot of haters, that Scully didn’t have agency, women are only good as mothers… I had a big idea and I put it right there, front and center, for people to make the connection that no one, literally no one, made. And you know what it is because I told you, you were the only one I told.” CC then stops talking and takes out the alien embryo prop from ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask‘!
[This is not the first time he hints at some bigger truth that ‘haters’ missed. But despite what he thinks, there’s been so much analysis by the fans that I don’t think absolutely nobody got it. Take your pick: Scully’s pregnant and this is again a miracle, possibly related to some new alien experiment, or man-made experiment, or triggered or enabled by William, who smiles at the end (and is shown hatching an egg in the teaser of the episode, having thus a life-giving force). Scully’s alien DNA generates alien-human hybrid babies (end of My Struggle IV echoing Sveta’s hybrid babies who were taken from her in My Struggle I) and the human race is slowly being manipulated into becoming a hybrid race, either by action of the CSM, or some secret human conspiracy, or by some covert action of aliens that have remained hidden for the entire revival. In terms of more general themes, the Struggles show we all have our biases and subjective truths (each Struggle episode has a point of view character) and we can get gaslighted by manipulators (CSM, William) but there is an objective truth we can reach to if we pierce through the lies. What more can the overall arc be possibly about? He should also reflect on why nobody ‘got it’, maybe these episodes are not his best work and not the masterpieces he thinks they are.]
On a new cut for IWTB:
CC: “I got just got the go-ahead yesterday to do a director’s cut of ‘I Want To Believe‘, the second movie, and I can’t tell you how excited I’m about this.” “I made it too scary basically and I was told so by the brass at Fox and they wanted a PG-13 movie, so we cut it back to be a PG-13 movie and we thought ‘OK we’ve satisfied their demands’. The critics, the people who rate the movies said, ‘no it’s not PG-13 yet, you’ve got to cut it back even further’. I can tell you that you can do more on network television, they’re more permissive than the sensors are for the movies. And so now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended. So it’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut, it’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.”
[This is very surprising! Is Disney/Fox investing in this because of some new edition or 4K/UHD transfer of the movie? I’m certainly eager to see an edgier version of IWTB, but I don’t think the lack of scares or violence was its weak part. Making certain already-existing scenes longer will enhance it, but I don’t know that this will turn it into a better movie overall.]
Much more stuff follows:
All big 3 (DD/CC/GA) had lunch last week in Los Angeles. The podcast closes with the hope that they can do one all three together. [Nice that they still meet! could this be related to the recent series reboot project?]
Inside joke on set of TXF: “John Bartley, poet and a prophet / John Bartley, taught me how to off it”, to the tune of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away” [“Bob Marley” in the original lyrics; Bartley was the director of photography]
CC loves Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino movies. [Yay for the Malick reference!]
CC: “Story was very important”: “I did the pilot for The X-Files, I wrote a 17-page single-space outline.”
On the 3×5 cards for plotting out episodes in the writers’ room: “[Glen Morgan] actually had beautiful penmanship, and he would make these cards and so that became also competitive: who could make the most beautiful cards?” [everything became competitive in there, but in a good way!]
CC: “The great thing about The X-Files was that you were surrounded by people who wanted it to be good from the beginning. And that’s not, in my experience, always the case. Some people just show up for work. But certainly when we shot in Vancouver, it was that esprit de corps, it was the reason I got up every day to do the show, do the job.” [This team spirit comes up again and again in interviews by many crew members.]
CC: “By season 7, we were all tired.” During s7 when DD had a lawsuit against Fox, DD had his trailer checked for bugs, there was tension and distance with CC. Despite that, CC remembers seeing DD and his wife in Malibu, and hugging him. DD: “I was number one on the call sheet and you retired the number one which was really nice.”
On that “annus horribilis” when CC produced TXF S4 + Millennium S1 + preparing to shoot the first TXF movie: DD: “these are the fruits of success, that you’re going to work yourself to death.” DD on CC at that time: “I was pissed off because I thought Chris is not with us.”
CC on Millennium: “I didn’t want to do another thing, but Fox came to me and said, “You’ve got to, this is your brand, and run with it.” [Interesting that this was really a push from the studio and less of CC’s desire to expand to other things.] CC: “I pulled the plug on Millennium too soon.” “I thought [Harsh Realm] was going to be a hit and I didn’t imagine myself doing three shows.” [I can’t blame him! He pours his soul into his shows.] If not for CC’s decision, Fox would have gone ahead with Millennium season 4: “It was going to keep on going, they would have gone with it.” “I got excited about Harsh Realm because I got a chance to work with Dan Sackheim again, who had produced The X-Files pilot with me. There were a bunch of us that I was excited to work with. I thought it was a really good concept and that’s a story in itself. I thought it was and I still think it was a little bit ahead of its time.” [I can’t imagine HR going on for 100 episodes, but the 9 episodes that were produced were amazing and it was cut short way too soon. I don’t know what I would have preferred, a full season of HR or MM s4.]
CC on pottery and the creative process: “I went to film school when I was making pottery. I would have the TV on for 10 hours a day while I was making pottery.” “And then I would listen on Sunday nights… I just loved the Dr. Demento show.” “This is a story about my serialized brain.” “I could be called a production potter, which means I would sit for hours at a time and make the same thing over and over and over or the same six things over and over.” “It’s about the process. There’s something actually meditative and engaging about doing the same thing over, serialized. And what is television? It’s serialization of a concept.” [I love this parallel!]
CC remembers important experiences that made him into a writer: writing blue book essays for a writing teacher (Mr. Lackman) on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd“; in journalism school with a teacher (Dr. Stein), writing a piece on Gaylord Carter (silent movies organist). “I’m a hard worker and I hate to hear the word ‘no’. And I wanted to be good at what I was doing.” [He has this work ethic still.]
On how CC got into Hollywood: He was next door neighbours with James Mangold [director, ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ among others]. He met his wife-to-be Dori, whose cousin was Dianne Crittenden, an agent and the casting director on ‘Star Wars’. They got him to write scripts and shop them around. [Sounds like it was quite easy for him!] CC: “The first script I wrote was… I’m from Belfflower. I wrote a script about three kids in Bellflower in the early 1970s who are baseball players, who have no idea that they can get out of the Vietnam draft, and they’re going to war because they don’t know how to not go, they don’t know about bone spurs. [Donald Trump avoided the draft claiming he suffered this ailment.] “The script is called ‘National Pastime’. It’s near and dear to me. It’ll never get made.” [Sounds like his own ‘American Graffiti’.]
In season 1, CC wanted DD & GA to go to couples therapy. CC: “You guys were at odds” “sometimes on set, that kind of thing rocks a crew” “if there is tension and you guys are the center of attention, if there is tension in that relationship, everyone knows it and it affects…”
Shooting “Squeeze” (season 1): DD had already done his ADR (re-recording voice in post-production) and was unavailable, so CC recorded his own voice for Mulder instead, for that shot when Mulder finds Scully’s cross: “damn it”. CC: “I don’t remember how you figured it out, but I remember your reaction, which was not good.” DD: “I was really pissed off and I remember you being bemused.”
The “widows and orphans” in CC’s scripts: DD: “in your chunks of dialogue, you wanted it to look symmetrical, and so you would make sure that each of your lines added up”. DD: “I’m reading your dialogue for 20 years on and off. And there’s always ellipses, ‘—‘. And in my mind, when I read a script like that, especially when it trails off at whatever in the middle, I’m thinking there’s a thought that’s not being expressed, and I’m thinking, well, what is what is the thought? And I’m always trying to fill it in.” DD: “So it it goes with my kind of philosophy that that self-imposed limitations which you’re giving yourself that it has to look a certain way are actually ways to get at deeper meaning and and freedom.” CC: “People don’t speak in complete sentences.” CC: “For me it was an exercise because I always think, if you can say it in four lines instead of four and a half it’s going to be better.” [I understand the will to have more natural dialogue. But compare a typical page of his early scripts with one of his revival episodes and maybe he’s overdoing it.]
Casting TXF: DD: “I had to convince the suits that I was the guy. And there was a line in the pilot in the description where you you described Mulder as like more MTV DJ than like FBI. So I was like, ‘Oh, he’s a bit irreverent, whatever’. So I came to the test wearing a pig tie.” CC: “We left the casting session. I actually talked to you outside and I said, ‘You’re good. I want to take you to the network’ and I said the stupidest thing, ‘I want you to start thinking like an FBI agent’.”
DD’s revelation about Mulder’s psychology: DD: “I gave thanks to you for kind of giving me a structural education in storytelling, I was coming to storytelling in a completely psychological sense.” DD: “Mulder is traumatized by his sister’s disappearance. Trauma is a word we use now, but we might not have said that back then, we could say something like PTSD now. He failed to protect her. That’s his trauma. He failed. But now he’s returning to the scene week after week and putting another young woman in jeopardy and sometimes failing, almost failing, to protect her. As if he’s trying to heal himself by protecting Scully in the way he couldn’t protect his sister. Yet he’s also reinjuring himself by putting her in danger and sometimes even having to be saved by Scully, saved by this sister proxy.” CC: “I never thought of it that way either.” “I guess you you could make a case for that. I don’t know.” [This is very insightful and I love this angle, it really makes the Mulder character work for me, to the point that it’s surprising Carter never thought of this. It’s also the type of analysis that I think fans were producing already back in season 1.]
On when DD was feeling low after receiving bad reviews for ‘House of D’, DD was mumbling/crying, CC told him “I want to hear your big boy voice”. CC: “That’s a Bill Carter instruction. He wouldn’t have said that exactly, but it was like, ‘buck up’.” [Sounds like Carter received some tough education from his father.]
CC: “Doing the X-Files was a perfect opportunity for me to talk about the world and my point of view in the world, or I should say my competing points of view, which are science and faith.”
CC: “I once told David long long ago, 30 years ago, that my first novel was going to be called Men in Their Hair.”
DD: “the reason that The X-Files was so scary in the beginning was because we couldn’t afford to show the scary things. It had to be dark” [He makes fond fun of director of photography John Bartley’s accent, who was from New Zealand] “If you have a small budget, you have to figure your way around the scare. And that explained or that drove The X-Files when it first aired, it was so dark compared to any other show on television — and I’m talking about literally — and that became its trademark, and that became the art of it.”
