This is a rather recent interview with Ken Hawryliw that I postponed covering because it turned out to be his last interview: Ken died earlier this year. (The GoFundMe fundraiser in his memory is still open.) He was the props master for the first five seasons of The X-Files and season 3 of Millennium (and things like Battlestar Galactica), and I am the proud owner of one of his props.
He had a treasure trove of stories to tell around the making of the shows. The interview ends on an interesting note on how things have changed since the analogue 90s. The interview is from December 2025, from the Hey Danny It’s Mulder podcast. There is some overlap with two otherdetailed interviews he did not too long ago. Detailed notes follow:
He would have loved to have worked on the pilot, but timing didn’t work out. 1X01: Deep Throat was his first episode. He “got” Chris Carter immediately. They had both seen the very same TV rerun broadcast of “Mysterious Island” when they were young.
He designed a lot of the props: the art department was glad to get this task off their back. He and his team ended up doing a lot of the research, and that meant libraries, phone calls, pre-internet. Over the years he had collected six 6-foot tall bookcases full of books, on topics like forensics. He sold much of that all together for a bookshop that was opening.
They’d develop a relationship with useful contacts, like the head medical examiner of the BC province, military advisors. Starting with 1X08: Space, they had military advisor Ian Fryatt, who got them to use military surplus uniforms correctly; he eventually opened a specialized company on military equipment, Phoenix 1 International Film Services. Then they got Ron Blecker [he has credits on all 1013 series], ex-Black Hawk Down, just two weeks after he left the Army, he wouldn’t say if he had been CIA or not.
They brought people in to make Scully act like a scientist.
In 1X23: The Erlenmeyer Flask: due to the liquid nitrogen, the acrylic fetus neck cracked and snapped off, the head fell on Gillian’s foot, thankfully she didn’t knock over the nitrogen tank. He designed the cradle.
He learned a lot on prop design working with Richard Hudolin [of Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica fame], and with Harry Lange on “Hyper Sapien” (who had worked on “2001”, “Star Wars”!). Carter wanted props designed from scratch, not take another object and modify it. Film didn’t have the high definition resolution of today, so they had some leeway.
He directed a lot of the insert shots during the first years, which drove the Guild crazy. His first time was for 1X07: Ice, with meal worms.
For the alien stiletto, he knew immediately how it should look like. If it were done with a spring mechanism it would have been twice the size, so they did it pneumatically. The alien artifacts’ look was based on the feel of the Roswell debris, metal fragments, their sheen. For the firewand, Carter told him to make it look like it came from the same factory as the stiletto.
His philosophy was to make it look real. He had the same philosophy in Millennium season 3. He had a reputation as the writers’ Nemesis, correcting them, but it was just to help things be realistic and credible.
About the 3X18: Teso Dos Bichos funerary urn: Originally it would have been from Uruguay, not Peru. The UN passed a law, you have to get permission to transport human remains across borders. She got hold of the Ambassador to learn what such a letter would look like. It was an urgent phone call, things were lost in translation, the Embassy thought they urgently needed the permit or the shooting would stop.
They got huge cooperation from the military. They got a VIP tour of the USS Constellation, visited the CIC. Story of photos [unclear whether this is for 1X01: Deep Throat or a later episode]: Jeanne was from West Sussex, could seduce people on the phone. She called a Colonel at the Pentagon, they had to know what security and uniforms look like for Edwards Air Force Base. The Colonel dispatched his own photographers to Edwards, back to Pentagon to develop the photos, flew them to the Fed Ex hub in Kentucky because they missed the day’s deadline, so they got them in Vancouver before next morning for the show-and-tell meeting.
For 5X01: Unusual Suspects where he acted: he had a line, “Whatever”. He asked Kim Manners how to say the line, but Vince had written it exactly because that’s what he always said, “Whatever”. Just be yourself.
“Apocalypse Now”: that’s where the CSM was from, and the texture of the print files. Secret files used to be printed on onion skin paper, so they couldn’t be photocopied. They tried to do the same and photocopy them, they burned down their Xerox machine. They had to be typed by hand with old typewriter.
They had two photographers. Ken Staniforth, who has since died, and Marcel [?]. Ken did the art direction of the photo shoots, he had a small crew, to do the crime scene photos. Like with the 3X23: Wetwired photos. It was guaranteed that such photos would be in a close up, because they move the story forward. He had to train the crew that these were important. For the UFO photo in 1X16: E.B.E., they shot the plate, then the art department would do photo retouching.
The case files would be in extreme closeup. The info in them was extremely accurate. This was to help the actors too. Story from Battlestar Galactica: His wife Alison is an author, she wrote a report that Admiral Adama would read. When shooting, Eddie James Olmos stopped the shooting to congratulate the writing, he summoned Ken on set.
Sometimes they would add a little joke in the text. They did it once with Gillian. Clyde Klotz’s nickname was “Dog Boy”. They gave Scully a file to read, and the perpetrator was Clyde “Dog Boy” Klotz, she had a good laugh. They worked long hours, the agenda was to make the best show possible, there were no personalities.
Before 6X17: Trevor: Film director Phil Spink asked Ken to meet Jim Guttridge [a film music composer], who had written a spec script for The X-Files. Ken found it was not quite a TXF script. They thought, why don’t we write one together? They wrote “Remembrance Day”. Carter’s assistant Joanne Service and Vince Gilligan thought it was really good. They got it to Frank Spotnitz; time passed, weeks. Gillian is the only actor with who Ken is friends with, he introduced her to Clyde, he was the first one they told when she got pregnant; so Ken asked her to read the script. In the interim, Ken and Jim wrote another script, just to prove to themselves they could write one in two weeks: it was about the Monkey King, Bigfoot, Stupendous Yappi was in it, it was comedy. Eventually Carter read both, he said to take more time next time. So it became a writing assignment.
Making 6X17: Trevor: It took them 13 pitches to get to Trevor. By season 6 almost everything had been done. The episode’s “beautiful idea” was that this man could do anything except connect with his son. They worked a lot on the scientific part but most was left out. They worked with a theoretical physicist. In an electromagnetic vortex, nobody knows what happens inside. A tornado is like a particle collider. What if you could survive something like that but it would change your molecular structure? It would only work with high-conductivity matter, not for things like glass. If you’d cross something, matter would be charred to its basic molecules, only carbon would remain. The first idea was that Pinker would walk through people and water in their bodies would turn to heavy water, and all cells in their body would rupture, bleed out spontaneously. It wouldn’t fly, too gory, it couldn’t be too sci-fi. The core was that he was propelled by the love for his son. In the first draft they wanted a huge action sequence for the end: Pinker runs through walls of motel rooms. The wind shield idea was taken from what was an earlier scene, where Pinker was stopped by car, and then Mulder figured out the conductivity thing.
Props move the story along, they are like clues. A senior props master who worked in movies like “Legends of the Fall” [Jimmy Chow] used to call him every two months to tell him “you guys are doing amazing work”, it was great to get credit. He is most proud of the attention to detail. At the end of some season, he told Chris “thanks for making me do the best props in my life”, Chris said “we are making television history”.
The only prop from the show he has left is a firestarter wand. There’s a detail that you couldn’t see in the final episode: the handle has a side glass with a liquid fuel gauge.
He’s happy he got to design props. His inspiration is from Richard Hudolin, he’s a child of the 60s, Batman (1966), Irwin Allen shows like Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. , the way prop curves give texture.
John Bartley [TXF director of photography for the first 3 seasons], the first thing he directed was a series pilot with David Hemmings [?], he learned not to use pure white. The directors of photography that came after just tried to “make a Bartley shot”, don’t make it your own. He worked so many hours in the first episodes to get the look right. Studio people asked if they could make production go faster, Bartley said, “hire a different camera man”.
The process to make props has changed a lot: the CNC [Computer Numerical Control] mills, the 3D printing. Things made by human hand had an organic quality. With Harry Lange things had an organic design, which is lost when using keyboards and machines. He’s old school, likes to sculpt, there is no replacement for that. Chris was inspired by “Jason and the Argonauts”, the skeleton fight had a nightmarish quality, you can’t get that with computers. He’s glad TXF was made in an analogue period, it would have been a different show today, way too much CGI. It was the last gasp of analogue times.
The Album that accompanied Fight the Future‘s 1998 release featured many classics — among them my all-time favourite, Noel Gallagher’s Teotihuacan — and ended with a secret track where Chris Carter just explained the entire mythology.
Album producer David Was was the one who approached the bands to collect songs. Among the contributions that were considered but didn’t make the cut were songs by U2, No Doubt and more. Some were not selected by Was (presumably), some might not have been even written (U2?), some were submitted but retired (Nine Inch Nails).
Gathering information, it’s possible to make a set of “the ones that got away”: that album’s B-sides.
Nine Inch Nails: Metal (a cover of Gary Numan’s song)
The Cranberries: What’s On My Mind
Saint Etienne: Burnt Out Car (X-Files mix) (many mixes of this song were released; this upload was made by what looks to be a fan account but it sounds legit; the lower tempo of this mix fits with The X-Files)
Saint Etienne: Sometimes In Winter
Now, it would be great to know which were the other songs.
Sources:
Interview with David Was on Allstarmag, 28/Jun/1998 (archived at u2songs)
Eighteen years ago (!), in the middle of the summer, a little winter-set thriller was released against the latest Christopher Nolan pompous blockbuster. Incredibly, the story repeated again this year — instead of waiting for a more fitting time like winter, the new cut of IWTB was released in the middle of the summer. When in 2008 the release date was dictated by a writers’ strike that left little else for Fox to release that summer, what can be the motivation for this release?
A few (belated) words on the Director’s Cut of “The X-Files: I Want To Believe”, “Vrach Frankenshteyn” (what a mouthful!).
Carter has tried to promote it extensively — I covered here no less than 30 interviews with him — but all in all there is little to say. The changes are, paradoxically, few and many at the same time. Overall, they do little to change my rather lukewarm appreciation of the film.
Eighteen years of fan analysis and time passing have been kind to the movie. There are a number of things that can be said in the movie’s favour that might not have been obvious at first viewing. The movie’s script is dense with interconnections between its various storylines: the “don’t give up” motto echoes through Scully and the boy she wants to save, through Mulder and pursuing the case, through the “evil” lovers wanting to save one another just as Scully holds on to Mulder even as darkness have a way of finding them. The viewer is challenged upon to think of the concept of Christian forgiveness when faced with a pedophile priest, who is used as a conduit to stop further crimes. There are plenty of narrative coincidences — like Scully finding out about the two-headed dog experiments by searching for an unrelated procedure, or Scully finding the compound via the numbers of the scripture Father Joe quoted — become examples of meaningful synchronicity when viewed from a mystic or religious angle. The first half of the movie is a remake of “1X12: Beyond the Sea” with religious elements while the second half is the Frankenstein part with more horror. It is first a questioning of whether morals mean something taking place in a frigid climate, before a figurative descent to Hell full of dirt and blood, and an optimistic ending that takes place in a sunlit spring day with snow melting. The story is about alien abductions performing experiments on women, but of a different sort than the show’s mythology. Some who are more attuned to this movie than me have been quite perceptive about all this.
It must be said, the quality of the photography in undeniable: this was shot on film and you can tell. The cold blue colours in the snow scenes, the warm oranges of the domestic scenes, the grain in the horror scenes. Revisiting this after being saturated with the badly lit badly focused all-digital scenes of most of current productions is refreshing.
And then there are all the issues — a slow and unengaging beginning and an anti-climactic ending, unmemorable villains, forced character behaviour, non-deconstructed clichés, some odd choices a bit all over. Despite the above, my feelings haven’t changed much.
So what does the new Director’s Cut do to enhance the experience?
Overall, it is the same movie. There is no new dialogue whatsoever. We learn nothing new about the “bad guys” of the film, who remain unnamed (!) (apart from fleeting glimpses at some paperwork). There is no new scene and much of what is “new” was actually already there in the original Extended Cut/Director’s Cut from the DVD/BluRay release. How could it be any different? The script didn’t have any extra material, and the shooting was holden to the script; even the novelization, based on the script, had nothing extra. Any changes are due to editing — and to what was cut.
Some tighter editing, especially during the first third, helps the movie get along. This is welcome, although despite these efforts the first half is still a slog to this viewer! Some attempts at making the pacing faster make no narrative sense, like the cross-cutting between Scully talking with Christian’s parents and the police questioning the bad guy.
In filmmaking, the editing of image and soundtrack are conceived as parts of a whole: as a result of the changes in the editing, in several places Mark Snow’s music has been changed for a better fit. The orchestral/electronic mix has been substituted with music from the revival series, with its fast rhythmic percussions and tense moments. It does the job of creating an atmosphere typical of a thriller, although I quite liked Snow’s score.
Some superfluous and fancy bits are cut (the dated George W Bush joke, Agent Drummer flirting with Mulder; but I will miss that shot of Mulder digging in a pile of sunflower seeds). Some baggage from the series is cut out, making this more stand-alone and approachable for new fans (exposition to Father Joe about who Mulder is, references to William and Samantha), although in the process we lose the parallels to our agents’ past lives that inform their emotional state. In particular, the references to William are gone, but the line to Scully “If you were a mother you’d understand” is kept, which is like going half-way there in doing the removing, oddly. A mixed bag.
Some scenes are moved around in an effort to make some of the narrative connections I mentioned earlier. The scene of Scully performing the surgery on Christian is now bookended by scenes of the abducted woman witnessing the horrific surgery performed by the Frankenstein-like doctor. We understand the parallel of using science for good or of using science to inflict pain, with both stemming from wanting our loved ones to survive. Unfortunately, Carter has substituted one of Mark Snow’s best tracks, “The Surgery”, with Clannad’s theme for “Harry’s Game”, which is a beautiful song in of itself but I don’t see what it is doing there. The only way I can justify this decision is that Snow’s track was too ethereal, warm and hopeful; the new edit juxtaposes both surgeries and the horrific elements make Snow’s track out of place — but the new track is not a much better fit.
The main selling point for this new cut has been to make it the scary film that was always intended. Compared to the original theatrical cut, the whole climax of the film on the “Frankenstein” compound runs longer, allowing us to see more of what is being done. But as far as I can tell, it differs little or not at all from the original director’s cut. See this comparison.
The main difference in runtime is actually what has been cut from the scenes where Mulder and Scully are together. The new cut makes away with the romance entirely, even mentions to a “home” are removed, to the point where one might think they are not living together and indeed are not together whatsoever (things were rather unclear back then, even reviews of the original cut thought that Scully just visited Mulder’s home; imagine now!). As a person who is attracted to this show for its stories and how these characters relate to them, rather than the romance, I am a bit conflicted. I do welcome the removal of some cringey lines that are completely uncharacteristic of The X-Files (like the scratchy beard tease) and I can even live without the final kiss, although I don’t quite see why it should be removed, and in its absence there is an abrupt cut. However, several scenes no longer work because the Mulder-Scully bits have been trimmed. There are some hard cuts from one scene to the next that don’t feel natural, like when Scully is thinking in bed. The whole Mulder-Scully argument about getting involved in the case feels even more rushed and forced and at the same time not quite there because it is not the focus of the film. In my review of the original, I had conceded that I had so many issues with the “monster of the week” plot that the best part of the movie was how it explored the Mulder-Scully relationship, how the plot was more a background. The new cut wants to return to an early seasons dynamic where the focus is back on the investigation. But what is lost is the emotional connection to these characters. All the scenes in this movie were conceived and shot in a certain way: the original intent still half-remains in what is left and the attempt to remove the relationship is only half-achieved. They would have to have done extensive reshootings to make this fit. The movie is less strong because of it.
Most of the work that went into this new cut, in terms of time spent to do it, is actually nearly unnoticeable if you are not intimately familiar with the original. Carter and his editors have gone back to the original footage and re-examined it in-depth. Many scenes are the same but some shots are different: a different take of the same shot, the same shot but from a different point of view, a reaction shot instead of the shot of who is doing the talking… For Carter, who complained that post-production was done under a big time pressure, this was done to make the best edit out of the material available. It took a lot of dedication; but for these changes I can’t tell what is best. Some more dedicated fans have already done a detailed comparison.
All in all, one is left to wonder: who is this for? It’s far from deserving some of the vitriol it’s getting. With fewer connections to the show’s larger storylines, tighter editing, less romance and more violence (but no more than the original director’s cut!), Carter is marketing this is a film for old fans to revisit or, especially, for new fans to discover. However, even with these changes, I cannot imagine that anyone that would want their friends to discover The X-Files would recommend this over so many other options. What’s more, who would know about this if not the fans? In the USA, it is on Hulu under a separate entry; but in the rest of the world it is on Disney+ under the extras to the original cut, making it extremely unlikely for anyone but hardcore fans to see; and unless you are a fan of physical media the original director’s cut, which is arguably the superior of the three cuts, is nowhere to be seen. So why release it now? This cut feels more of a pet project of Carter’s, who seems to have plenty of spare time. He is asserting the intellectual ownership of the brand just as the huge corporation actually owning it is about to give it away to newer hands, with that other project possibly fast approaching a green light. If it could eventually lead to more X-Files being made by him, all the good for him!
Now I wonder if there is out there the possibility for an even heavier cut. I imagine a cut that tries to keep it as close as possible to the length of a double episode of the series, complete with opening titles and a cliffhanger in the middle. Or, why not go all the way with this surgery? Away with the sick boy and psychic priest storyline and those silly end credits: if you are going to put Frankenstein in the title, focus on that. Mulder and Scully come to investigate disappearances and the findings of body parts, even tighter pacing, some plot relevant dialogue repurposed as voice-overs over phone calls, most of it takes place in the still-unnamed-bad-guys’ compound, Mulder and Scully wonder about the darkness in the world, end. It would lack all the depth of the original, but it might be an entertaining 45 minutes.
Another Carter interview in a long list of interviews for the new Director’s Cut of IWTB: this one on the ex-X-Files Diaries / Seriously Obsessed, plus some “Queens For A Day” news.
Two things are new and important here.
First: he justifies cutting down on the Mulder-Scully romance from the second movie as keeping things in store for his post-season 11 continuation that he has in mind. There was a word for this type of MSR enjoyer in the old fandom: fini-shipper, a desire to not have the romance take any place on-screen until the very end of the show. Obviously, Carter cannot think of any other way to portray his lead couple than to postpone gratification until they are well in their sixties. Implicitly, that would mean that his envisioned finale would end with Mulder and Scully together.
Second: he has a story to tell as a post-season 11 continuation that he would prefer to do as a series or movie, but when really pushed on this, for the first time he does not close the door entirely to telling it in another format, such as a novel. I really wonder whether Disney will give him the opportunity to make this project a reality and we are I think several years away from when Carter would give up hope on producing this as a live project, but at least we can live with the hope that we will get to know what it is about at some point in the more remote future. Now, I would also love to be able to read Carter and Spotnitz’s story treatment for a mythology-focused third movie that never materialized after IWTB, thank you!
Interview highlights
Cutting Mulder-Scully scenes from IWTB Director’s Cut: “One of the reasons I’m doing this is… When Scully says to Mulder at the end of season 11 ‘I’m pregnant’, that’s not the end of the story in my mind, that’s the beginning of another story.”
“I didn’t know Gillian would leave the show, I had always hoped that I would get to finish my story, because I have a big story to tell.”
“That’s another reason I’m doing the Director’s Cut, I wanted to leave myself some ammunition for when and if that opportunity comes around.”
“When I wrote the finale, My Struggle IV, I didn’t know that Gillian would be leaving the show.”
“He [Coogler] is including Mulder and Scully.” “I don’t know if it’s official, I know he’s spoken to both of them.”
Would you ever consider writing it as a novel? “Well, it’s something I was actually going to say, if there was no opportunity to do another reboot, and if there was no opportunity to do another movie, I still have a story to tell, however it will be told.”
“They [DD & GA] know what I’m aiming for and at, they didn’t before, when the show came to an end there, neither.” “I met with each of them individually and kind of told them what my plan was, whether or not and whenever may or may not come to fruition, they at least have a sense of what I’m planning.”
Adding the song ‘I Fall To Pieces’ was editor Eleanor Infante’s suggestion.
For both IWTB and My Struggle 1: he had hardcore viewers in mind, but he has to balance that with having to spend time reintroducing Mulder and Scully for new viewers.
“Who I was trying to satisfy is my wife, she thought there was too much Mulder and Scully relationship in the movie.”
On the viewer choosing different versions of the movie: “It’s a freeway off-ramp.”
“You have the chance to make a movie so you have to give people what they’re expecting, so you give them the Scully and Mulder kiss, it felt almost like pandering.” “If there’s a third movie, what do they do then?”
We now have the first stills from the movie, which all feature the lead Erin Boyes, who plays the modern-day conservative talk show host who is catapulted back in time in the life of her own mother.
Some additional information from the above interview:
It will be in 3 film festivals next month. [So there’s at least one more to be announced.]
It’s an independent movie, self-financed. [Hence the festival circuit, hoping to find a distributor.]
Title explanation: it refers to the old “Queen For A Day” talk show, but it’s actually “about somebody who goes back to Queens, New York and spends a long day there”.
Editor Misha Syeed did such a good job during several months on the Director’s Cut that he and Dori kept him on for ‘Queens’.
Music editor Jeff Charbonneau, who has worked on TXF since the pilot and on the new cut of IWTB is also on ‘Queens’.
No less than twenty more Chris Carter interviews, out promoting his new director’s cut of “I Want To Believe” + one interview from someone I had not seen interviewed before: special effects David Gauthier at the very end! Obviously there is a lot of repetition across these interviews and with the interviews from earlier this month. I have tried to quote the new bits for each. I will comment on the new cut itself at a later date.
What transpires from all of this is the following:
On IWTB: Although the Mulder-Scully relationship is his idea of an ideal relationship, one of his main motivations with the new version was to cut scenes that featured the relationship. He really feels he was forced to do this by movie executives who did not understand the show. [This could be the one thing that he regrets about in making TXF, which he mentioned at one point in the past. I’m glad he got it out of his chest and could “correct” it. Whether that makes for a better film…this is debatable.]
On his future idea for a final movie or a season 12: The word “immortality” comes up again and again, as does the question about what happened before the Big Bang. The aliens, the CSM and Scully could be immortal. Searching for immortality as an obsession of our times among the powerful is something he comments on. This is what he set up during the 4 Struggle episodes. [This does tie in with my own wild ideas about alien DNA providing insight to the fabric of time and space! Imagine that, a joke from a Darin Morgan episode (Clyde Bruckman) becoming canon. Is this an exciting development for the mythology? I don’t see how the Struggles were subtly setting this up, although we do know for a long while that (self-)healing is an alien power, and obviously William is shown surviving at the very end (is that the big hint?). As a culmination of the mythology I’m not sure it brings much more than what has been said already: whether it’s alien colonization or human conspiracy, what it has always been about is the manipulation of our genome to gain power and long-term control over humanity, and we have seen this already. This is another variant of this, with the nice addition of commenting on the current transhumanist obsession of our techbros overlords. I mean, the man can have interesting ideas (that have some trouble translating to a structured narrative end-product) but there’s so much “stuff” being made today, who am I to say no to it and why not giving him the chance to do this at this point?]
A couple more important items: He is working on something with Glen Morgan [tell us more!]. ‘Millennium’ and ‘The Lone Gunmen’ are not available anywhere because of the cost to license their music. [We knew about MM, this is new for TLG, and nobody asked about ‘Harsh Realm’ unfortunately. The new cut of IWTB was also costly because of new songs to license, so this is a trend.].
Here are the interviews, with many thanks to Adam Silva:
“I always felt that they forced me to shoehorn that Mulder-Scully relationship in there and that it took away from the scares. When we did the series, the relationship is something we always touched on in passing; it was part of the storytelling, but it wasn’t the object of the storytelling. I was always unhappy with the way that I was forced to do that.”
Have you ever felt tempted to collate the mythology episodes into one long story? “Yeah, it is of interest to me. We went to great pains to make all those puzzle pieces fit. It would be a thrill to put those puzzle pieces together.”
Any message to fans upset you’ve robbed them of some Mulder-Scully Romance moments? “Frank Spotnitz told me people are gonna miss that last kiss. But are they? It’s a touching moment without the kiss. For me, it’s one of the most touching moments in the series. Scully, the emotion she’s experiencing there—she breaks down in a way, and it’s actually better for me without the kiss, as symbolic as it is, of their love for one another.”
“They should know this is more keeping in my vision. This is a re-exploration of something…I put my heart and soul into it.”
If you were still writing episodes of The X-Files, is there a topic you would love to cover? “It’s funny, someone asked me about immortality today, and what I think about immortality. I said I love the idea of living forever. I said I’m not one of those people out there trying every wellness trick to try to live forever, although I try to live a healthy life. But I’m curious. Biblically, people lived for hundreds of years, so there are things in front of us which suggest a kind of relative immortality, and I’m fascinated by that idea. Are aliens immortal? If we were able to access alien technology and science, could we become immortal? All those things are of interest to me. If and when I bring my X-Files back to the screen, not Ryan Coogler’s X-Files, but if I ever bring mine, I actually, set up in the last two reboots, that very idea.”
Carter notices a current connection between the film and what’s happening in society: “It’s funny that the story now actually has relevance as people are talking about looksmaxxing or bodymaxing. There are tech bros who want to live forever. Is a head transplant a way to live forever? If you could do it with a monkey, as we are suggesting, you could do it with a human being. It has relevance in science in a way it didn’t in 2008.”
“The first movie, 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future, made money, but the producers weren’t necessarily fans of the show. So they wanted us to hit the relationship between Mulder and Scully really hard. I felt like the relationship took away from the horror of the story.”
“Even after people running 20th Century Fox movies said we should do a director’s cut, I never thought it was going to happen. I just assumed they’d come up with a reason we couldn’t do it. But it was full-speed ahead from the moment we showed them the trailer we cut.”
“What I think was unappreciated when the movie came out was the Frankenstein element, which is only kind of alluded to at the end of the movie when Mulder’s putting a newspaper clipping on the wall. So I added “Vrach Frankenshteyn” to the beginning so that when—if you recall, the search party is following Father Joe out onto the ice and snow and he finds that arm, it suggests a Frankenstein story rather than a kind of a weird and disconnected clue. And it draws the audience into the Frankenstein story.”
“We made the movie for the big screen; I think the production values are big-screen values. Also, what dates this movie is that we shot it with film cameras, not digital video cameras. So it’s old school in that sense, and I think the values are filmic.”
“That relationship of Mulder and Scully is still my idealized relationship for a man and a woman, of mutual respect, of agreeing to disagree [on] faith and science, and of the intersection of those two things. That they can be something that you agree to disagree on and still maintain your relationship. I wish people could agree to disagree more in life because we have more disagreement than we have agreement in our lives and certainly our political lives right now.”
“That’s what we originally intended to do, a monster of the week story, a standalone. The budget was a third of the first X-Files movie budget. We had a limited amount of time to make it. We were making it in a place that was so hard to make a movie in, which was cold and snowy and icy and hard.”
Stand-alone: is that why you also cut mentions of Mulder’s sister and William? “Yes.”
On censorship and 2X13: Irresistible: “There was an episode I did called “Irresistible,” and it was about a man that I originally referred to as a necrophiliac. And when I turned that script in to the people at Standards and Practices, the network sensors, they said, “You can’t do a story about a necrophiliac.” When you’re working in television, the deadlines are fast and furious. And this is the script that I had and it would begin shooting day after tomorrow. And I had nothing to replace it with. And you’re on a conveyor belt, and you’ve got to be feeding the monster, it’s food. And so they basically handed the script back to me and said, “Can’t do this.” So it’s like I had to think about what I was going to do. Do I come up with a new story, try to write a script in two days? Not possible. So, I thought about it, and then I thought, “OK, I think I know what to do.” I referred to the necrophiliac as a death fetishist, and I handed the script back to them. They said, “OK, great. You can do it.” So sometimes, it’s as simple as a tweak, a point of view.”
“There’s a huge hardcore fanbase out there, and bless their hearts, they’ve adopted Mulder and Scully. I think it’s really those two characters are the secret to our success. Their relationship wasn’t just romantic. It’s respectful. It is combative. It is, for me, my perfect idea of a romance, of a relationship, of a friendship, of a mutually respectful relationship. And I think that’s simply the reason that people are still drawn to the show.”
“I was just visiting one of those people the other day, David Nutter, who came and directed some of our very best episodes. I’m working on something right now with Glen Morgan, who he and his partner, James Wong, wrote some of our best episodes and then directed some of them too. I’m still working with these people.”
“I never got to release the movie that we, Frank Spotnitz and I, originally imagined. That was back in 2008. But I got the idea to do a director’s cut only last year.”
“I worked with two different editors, people I respect and I’ve worked with before who weren’t involved with it all originally. I asked them to watch the movie and help me to refine the cut and make it the scary movie that I originally intended to make. It was heroic on their part. The movie was originally edited by an Academy Award winner, and so coming in and basically re-editing his vision took some courage.” “That said, I think the editors alone, just in the way they re-approached the movie, really helped it. I gave them the reins early on, and then when they gave those cuts back to me, that’s when I started to work on it. They added material, they took out material, they restructured material.”
“Scully being a scientist and Mulder being a believer in the paranormal, and that they agree to disagree wonderfully—it’s part of the nature of their relationship. I think it’s their mutual respect for one another. That, for me, is the ideal man-woman relationship. It feels inevitable. It feels destined. I have that relationship with my wife.”
“I really think of science as a search for God, and there are so many big questions that are unanswered, and we are trying to find the answers to those things. And will those answered questions bring us closer to an idea or a how it how it all began? What came before the Big Bang?”
Scully’s Catholic faith is important to her. And I believe that you are a person of faith as well; is that true? “I am a person of challenged faith. I grew up in a religious environment. I have two uncles who are Protestant ministers. Catholicism is of interest to me — I had never been to Mass, and I live near a Catholic church, so I went to Mass the other day, and I found it fascinating.”
“Scully is working at a Catholic hospital, and they’re telling her to let this boy go, and she won’t let the boy go. So she follows her faith in science, and she follows her faith in God to save this young boy’s life. And she goes back to Father Joe. She wants to know about his faith, and how he can have this faith when he has betrayed it. For me, there are wonderful layers in this movie, and I think some of them went unappreciated when it came out in 2008.”
What truth do you still think is out there that we haven’t had the answer to yet? “I’ll go for the big one, which is what was there before the Big Bang? That’s the question of the ages. If and when that is solved, it will take everything that’s wrong with planet Earth right now and turn it possibly upside down and solve so many problems when we realize why we are here, what we are doing, and what we are missing.”
“I wasn’t the biggest science fiction fan as a kid. My brother was the big science fiction fan and he became a scientist. I became a writer, and I think my interest is in telling stories. There’s something I’ll tell you that I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody, but one of the most inspirational movies for me starred Christopher Plummer, and it’s about Jack the Ripper, and it’s called “Murder by Decree”. And in that movie we have some of the same dynamics of The X-Files. And it is really Sherlock and Watson, I think that has gone largely unappreciated.”
What would a Chris Carter X-Files episode look like today? “I think it would be about, and I intend if we come back ever, to explore immortality. I think it’s something that everyone has imagined. There’s some people pursuing it vigorously right now through science. Everyone wants to know what it would be like to live forever, and I think everyone imagines it at some point or another in their life.”
About The Post-Modern Prometheus: “I got to explore it visually in a way we wouldn’t typically explore an X-File because it was in very big close-ups, and the actors are staring essentially right into the camera, just beside the camera, the camera was right in the actors’ faces through the shooting of it. So for me, it was another challenge in directing.
Is the Smoking Man still alive? “Good question. Yeah, he seems immortal, doesn’t he? He survives everything and anything.”
Is Scully immortal? “It’s a good question. If Mulder and Scully ever reunite for season 12, I have something to say about that.”
Would season 12 have been the final season? “I don’t know. It’s funny, I always likened us to Lewis and Clark. We knew where we were going, we just didn’t know how we’re going to get there.”
He has more stories to tell with Mulder and Scully: “For me, it’s not over.”
Rumors persisted that the movie was rushed into production to avoid an upcoming writers’ strike, which Carter denied. He said they didn’t know there was going to be a writers’ strike and were already in shooting when the strike happened. “Because we were already in production, we were given the ability to work and not have to man the picket lines,” said Carter.
He remembered that he and co-writer and producer Frank Spotnitz were in London on the promotional tour for “I Want to Believe” when they got a call from a Fox executive, telling Carter and Spotnitz that Fox wasn’t going to advertise the film. “They were simply going to rely on word of mouth from fans,” Carter said.
[About Millennium and The Lone Gunmen being unavailable on home video or streaming] Carter said that both are filled with “music that needs to be licensed that is very expensive.” “It’s really not any about anything other than the cost,” said Carter.
[David Gauthier was the on-set practical special effects coordinator for the 5 Vancouver seasons and IWTB. The French diver infected by the black oil in ‘Piper Maru’ was named after him!]
On the new cut: “With the the lower rating we had on for the release of the film, he [Carter] wasn’t able to show all the great special effects makeup work that Bill Terezakis came up with.”
The abduction of the second victim: “Chris and I discussed how how he wanted him [the villain] to get into the car to grab her. What he wanted to do was just punch the window, so there’s a shot from inside the car with her face in the car when the villain uses his fists and punches out the window.” “It’s tempered glass, and I had to use tiny explosives to break the glass as his hand approached the glass, so it never really contacts the glass. The glass is broken just as his fist comes to it, and it looks like he’s broken it, but he hasn’t really broken it. That’s movie magic.”
Pushing Mulder’s car off the side of the road: “We wanted to get a shot of David in the car with the with the the pushing of the vehicle with him so we built a a mechanical rig to have the car tilt up while the while the snow plow was pushing it.”
Mulder emerging from the crashed car: “when Mulder escapes from the car that was buried in the snow, I was down there underneath in the car with him and helping him, pushing him out of the window so he could make his way out through the snow.” “Once we got him [David] into position, he had no footholds to push himself through the snow.” “At one point, which you don’t hear, he says, ‘Dave, that’s enough, that’s enough!'”
On IWTB: “The graphic nature of what was taking place in the show highlighted what the interaction of Scully and Mulder was at the time, when they were facing sort of the breakup of their team. I thought when Chris was able to really show the violence and the ugliness of what was taking place by the bad people, the love between Mulder and Scully was highlighted, and to me it made a completeness of to what The X-Files was all about.”
Creating 3X15: Piper Maru: “I took Chris over from the studio across the road to see a manufacturing of the newt suit, which was by Phil Newton, North Vancouver native, and he enjoyed it so much that he put that into a script, one of our lore scripts where the black oil enters the people through a newt suit. And Chris happened to use my name as this newt suit driver at the time.”
