Here are the highlights from some recent interviews with Vince Gilligan, who really started his career with The X-Files in season 2.
Starting on TXF:
His agent Rhonda Gomez: “she said, “Yeah, I haven’t seen it [TXF] yet. But, actually, I’m related to the fellow who created [the show], related by marriage to his wife. Would you like to meet him the next time you’re out to California on movie business?” ” [Dori Pierson really, really helped Carter’s career!]
“They had a 26 [episode] order for the second season of X-Files, and they didn’t have enough episodes. They were taking any warm body who walked through the door.”
On Soft Light, his first episode:
Inspiration: “The night before [meeting Carter], I was sitting on the sofa in my hotel on Beverly [Boulevard]. I was watching TV, and the lights were off. I was looking at my shadow on the wall, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be creepy if it started moving independently of me?” […] in the original version, this [shadow] was alive and it moved separately.”
Rewrites of the initial script: “If it had been produced as it was written, it would have cost somewhere — just for that one hour of TV — between $40 and $50 million.” “It was so big and over the top and insane and unproducible. And [the producers] took it — they said, “Thank you very much” — and then they rewrote, probably, 70%, 80% of it. They were very nice about sending me the script back after it had gone through the rewrite process.”
On Small Potatoes:
“I got to be on the set the whole time up in Vancouver, and I had the best time.”
“he [DD] really liked Darin, and he got to play Darin, essentially.”
On Bad Blood:
“I got to be on the set the whole time and I enjoyed it thoroughly.”
“Some of my favorite dialogue in “Bad Blood” is stuff I didn’t write. My favorite scene in “Bad Blood” is when David Duchovny and Luke Wilson were sitting in the cop car out by the cemetery and they just start riffing. Luke Wilson’s character is saying, “So the guy you’re looking for is kind of like Rain Man?” And David says, “No, not really.” And Luke goes, “Well that ol’ boy could count all those toothpicks.” All that dialogue in that sequence there, it was just David and Luke who came up with that. It makes me laugh so hard. I didn’t write a word of that.”
On X-Cops:
“I think it was one of their [DD/GA] favorites because that was the shortest shooting time of any episode of The X-Files. The X-Files typically took between 13 and 21 days to shoot an episode. But “X-Cops” was shot on video, and it was done in these long oners. That episode was shot in five or six days.”
“It was a big deal, for instance, as I recall, to shoot it on video, instead of shooting it on the normal 35mm Kodak stock that we shot the show on.”
“we shot with Bertram van Munster, who was a producer on Cops at the time […] He was one of their lead camera operators; he’d be the guy riding around with this big camcorder on his shoulder, riding around the back of these squad cars on Cops. He photographed a fair bit of the episode himself”
On writing and the humor in TXF:
“Darin Morgan showed everybody that The X-Files could, indeed, be funny, but I tend to think that Glen Morgan and Jim Wong don’t get enough credit. Really, the first little whiffs of humor, as I recall, were in episodes written by them. They had some killer lines between Mulder and Scully in certain early episodes.”
“I never really got to know either David or Gillian as well as I perhaps might’ve hoped to because they were busy on the set 14, 15 hours a day, and I was busy in my little cubbyhole, writing and rewriting episodes.”
“There was a lot of midnight oil being burned, trying to figure out how to get exposition across [in these episodes] in a way that didn’t seem expositional. One of the many things I learned working on The X-Files for seven years was, how little the audience needs explained to them. It took me years to learn that as a writer, but it was an invaluable lesson. And you don’t learn it just from writing many episodes of TV, you learn it from spending hours and hours in the editing room. You come to realize that there are whole reams of dialogue that you can cut out in an editing room — because the actors are so good.”
Links to the articles:
https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/online-originals/x-files-vince-gilligan-soft-light-interview
https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/online-originals/x-files-vince-gilligan-x-cops-episode
https://www.cracked.com/article_46032_vince-gilligan-on-finding-the-funny-in-the-x-files.html
In his speech accepting a top award at the Writers Guild, Vince Gilligan — creator of iconic shows with anti-heroes like “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” — argued that the ‘bad guys as protagonists’ trend had gone too far, and he urged writers to come up with more shows where the leads are actually good guys. (Hear, hear!) Looking forward to his next show, then.
Introducing that award was Gillian Anderson, with a hilarious intervention (“we did some 7065 episodes in the 9000 years that we were shooting”)!…
Tags: 1013interviews, bad blood, small potatoes, soft light, thexfiles, vince gilligan, x-cops
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