More Chris Carter! Another fresh interview with The Creator, this time from the Danish Conspiracy podcast Sammensværgelsen. There is some significant overlap with the immediately preceding interview that I covered a few days ago, but there is also more detail here. Carter talks about the new Director’s Cut of the second movie, his ideas for a “My Struggle 5”, Coogler’s new project, and his next movie “Queens For A Day”.
As always, I’ve tried to transcribe “the actual quotes” that are interesting [and my comments are in brackets].
Making IWTB in 2008
- It was a movie made with a limited budget in limited time, but seeing it anew he sees that the production values were amazing. They shot for 50 days almost entirely in the snow.
- From 2002 to 2008 they had double or triple the budget to make a two hour movie [I suppose he compares it to the budget for two hour-long episodes of 2002: it really is not a lot. The production budget is estimated at 35 million dollars. By season 9 they were well exceeding 4 million dollars per episode.]
- They wanted a rural setting. When they scouted Pemberton there was no snow, then Vancouver went through one of the snowiest winters.
- “We had pretty much complete freedom.” “Except there was some interference with the Mulder-Scully story, we worked that out.” [This is the first time I hear of this, this is before the cuts made due to the rating, so it must have been something earlier in the production, perhaps at the script stage. Did Fox require more romance to be able to market the movie to a wider audience?]
- He went to a very wide-ranging lecture of the religious scholar Houston Smith. Someone asked him to sum up his knowledge; Smith said that the secret to life is “don’t give up”. Carter hopes this resonates like all the other TXF slogans. “Scully’s story with this kid [Christian] in its own is such a beautiful story of ‘don’t give up’.”
- The post-credits scene was “cathartic”. Mulder’s red swim suit was a nod to the fans.
- To his surprise, “the television censors were more permissive than the movie censors.”
- “It had been cut back to the point that it was not the movie we intended to shoot.”
- “This movie was originally edited in such a rush.” They had one editor, then the deadlines were so hard to hit that they hired 3 editors. [Only Richard Harris is credited.]
IWTB Director’s Cut
[The movie with the simple name “The X-Files I Want To Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn” is coming out August 14 — barely in 4 days!]
- “They aren’t revolutionary changes but they are changes.”
- “The changes are small, there are some things we left out.”
- “It works more as a Frankenstein story, and still a Mulder and Scully story.”
- “It is closer to my original vision, certainly.”
- “There are elements to scenes that we have added, there are elements to scenes that we have subtracted, there are no new scenes per se.”
- “There’s more graphic stuff. It’s terrifying but not horrifying.”
[This is quite as I initially expected: changes sprinkled throughout related to pacing and censorship, aimed at giving the whole movie a better flow and a feel that is closer to a horror film. No big changes to the structure of the movie, no new scenes, perhaps little to no new dialogue. The differences will be too many to be able to make a summary of the comparisons, and a detailed comparison will be more of an academic exercise to illustrate film theory. The experience of watching the new cut might be marginally better for someone who has already seen it, it will probably won’t change your opinion on it. The new cut might be the cut that you might recommend to someone who will see the movie for the first time, from now on.]
- The Director’s Cut came about as an aside during a conversation Carter had with Steve Asbell, head of theatrical at Fox, a champion of the show. Carter asked him if he ever considered it, he later came back to Carter and gave the go.
- Frank Spotnitz lives in Europe so he couldn’t work on the movie.
- There is new music in. There is a Clannad song when Scully is performing surgery on the kid. There are other Mark Snow elements they have played with. Jeff Charbonneau [music editor since TXF pilot] was the music editor. [Does this mean that Snow’s highlight track “The Surgery” is gone? I like Clannad, but I would be sad to see it go!]
- The chase scene [the one that ends with Agent Whitney’s death] was inspired by a chase scene in David Fincher’s “Seven”. Originally it ran longer, but it ended up being more interesting with quick cuts. In the new version it is re-edited, it is 15 seconds shorter.
- The whole film is slightly shorter.
- The early scene was inconclusive or confusing: they find the arm in the snow, that was raked with a garden tool earlier. “When you realize it’s a Frankenstein story, it gets you thinking in that direction.” [I’m not sure this scene needed additional context. The viewer pieces it together, and that’s good.]
- Title “Vrach Frankenshteyn”: “Doctor” was too commonplace or easy. The Russian “Vrach” sounds terrifying to me. [This won’t win Carter any subtlety points!…]
- Will there be a physical release? “I don’t think so.” [Disney has decreased its physical releases to nearly zero. Consider yourselves lucky with the BluRays we got.]
- Gillian has not seen it, David has seen it. Frank gave notes and concerns, they tried to address them all.
- The new editor is a man named ?? (Said?). They showed it to Eleanor Infante, she did a pass of editing, especially in the beginning, “she saw things we wouldn’t otherwise have seen”. [This runs counter to the impression that Carter gave us repeatedly that Infante was the editor! I hope that other editor is talented too, but it’s odd that Carter doesn’t praise him when this is all about the editing!]
The future of the show, Coogler, comics
- “I’m always thinking of ways to revisit the show.”
- “The “My Struggle” series was somewhat misunderstood about what I was trying to do. There is a giant payoff to those four episodes that I was setting up and I would still love to tell that story.”
- “It would be a “My Struggle 5″, but really it would be a culmination of not just those four episodes but for the series itself.”
- “I see it as a conclusion, but of course you never know where these stories are going to lead you.”
[It’s impossible not to be excited or at least curious for what this payoff is. Even after all we went through with the 4 Struggles, I want to know what he has in mind! See the previous interview for some more theorizing.]
In terms of timing, now there is the Director’s Cut, and the Coogler reboot comes first. “You don’t want to start competing with yourself.”
[That is true, but it’s also true that one project will feed off each other if they are successful, so you have to strike when the iron is hot. What happens if Coogler’s pilot is picked up for a series? What happens if it runs for several seasons? What happens if Mulder and/or Scully appear in it, as Gillian Anderson is teasing? Duchovny and Anderson are names that can pull enormous attention, but none of them are getting any younger, and Carter either.]
“Always give the fans what they want, and not what they want, not what they’re expecting. That’s a very important thing, when you give people what they want it’s kind of hollow in a way. It’s better to give them what they want but not in the way they might have imagined.”
[This directly echoes something he said in his previous interview regarding the revival. Add unexpected plot complications to increase engagement with the story.]
When he is asked of more TXF comics coming: “Amazing!” “The show has a life of its own.”
On such side-products: “They always pay me the courtesy of running things past me.” [Interesting that he says that it’s a “courtesy”: it probably means that Disney/Fox is not legally obliged to do anything, but they still keep Carter in the loop for all things TXF.]
He doesn’t know more about the comics. “I’m not a comic book guy, but I try to keep the soul of the show in mind.” “Mulder and Scully are The X-Files and it always has to involve them.” [I also see this as a hint that Carter is unlikely to put his future series finale idea in comic book format or even novel format: he will always try for a live action project.]
He’s only had had one phone conversation with Ryan Coogler. “I haven’t read the script.” “I’m just like the fans, I’m waiting to see what he comes up with.” [He truly is much less involved with this project than what people might believe. Coogler’s project is a completely separate project.]
He only heard things indirectly from being in Vancouver. [Possibly the production of Coogler’s pilot and Carter’s new movie overlapped.]
“I was told they were using 8 cameras”, this is new for TXF. [TXF typically used only one camera at a time, with at most two being on set at any point in time. What this means for Coogler’s pilot is hard to tell.]
Queens For A Day
[This is Carter’s next movie, written by his wife Dori. See Eat The Corn article from May. Here we get the first hints as to the content of it!]
“It is a horror movie of sorts but in a completely different way.”
When he found Dori’s script from some 30 years ago, he suggested her to rewrite it with a real-life person in mind as the lead, a talk show hostess.
It has some of the same cast and a lot of the same crew as TXF. He specifically mentions people from the revival: producer Grace Gilroy, production designer Mark Freeborn, director of photography Craig Wrobleski, and people in props and casting.
He hopes it gets released before the US midterm elections in November because it has a political message.
Tags: chris carter, iwtb, iwtb dc, my struggle iv, thexfiles
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