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Aug
12
2026

Six more Chris Carter interviews

Six more Chris Carter interviews! As he is out promoting his new Director’s Cut of IWTB, out on 14/August. Obviously there is significant overlap with the two in-depth interviews I covered already (Hey Danny and Conspiracy). Here I only cover the new elements.

Main new points: the new Director’s Cut is actually shorter than the theatrical run; among the cuts are the Mulder-Scully romantic and emotional bits, which were rather forced on Carter; we get a pitch for his next movie “Queens For A Day”; and he thinks Scully at least and eventually Mulder will appear in the Ryan Coogler TXF project.

It sounds to me that this new Director’s Cut is all about the Monster-of-the-Week, detached from any other ‘superfluous’ elements that might link it to the larger story of the show, like the Mulder-Scully relationship: it is a version of the movie made to attract new viewers. In the interviews below we learn some specific cuts that were made; but apart from the obvious ones, Carter has tightened the whole movie to make it run shorter and has added new music. It’s the latter I am more interested in, to get a new sense of the flow and ‘feel’ of the movie and understand if it works better for me.

The X-Cast

[Context from Tony: Tony was sent a copy of the Director’s Cut that he saw in preparation for the interview. As a consequence, the interview was embargoed until today 12/August. Disney also specified not to discuss the new Coogler project with Carter. This embargo fits with reviews of the new cut, which have now started to come out.]

  • “I felt that Fox didn’t really promote the movie.”
  • “We had about the third of the budget” compared to the first movie.

[The reported budgets were 65 million dollars for FTF and 35 million dollars for IWTB; a third of FTF would be about 22 M$; could it be that the 35 M$ figure included both production and marketing?]

  • “We didn’t lay as heavily into the Mulder-Scully relationship, we stayed heavy on the Frankenstein story element.”
  • Cuts: several of the romantic aspects and any mention of William; but there is a reference to Samantha.
  • “Those were marks that we were hitting for the executives, I never that this was exactly right, this is more of the scary movie that I wanted to make.”
  • “With the two reboots we got a whole lot of Mulder and Scully, so going back to it I didn’t think we didn’t necessarily need as much.”

[This is as straightforward as Carter will ever get: he is uncomfortable with the Mulder-Scully romance, and moves towards that direction are forced on him. He has spoken in the past about not wanting to “domesticate” M&S, and these cuts must be to avoid these things. This is certainly going to be extremely unpopular among a big part of the remaining fandom. As for myself, I did think some bed jokes were cringe; however, they were together, it’s pointless to make their relationship even more ambiguous, this even makes the movie incomprehensible as there already were viewers who thought that M&S were not living together.]

  • Cut: exposition dialogue in the scene travelling in the car with Father Joe.
  • Cut: the George W Bush photo moment.
  • “Anything that felt extraneous or where we were goofing around got cut out.”
  • “At the same time I hope I didn’t cut out things that people liked about the movie.”
  • Added: Agent Whitney (Amanda Peet) actually gets impaled when she falls down that shaft.
  • Music changes: no main theme melody at the start, it’s directly more ominous, and it’s different throughout. Jeff Charbonneau did all that.
  • Addition of the [Patsy Cline] song “I fall to pieces”, which is ironic.
  • Added: a scene with Scully crying.
  • In memoriam in the end credits: it used to be only Randy Stone, now it includes Nicky Aycox, Mark Snow, John Bartley…

“Queens For A Day”: “It is a horror fable.” “It’s about someone who time travels and goes back and has to walk in someone else’s shoes.” [This sounds straight out of “The Twilight Zone”! It can be fun.]

He has never thought about doing the same Director’s Cut approach for FTF — if so, he would bring in Rob Bowman, Dan Sackheim and Frank Spotnitz.

The Pop Culture Principle

[Interview by Millennium fan Troy Foreman.]

  • “I always felt there was a big push to lay into the romantic relationship between Mulder and Scully. It always got in the way of the scary story for me. I tried to balance those things better.”
  • “There was some concern that it’s coming out in as it were competition with Ryan Cooger’s reboot and that’s not the case, it’s coming out months in advance, at least. I didn’t want these two things get confused.”
  • “I don’t know what the future holds. I’m really anxious to see the Coogler take on the show and how it will effect or not effect my ideas about going forward with Mulder and Scully.” “I don’t know how one thing will influence another.”
  • Troy: IWTB is very “Millennium”-like and you could substitute M&S with Frank Black and Emma Hollis. Carter: “I never thought of that! Yeah, it’s got a Millennium vibe to it. That’s astute.” [I remember the summer of 2008 and in anticipation of the release some were hoping for a Frank Black cameo! IWTB is so Millenniumistic, it’s wild that the creator does not realize these connections when they are so obvious to some viewers!]
  • At some point Carter asks his assistant something about the music. His assistant can be heard saying that they removed the emotional music, but everything they added in was from Mark Snow. [Some of Mark Snow’s best lyrical work was in tracks like “The Surgery”, it’s a shame this is toned down. The tone of the new cut is pure horror.]
  • He is going to be in Philefest 2028 in Vancouver.

https://thepcprinciple.com/interview-chris-carter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1u6lXS9pY

On The Red Carpet

(Short 2 min interview)
Carter’s favourite episode: “5X06: The Post-Modern Prometheus” [More Frankenstein!]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhm4Dg3i2dU

The Hollywood Reporter

  • “Unlike most director’s cuts, I didn’t throw in everything but the kitchen sink. It’s actually shorter than the original.”
  • “My feeling is that the movie became a relationship heavy movie. The scares were second to that. I wanted to go back and put in the scares.”
  • “When the original was released, I went out and promoted it. The studio didn’t promote it, so it I felt it was never really seen by a wider audience.”
  • “We made it for less than $25 million.” [That small figure again. Much less than the reported $35 million at the time. With that measure, it was a box office success!]

About continuing the story beyond season 11: “There’s a point at which you need to deliver on a promise. And I wanted to deliver more than the promise. I wanted to give them what they least expected. I know that sounds somewhat confusing, but I had a bigger plan and it all made sense. It will make sense, and so hang with me.” [“Deliver on a promise”: this is 2002 all over again. And 2008. And 2016. And 2018. See earlier interviews on theorizing on all of this.]

“The thing that was unexpected, but now highly anticipated, is the Ryan Coogler reboot. I don’t want to do anything to compete with that. I don’t want to do anything to get in the way of that. I don’t want to play off of that. I want to continue to tell and finish the story arc that I have in mind. That said, I’m anxiously awaiting his version. My name is on it as executive producer, but I have done exactly nothing. I am, like everyone else out there, excited about what it may be.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/x-files-i-want-to-believe-chris-carter-interview-1236668936

Parade

He cut the romance, but he also cut some of the gore. “There actually was a lot more of that. I cut it down a little bit because there’s a point at which it gets overplayed, and I didn’t want that. A little went a long way for me.”

“It’s always Scully’s movie. The X-Files wouldn’t have succeeded without Scully. If it were just Mulder poking around in the dark, it would have been only so interesting. Scully, with her science background and her belief that science can explain everything, that is the beating heart of the show. Mulder just takes her on the wildest ride that she never imagined, and us as well. So it’s Scully’s movie until it’s Mulder’s movie.”

“Queens For A Day”: it’s “about a very flawed person who has to go back and live life in someone else’s shoes. If that sounds a little like A Christmas Carol, it’s not by mistake.”

https://parade.com/movies/chris-carter-reveals-why-his-new-x-files-cut-pulled-back-on-mulder-and-scully-exclusive

Polygon

“At least Gillian, I think, is going to appear in the Coogler version. And I’m assuming David will too, so you will see Mulder and Scully there.”

[As suspected, this explains why Gillian has been saying so many positive things about Coogler. Carter drops this bombshell in the middle of a random interview. Does he not realize he is messing with Disney’s marketing, who have wanted to keep this a secret? Or does he fully realize, and cares little about whatever version of TXF is not his own? In any case, this is going to be interesting!]

Does Coogler’s project make his continuation more complicated? “I don’t know. When I see it, I’ll know, and so will the Fox executives. They’ll have a sense if these things are going to be in competition or if they are going to be complementary.”
“I would love to do either another reboot, or another movie. My ideas going forward are big ideas. Whether they’re a TV series or a movie, I don’t know, but I have big plans.”

[Very clearly, with this Director’s Cut and the press around it, Carter is attempting to draw attention back to him and his future for the show, he is trying to tell to Disney not to forget him, and that when this ‘craze’ with Coogler’s side project will pass, he will still be there to offer his original take. Let’s see if Disney will listen, and if Anderson will be willing. These are big ifs.]

https://www.polygon.com/x-files-creator-chris-carter-says-hes-pretty-sure-mulder-and-scully-are-in-the-reboot

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Aug
10
2026

Chris Carter interview on the new IWTB Director’s Cut and more

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.

https://sammensvaergelsen.libsyn.com/interview-chris-carter-on-the-new-directors-cut-of-i-want-to-believe-and-the-future-of-the-x-files

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Aug
07
2026

Chris Carter interview on the future of the series and more

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

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May
05
2026

New Carter movie: Queens For A Day

You heard it here first! “Queens For A Day” is the title of Chris Carter’s next project: a movie he is directing and that he co-wrote with his wife Dori Pierson, and whose shooting already wrapped one month ago!

Director of photography Craig Wrobleski broke the news with an Instagram post dated April 5 2026:

“Just before Christmas of last year, Chris called out of the blue (very Chris) to ask if I would like to shoot a movie he and Dori were putting together called Queens for a Day. Of course I said yes and was sent the most beautiful script filled with heart, humanity, comedy, heartbreak and timeless themes – one that kept revealing itself as you read it and, as we later learned, continued to offer up revelations with every shoot day. […] We just wrapped shooting on the film and it was one of the most unique and extraordinary experiences I’ve ever been a part of.”

Wrobleski’s post provides more details:

Nothing is known about what the film is about. The title is a riff on the 1940s American radio and TV game show and related comedy film, “Queen For A Day“, where contestants tell of their hardships and win prizes…

During an interview with the X-Cast recorded on November 23, 2025, Carter had said that he was about to embark on a new directing project. His wife wrote something about 35 years ago, it was optioned but never made. He found the script in their closet. She has updated it. They have found the perfect actress for it, it will excite TXF fans. They were searching for investors for it.

During an interview earlier in 2025, he said that he was writing a movie and that the script would be done by end of June. “It’s going to get made because it’s timely.” “I know where I want to make it, I know who I want to make it with.”

From the looks of it, the project went into production quite quickly, with filming taking place anywhere between December and early April. An Instagram post from Erin Boyes from February 16 could mean that filming only started around that time.

It is quite surprising that this information comes out of the blue, but it’s not unheard of, I hope that more information will start filtering out and we will get something more official.

I am very glad this has happened! Finally, Carter is doing something, his first project in 8 years and his first non-X-Files project in 12 years (since the pilot for “The After”). Now I hope something happens with this, because there is the odd precedent of “Fencewalker”, which was a project of his that was actually shot in 2008 but nothing came out of it. More to come as this develops.

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Mar
21
2026

2023 Philefest Millennium panel

Happy spring equinox!

Somewhat recently, already 4 months ago, a recording of the Millennium-focused panel surfaced, thanks to Kurt North from the X-Cast / The Time Is Now podcasts. This is the only panel from Philefest in September 2023 that had not been recorded by X-Files News, I suppose because it was not about The X-Files. The panel had Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and Troy Foreman (producer of the Millennium documentary). Though short, this panel is excellent, on several points Carter has humorous comments followed up by very heavy stuff, and we finally got a good reason why MM is still not on any streaming platforms. Here are the highlights:

  • Carter: The idea for MM came from Fox forcing him to come up with a second series! He was a big fan of “Silence of the Lambs”. He finds Fincher’s series “Mindhunter” excellent.
  • Spotnitz: TXF episode “Irresistible” was an early template for MM. Among all the hours of TV they did, the Pilot of MM is the best. In the Pilot, the characters, the ideas are “closest to who you [Carter] are, closest to your worldview”. Carter does believe in the evil of the world, but we all have yellow house. There were no supernatural monsters or aliens like in TXF, it was the reality of the human condition.
  • Originally two highly qualified executives had been hired to run MM [who?], but Carter and Spotnitz had to take over. There were 1500 people working daily on TXF, MM and the TXF movie, it was amazing they pulled it off.
  • Why don’t we have MM on streaming? Season 2 has a lot of good music and securing music rights is costly. Carter: Disney/Fox is “cheap”. [Finally, an answer! Hold on to those DVDs!]
  • Season 3 was run by Ken Horton and Chip Johannessen, they had plans for season 4, but Carter and Spotnitz don’t know them, don’t know what was Peter Watts’s fate. Fox would have done a season 4, but Carter moved MM aside to do “Harsh Realm”. Fox was chasing better ratings, but the ratings never got better than MM, it was a structural decline.
  • Carter: “I’ve met evil people”, “some people have a defect”, “too many of them are lawyers”, “I know the face of evil, I’ve looked it in the eye and shuddered”.
  • The reason Carter took a break after TXF was an on-set accident where a crew member electrocuted himself and was killed. [This was Jim Engh; 8X01: “Within” was dedicated to his memory.] He went to the funeral, he met his widow. Later, the widow was suing and Carter was named specifically. He was called in for a deposition, the lawyers were trying in every way to connect the deceased with him. He had enough, he didn’t want to put himself in a position to be accused. Eventually the case was dropped. [These are rare details on a little-known case, and a surprising amount of detail. Along with a work burnout and other legal issues with Fox, this was certainly a contributing factor for Carter’s break after 2002.]
  • Question about common visual elements between the MM pilot and TXF: “The Red and the Black” (people with sewed orifices in their faces): Carter: both were made concurrently, it was not conscious.
  • Spotnitz: Carter loved Fincher’s “Seven”. He got “Seven”‘s assistant production designer for the MM pilot. [This was Gary Wissner, credited as art director on “Seven”.]
  • MM revival: the obvious way forward would be if Jordan has similar gifts and becomes a serial killer profiler herself. Carter: the number of killers has decreased in recent years, one would have to branch out for new stories. “Dahmer” was great.
  • Sarah Jane Redmond originally approached Carter for a role in MM. She had the perfect affect for MM. Carter wrote the Lucy Butler role for her.
  • In the MM documentary, the interview with her took place inside a church.
  • Spotnitz: originally the show would not have any supernatural at all. The studio was pressuring for it. By the end of season 1 they did “Lamentation”. Lucy Butler was Spotnitz’s favourite character after Frank Black.
  • What do they fear now? Carter: “the Trump administration”. If they’d do the revival, a scary title would be just “Trump”.
  • Season 2: Glen & Jim had ideas, they took a huge load off Carter & Spotnitz. He watched the season like a fan.
  • Spotnitz: he was exhausted after season 1, it was brutal. Carter asked him if he wanted to leave TXF for MM. It was a hard decision.
  • For season 2, Jim had T-shirts printed out “99% less serial killers”. It was a different direction.
  • Season 3: Chip was a poetic, artistic writer. It was a different tone and focus. Carter & Spotnitz came in and contributed, but it was Chip’s vision. The show was 3 distinct visions, a triptych. Spotnitz loved the work of Kristen Cloke.
  • On TXF: “The Erlenmeyer Flask”: the hybrid idea was something Carter and Anne Simon hatched together. Carter follows current research on genetic engineering, “we are on the cusp of changing the human race”.
  • Spotnitz: on the Scully effect. MM’s casting was diverse: it was not a calculation, it was not pandering, it was resisting pressure about ‘where’s the sexual tension?’ (regarding the Emma Hollis-Frank Black relationship). It’s amazing how well MM holds up. “That’s Chris’s respect for women.”
  • Carter: on female producers in MM. TXF had more female than male producers, he is super proud of that. He took offense with some comments in seasons 10-11. He tried to hire a female director of photography for TXF, Sandy Sizzle, which was rare at the time; Fox’s Charlie Goldstein said ‘no way’, that women couldn’t lead a crew. [This whole bit sounds like an organized defense of their work in response to criticism Carter in particular has received, and it looks like it has touched a nerve! All of these are good points but this is somewhat misplaced: I think the criticism has centered around the writing staff, which was nearly-entirely male for TXF and admittedly more balanced in MM. Also, there are many behind the scenes things we are not aware of and now that so much time has passed Carter is opening up a bit, it’s not usual for him or in the industry to be naming people like this.]
  • The leads of MM, Lance and Megan, were their first choices, no auditions, they gave them the roles based on past work. Megan had a unique intelligence and humanity. Spotnitz: when they killed Catherine he was sad and disappointed, it was not his decision.

Speaking of which: an extended cut of the Millennium After the Millennium documentary is coming on April 7 on BluRay and streaming (Amazon Prime)! (I don’t know if this will be available globally on Prime, it wasn’t in the past.)

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Jan
25
2026

Carter on 10 years of the revival, season 12, third movie possibilities

The X-Files revival is already a decade old! As incredible as that sounds. “My Struggle I” premiered on January 24, 2016; followed by “Founder’s Mutation” just a day later. A decade later, Chris Carter is still preparing new things for the world of The X-Files. Here we break down his latest interview, the last interview of The X-Cast podcast, recorded on November 23, 2025. After hosting academic-level analysis of TXF and bringing us dozens of interviews with cast and crew, the X-Cast ran its course and finished its notable run (I even sent them an audio message for their last episode!). But Carter is not done with the show, and he even looks forward to more interview with them despite the fact he was told that this was for the X-Cast’s closing salvo. It feels very weird listening to this interview: on the one hand it feels like the ending of an era, with the revival being as old as it is now, and with these dedicated fans calling it a day; and on the other hand Carter opens up so many fronts that it’s impossible even for the most jaded fan not to be excited for the future.

“I Want To Believe” Director’s Cut

  • As first announced on David Duchovny’s podcast, an all-new cut of the second movie is in preparation.
  • Carter is exchanging notes with Garfield Whitman; he was post-production supervisor in Carter’s “The After” and an associate producer / co-producer for both TXF revival seasons. They have a finalized cut and sending it to studio imminently.
  • Carter and Spotnitz loved their script. The studio asked them to make a change; to get the PG-13 rating they had to take out several scary things and part of the story. Then the Motion Picture Association asked for more cuts. Carter found out that the PG-13 rating on theatrical movies is less permissive than network TV.
  • The story is an “homage to Frankenstein”. He had heard that a doctor in Cleveland had done a transplant of a monkey’s head. He visited him for research. The equipment in the lab in the movie would have been what would really have been used from that operation.
  • The Mulder-Scully relationship went through an “interesting wrinkle” in IWTB. Mulder and Scully never got married. [A thousand fanfic writers cry in agony!]
  • He remembers lots of shooting in the snow. With the director of photography, the did tests using digital cameras, but the snow was blurred out, so they decided to shoot on film.
  • The distance from it since 2008 makes him look at it with fresh eyes. He lifted some things, rearranged a couple of things.
  • He is working with the “best editor I’ve ever known”, Eleanor Infante, it’s “her version of the movie”; she worked on season 11, and with Carter on My Struggle IV (here’s a recent interview with her). They have added effects and music. Changes are sprinkled throughout. The new cut has “made it lean on the story rather than completely on the relationship.”
  • “It was not the movie we set out to make”, “it was always a disappointment”. [!]
  • His wife has seen the new cut, she is his toughest critic.
  • There is not more Skinner in it.
  • They have access to Mark Snow’s music library from the show, they are drawing from it for the new edit. “Mark Snow MS is TXF”. Carter talked with him shortly before he died, his diagnosis was terminal. [Nice to hear him talk about Snow, finally.]
  • They are on a tight budget. He wants to add two contemporary songs in the edit, and they are expensive.
  • It’s impossible to say when it will be released. [Or how? Could Disney/Fox be planning this as a tease before the premiere of Coogler’s TXF series?]

[This cut is more than the already-existing IWTB extended cut (in the DVD/BluRay), it is much more than either reverting to an earlier cut before the changes demanded by the studio (see “Blade Runner” Final Cut, more or less), or taking extra scenes that were shot and adding them in (see “The Lord of the Rings” Extended Editions): it is an all-new edit with new sound mix based on the same raw material, with a different editor and a director who is 17 years wiser. This is closer to “Caligula” Ultimate Cut, you could say, and rather quite unique in movie history. Now, I don’t know to what extent the additions will make me have a complete change of opinion on the entire movie. But we are not talking about just adding in more violence, and indeed some additional story is very much welcome. Surely it bodes well for making the movie at least marginally better! I will look forward to this. What is most surprising out of all this is Carter’s admission that the 2008 movie was a “disappointment”: a very rare admission and an example of self-criticism that is not Carter’s forte, as we will see in what follows.]

The 2016-2018 reboot

  • The reboot came about not with Carter going to the studio, but with the studio approaching him and the actors first.
  • “Darin’s episodes were fantastic” (if they could have done more, “my answer is always more Darin Morgan”!), “Glen [Morgan] and Jim [Wong] were great to have”. Frank Spotnitz was busy in Europe. Great to have newcomers like Ben van Allen, who did a horror movie type episode [Familiar].
  • Series today have the luxury of having all scripts ready before shooting, they didn’t. [S10-11 were produced in the ‘old style’ of network TV, like the original series in the 90s.]
  • A writer wrote an episode but it wasn’t TXF, Glen jumped in and wrote a fantastic ep. [He won’t say which writer it was and which episode Glen replaced. “Rm9”?]
  • The studio thought of reordering the s10 episodes. He didn’t disagree, but it was not a popular decision.
  • About “Babylon”: “Miller” is Mulder in Dutch, and David’s son is called Miller; “Einstein” fits with Scully’s science background. He anticipated the question on whether this was a backdoor pilot; but there was no time nor the opportunity to discuss anything more than what they did. He has friends who have done MDMA or ayahuasca, they have come back changed; it was fun to see Mulder do something like that with his mushroom trip. He is a fan of Fatboy Slim’s video clip with Christopher Walken [Weapon Of Choice], wanted to see something similar.
  • “My Struggle I” was written 2015 before Trump and it “predicts the conspiracy-laden crazed world world as we live in today”. He had been going to conspiracy theory conventions, he saw what was coming. “My Struggle II” predicted the pandemic.
  • The revival is “good”, “the work is great”.

[While there are certainly good things to say about the revival, and 10 years passing has already started doing its work in terms of re-evaluation, I still wouldn’t call it “great”, especially where the mythology is concerned, which is entirely Carter’s doing. MS1 might have thrown the viewer into a whole new world of crazy conspiracies, especially with that scene where Mulder and O’Malley are trying to one-up each other at the most out-there conspiracy theory, but the show didn’t do anything that was narratively interesting out of this mess. At the time in my review, I expected the confusion in MS1 to correspond to Mulder’s state of mind, hoping that subsequent episodes would develop this, clarifying the lies from the truth, becoming specific rather than vague, producing a plot that says something and brings change into the characters; what we got instead was a mere statement, a mood, and stopping there, on to different things in every single Struggle. Clearly, Carter is not one that relishes the current state of things under Trump, the MS1 conspiracy overload was a warning that paranoia would be our undoing, not that all conspiracies were premonitions. As a result, bona fide right-wing conspiracy theorists took MS1 at face value and felt vindicated that their world view was becoming mainstream; MS2 did little to correct that.]

[Of course an author doesn’t have to share his characters’ opinions, as in any work of fiction. There is this whole reading of the Struggle episodes about subjectivity: paranoia in My Struggle I (Mulder), lots of science in 2 (Scully), lies / cover-ups / self-aggrandizement in 3 (CSM), and whatever 4 was (William). And indeed these episodes become more interesting once you perceive that, they are complex episodes. However, at some point you have to tell a story, some story: you can’t have absolutely nothing happening in an objective shared reality and impacting character motivations, decisions, actions following one another, plot. So the Struggles-as-subjectivity was a nice experiment, but that reading can only hold to a certain point.]

The “My Struggle IV” clue and season 12?

  • About the 4 “My Struggles”: “they were all aiming at season 12. Whether that happens or not I can’t predict. I can’t think of any bigger things that I’ve set up through the course of those 4 episodes than I’ve done in the show previously. I’ve got big ideas. I certainly would love to see those come together as a series or as another movie. We’ll see.”
  • Theories about what the clue about the continuation could be (the host Kurt throws several theories at him: that there is no real savior, everyone is their own savior; that Scully’s pregnancy was the first stable inherited hybrid; and Eat The Corn’s own elaborated theory was quoted to Carter, that William can perceive the “music of the spheres” and have access to timelines and can change the future): “all of that plays into the culmination, I put a big clue in there and no one has really — not even responded to the clue, haven’t seen the clue. That clue is staring you in the face, it plays into what TXF will or will not become in the future.”
  • There was a “not pleasant exchange” with Gillian, she felt Scully didn’t have agency. “The pregnancy came out of the blue for her, which it did, because it came out of the blue for me too.”
  • There were some angry fan reactions after the finale: “It showed me I hadn’t done enough to convince people what I’m doing. I’m doing this organically, its not like I — all has to do with the show and what came before it, but I’ve got a big idea, a lot of people didn’t see it that way.”

[I was excited at building up that theory collecting quotes from various of his theories, and I must say I was disappointed not at the fact that it’s wrong, that’s fine, but more at his whole attitude. It’s amazing to me how he persistently teases us with this big clue for well over a year now. Despite being directly presented with the most meticulous fan-made theories, his reaction is just the spiel as if he hadn’t heard anything, that there’s a clue that somehow absolutely nobody has thought about or even come close to. Is he taking us all for a ride just to stir interest in making more episodes? It just never ends and there is no catharsis, if season 12 is made there will always be season 13 to tease afterwards. And when the journey is so frustrating I’m not sure I’m interested in the destination.]

A third movie?

  • Carter was discussing with 20th Century Studios President Steve Asbell about a possible third TXF movie. That’s when the idea to do a director’s cut of IWTB first came about, it came out of the blue.
  • David Duchovny and Carter have been “talking about something new for quite a while”, something involving both Duchovny and Anderson. All three were going to have lunch together on December 1 to discuss this project.
  • All this is separate from Coogler’s project. Carter gave his blessing to Coogler, it will be his own thing. “I’m curious what he’s going to do.”
  • There’s a lot of new science he wants to write about in new episodes.
  • About continuing the story in other media: Others come to him with project and ask him if he wants to collaborate. “Perihelion” book: “I think she did a terrific job.” The cancelled TXF animated series “didn’t happen, I think I made the right choice” [to cancel it]. “I don’t think we’ve seen the end of these characters in the medium we’ve come to know them.” [i.e. live-action] “These characters and the show are so personal to me, I want to protect them every way and every time I can. I don’t want to have them become irrelevant because there’s so much of them, so I’m reluctant to — although there are opportunities like the Coogler series.”
  • In IWTB there are “all those little things I laid in there, on the wall, the back of Mulder’s door at home, little things that meant something to me, now I have the chance to — there’s more to see.” [Is this about the elements in the new cut, or that IWTB includes hints about what comes next that will become clear later?]

[So not only the story of TXF is not over, he actively has plans for a season 12 and a story idea for a third film, all in parallel to Ryan Coogler’s potential series. This is huge! Is it 2008 all over again? Time to resurrect the tag. Mulder and Scully are off-limits to Coogler, at most there could be a cameo for them, and we can call this project a “spin-off” of the main series. Mulder and Scully are ‘reserved’ for whatever Carter (and Duchovny) have in mind. I understand that will to “protect” the characters: Carter has poured so much of himself in this world, his worldview so unique and so closely associated to the TXF identity, that it’s difficult to imagine TXF without him. Despite everything I’ve just said about his revival episodes (and my head-canon still stops after season 7), I will always be interested in what he does. I genuinely hope he proves my negativity wrong!]

[But is he reading the room well? How likely is any of this to bear fruit? Is one re-edited movie that carries a lot of lukewarm baggage enough to trigger financing for a new revival? Coogler’s project has an uphill battle to convince a new audience that it will have an identity of its own and that it can stand on its feet, and the studio and Disney will focus their marketing on that new thing instead of a return to the old. So will we ever know what Carter intends? His approach to hold everything hidden is very different to, say, Daniel Knauf revealing planned plot points for “Carnivàle” or James Cameron saying he would be ready to publish everything in a press conference or in a book if no more of his “Avatar” films are made!]

Misc and non-TXF projects

  • He is about to embark on a new directing project. His wife wrote something about 35 years ago, it was optioned but never made. He found the script in their closet. She has updated it. They have found the perfect actress for it, it will excite TXF fans. They are now searching for investors for it. [I hope he manages to do it, just so that we can see more of his work being made and break his ‘single-success man’ image.]
  • “I have an idea right now that is kind of my answer to the criticism of ‘The After’, it may see the light of day someday.” [Another story idea, another thing I want to learn more about!]
  • The logo: the “typewriter X” was created by himself. The “X” used in “Fight the Future” was made by others; but he “has ideas about” that logo for the future.
  • His advice to young Carter writing the TXF pilot in 1992: “You’re lucky you didn’t listen to your mother, who said you don’t know what a hard days work is!” They worked a lot for the series! “My forebears were dairy farmers who got up at the crack of dawn to milk the cows. I was the same person, working on a science fiction TV show.”

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