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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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Jun
29
2026

Cons update + RIP Marty McInally

Updates on some recent events

Spacecon San Antonio

June 14 – Panel with David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and Mitch Pileggi.

  • Mitch: during season 1, David said “this thing won’t last 7 episodes”!
  • David would enter chat rooms, nobody believed it was him
  • Mitch watched the show with hs brother, “this is dad!”: he was a defence contractor for the military, bald, glasses, suit, “constipated”
  • Gillian: “because Scully was fearless, I became more fearless because of her”
  • Chris would dictate them new script changes over the phone, Daivd could pick it up very easily, Mitch was slower and he was pissed off at David
  • Gillian’s 10 month old daughter hit her in the eye, she had a scratched cornea, so they had to shoot a scene from one side of her face onl (that was the greenhouse scene with John Neville in Paper Clip)
  • David was multitasking, while he was in the toilet in his trailer he called Chris with questions, Chris said “are you trying to prove to me you are a producer?”
  • David tries to tease Mitch on Avatar, Mitch says the Skinner episodes are not his favourites. Later, when talking about sexy shows, David tells him “remember I wrote you as Skinman”
  • Only David has heard of the IWTB director’s cut, he hasn’t seen it himself
  • Gillian acknowledges the director of photography John Bartley
  • David announces that Marty McInally passed away recently, a focus puller and camera operator in the Vancouver seasons
  • What David remembers is the new things, the first episode David Nutter directed, the first Chris directed, thr esprit de corps they had to pull off something good with so much work. Gillian says that the comedy episodes got them going for such a long time.
  • After years in Vancouver, shooting FTF in Los Angeles felt much bigger
  • Shooting the bee domes: David had to be in his trailer for hours because they were shooting the bees first, it had to be before sundown because then they go to sleep or turn aggressive. He asked Josh [McLaglen, the first assistant director] why can’t the actors go first? The bees got a better agent than him!

Liverpool Comic Con

May 2-3 – Panel with Gillian Anderson, Nick Lea, Annabeth Gish and Brian Thompson. Not much here.

  • Nick Lea’s favourite episodes are the Tunguska/Terma two-parter
  • Brian Thompson listens to podcasts and mentions Donald Hoffman‘s theory of consciousness, a bit out there
  • Annabeth Gish talks about the latest conspiracy theory of the day, about the death or disappearance of scientists; unfortunately it has been debunked and she is just spreading misinformation; it would make a good X-File though.

Denver Fan Expo

May 28-31 – Two panels, one with the full cast (it’s the first time they were all together since a 30th anniversary panel in 2023), and one with just David and Gillian.

Nothing of note. Like, nothing. David remembers being scared of a 1979 B-movie: Parts: The Clonus Horror.

At least some nice photos came out of this!

Marty McInally

As mentioned by David above, Martin (Marty) McInally passed away recently. He was a focus puller and camera operator in the original Vancouver seasons — starting from right after the pilot, and for all episodes of seasons 1, 2, 4 and 5 + on the second film, I Want To Believe. As a single-camera production (as opposed to multiple cameras working simultaneously, like on live TV or soap operas), The X-Files probably had one or two camera operators working at any point in time: Marty must have been among the people most present on set across the entire shooting!

Here he is (right) with director Kim Manners (left, also RIP), in a photo from the “X Marks the Spot” book.

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May
22
2026

Interview: editor Jeff Cahn

Here is a relatively recent (August 2025) interview with editor Jeff Cahn, by the X-Files Museum. An overall great guy and a fan of the show itself, he is full of behind the scenes stories beyond just about his role as assistant editor. He is credited for no less than 148 episodes of The X-Files over all seasons (s1-9) + on Fight the Future. His first credited episode was early season 1’s “Shadows”; essentially he has a credit on all episodes, except the first 2 seasons where rotating editing crews meant that he was on every other episode. Here are my notes.

  • He started working with Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” in 1980! [I cannot recommend it enough!]
  • He was looking for work. Heather MacDougall (main editor of 60 episodes over s1-8 + s10) recruited him on Friday to start work on Monday. That same day he first watched TXF on TV, it was “Squeeze”. On Monday he congratulated Morgan & Wong, it was the first time they got praise and they were surprised.
  • He got a sense of the popularity of the show hearing people at malls and cafes, early on. The crew was surprised and relieved to get an order for the back 9 episodes of season 1. [Initially only 12 episodes were ordered after the pilot.]
  • Mary Astadourian [Carter’s assistant, then Ten Thirteen vice-president] wanted TXF to have a presence on the internet. She urged him and assistant editor Sue Kesler to go online to chat with fans, on Delphi, AOL. He got fans invited to Ten Thirteen parties.
  • For the first 2 years they had 3 teams of main editors and assistants working on 3 episodes at any point in time. Later, the 2 assistant editors were working on all episodes at once. [The editor/assistant couples were Heather & Jeff, Steve Mark & Sue.]
  • This was the first show he worked on that he was a fan of. He had access to the scripts early on, but he didn’t want to read them to spoil the entertainment.
  • “FTF”: he was the last one to get a script. Carter told him it was because he was talking to the fans, he didn’t want story details to come out. The script was printed on red paper, with the owner’s name stamped on each page, and the cover page saying “please don’t share details with others”. [pictured] Codename Blackwood. They were working on the editing for a year. There were storyboards and animatics. The special effects shots were the last thing that came in.
  • There were not that many special effects. They would call in Mat Beck [VFX producer] and give him start and end time codes for each shot. “First Person Shooter” had the most, with 100 visual effects shots.
  • During season 6 he would walk down to the set. He remembers the shooting of “First Person Shooter”, with Maitreya shooting machine guns.
  • He went to the studio where the “FTF” Antarctica scenes were being shot, the ice box, DD & GA were running and were freezing.
  • Mary Astadourian presented him Mitch Pileggi just when he got hired, he went to have drinks with him on Pico Boulevard.
  • When they moved to LA, David and Dean Haglund would hang around the editing room. David was an extrovert, Gillian an introvert. When David was directing the editing room door was open; when it was Gillian it was closed.
  • He was on set when Darren McGavin worked for the last time. [“The Unnatural”] He shot his scenes, went home, had a stroke.
  • He imitated Jon Landau’s voice for ADR for “FTF”; Jon later congratulated him.
  • He came up with the name “The Wongs” for Glen & Jim. Joanne Service [Carter’s assistant] laughed, word of it got to Canada, it stuck.
  • He told Carter that his directing job on “The List” was “just OK”. He expected to be fired. But Carter gave him a promotion instead! He supervised the editing of all 9 seasons for syndication.
  • Carter is “old school”. He doesn’t want overwhelming music or sound effects. He wants to feel the scene, the acting, the editing. Frank Spotnitz has a good vibe, he is always smiling. Carter’s door was always open. Carter drove a white Toyota SUV with a surf board.
  • One Saturday, Carter was rewriting “Alpha”. He wrote in a character named after him, Jeffrey Cahn, but Jeff told Chris that nobody actually mentions the name in the dialogue. By the time the episode was finished, Mulder says the name several times.
  • Writers would forget details, like when did Mulder last use his flashlight. They’d ask him, and he would go online and ask the fans, he got replies instantly.
  • The day after “Home” aired, he was with Michael Stern [“Home” editor], Kim Manners walked in and said this is never going to be shown again.
  • They’d work a lot and late, to 11 pm, 1 am. Carter and Spotnitz would wait for a VHS to show to somebody, the producer cut, the studio cut, etc. One night at like 1 am he tripped on the power cord of the Avid, and they had to start all over again. [Note to Gen Z: VHS recording happens in real time, there is no way to accelerate the process like when copying a digital file.]
  • The writers eventually got themselves in corner. He told Carter that the mythology was getting too convoluted. He was not a fan of the William storyline.
  • They were all proud of working on the show. Even the security guard at the studio lot had printed business cards with his name and TXF logo!

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May
04
2026

Interview: Craig Wrobleski

New interview: “Hey Danny It’s Mulder” sat down with Craig Wrobleski, the director of photography for The X-Files season 11, taking over from Joel Ransom in s10, a Canadian who among other things worked on “Fargo” and followed up TXF with some episodes of “The Twilight Zone”. Cinematography is of course one of the most important parts of what made TXF a success, so all eyes were on the DoPs for the revival seasons. After the frankly disappointing look of s10 (surprising from Joel Ransom, who had also worked on s4-5, but on film, not digital), s11 was a distinct step in the right direction. The interview has plenty of technical aspects, very interesting for the details-oriented fan, but there’s much more than that here, about art and the process of creation. Here are my notes from the interview.

  • In preparation, he read “American Cinematographer” articles written about the show. He watched the episodes shot in Vancouver and those shot in LA: the look changed but it retained the show’s essence. [ASC article example: Joel Ransom]
  • His approach was not to try to recreate how the show looked back then but retain echoes of it. Vancouver looks much more modern than it looked back then, so a recreation was out of the question. Digital means a different look too.
  • He likes using shorter lenses to be close to actors, to be closer to the story, be more immersive, to have the supernatural elements but have them be more relatable.
  • Every script was very descriptive, it told you what the tone should be.
  • There was a lot of exteriors shooting. They used the TXF office set to shoot just for two days out of the entire season.
  • “Lost Art”: the reference for the parking scenes were the parking sequences of “All the President’s Men”, but they didn’t want to recreate it exactly. They used very contemporary cinematography (soft light, shallow depth of field), an old vibe but with a modern aesthetic. The ground surface was coated with a reflective material, an oil of some kind. The lightbulbs were changed. They shot it at a lower temperature at the camera to make it look cooler. They put pink fluorescent lights in the background, in a specific callback to “All the President’s Men”. [That movie was of course a big inspiration on the entire look of TXF, but even more so for these scenes, to a comical degree. Here are some image comparisons, with ATPM first, TXF second.]
  • “Followers” was all about technology, they wanted it to be like a different world. Scully’s house was a modern rich space, Mulder’s farm house was simple. Note: he says “David”, not “Mulder”, about the ad-libbed line of her house being better than his.
  • Digital affords to use more colour, they used colour a lot in s11, unlike in s10. [Rather than colour, what I noticed was a better use of darkness and of contrast, which approximated the look of film better compared to the much more digital look of s10.]
  • He works side by side with the directors. Most shows have alternating directors of photography across episodes, whereas he did all episodes. He didn’t have enough preparation time with the directors. Glen and Chris kept people up to speed. He stopped dreaming during the shoot. He realized he had no spare time for his subconscious to digest what was happening. But creativity works when you let things stew in your mind. [This is interesting — it was a challenging shoot that had its positives but also some negatives.]
  • His main task is capturing performances. When performance, lighting, lens, camera move, everything happens in the shot, when that happens it’s magic captured in a bottle. Chris is especially sensitive to performance. After a good take, he would give little notes, and the next take would be much better, “The One”.
  • Digital can make things too polished, sleek, unreal. He wanted things to look natural, real, have soul, patina, have imperfections. Chris is very clear that TXF is not a sci-fi show. It shouldn’t have the clean polished silver polished look of a sci-fi show, it should feel real and relatable.
  • He asked Chris what brought the show to Vancouver originally: it was the forests. It was “bizarre” when the show moved to LA. In Vancouver, the air is thick, it rains a lot, there are plenty of reflections and sheens, the sky has a low ceiling, gives the feeling of an oppressive environment.
  • All other crew members in s11 had a connection with the show, even if it was just for s10, except for him.
  • The last scene they shot was the last scene of the last episode, and the last shot was that final wide shot with the drone pull back.
  • The Alexa camera has a low contrast curve setting. They shot the season with it. That was a setting unlike the TXF look, it gives a sleek modern look with smooth contrast, but they built contrast in with the lighting and finessed it in the grading process.
  • Many choices were done not based on logic but on feeling, testing things.
  • “Lost Art”: the black and white opening scene in the Ovaltine cafe was not shot with a b&w camera, but with a red monochrome camera, which sees more gradations of b&w. After they started shooting, they realized they couldn’t use a blue screen for the special effects, for the mirror shots.
  • Darin was laughing all the time during the shoot, they could even hear him on the audio recording.
  • The whole season was like a homage to the legacy of TXF.
  • For the two-wheeled scooter, Darin just had the idea during a break, “how about we shoot it?” It was so stupid that they had to do it.
  • “Kitten”: you like to have first shot actually done within the first hour of the shoot day. For the Vietnam sequences with the helicopter, they didn’t start before 5 hours due to the logistics. They were committed to do real shots, not use CGI. That’s crazy for television.
  • He had a lot of fun on set, it was great experience.

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode11

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Apr
24
2026

Interview: Cloke & Hamblin on Rm9

A recent interview with the writers of The X-Files season 11 episode 11X07: Rm9sbG93ZXJz aka “Followers”: Kristen Cloke-Morgan and Shannon Hamblin, from the “Hey That’s Me” podcast. There’s quite a bit of repetition compared to an interview with Cloke from two years ago for The X-Files Diaries. Here are the highlights:

Most importantly:

  • Glen offered them to write the episode. During s11 there was a concern that there were not enough female writers, they decided to turn over some episodes to other writers. [Just in case there was any doubt left: Gillian Anderson’s public comments had a positive, immediate and concrete impact on the making of the show: had she not made these comments, this would have been a purely Glen Morgan episode, and I suppose 11X09: Nothing Lasts Forever would have been a Wong-only episode. Gillian’s comments were made in June 2017, the female writers were announced in August, the original script draft (white production) is dated 17 October and there were script revisions to 5 November.]

Also:

  • Shannon was a fan of TXF. She met Glen Morgan because a science fiction script she wrote got to him. [Looks like this was not produced — her IMDb page is quite empty.] She was a writers assistant during TXF s11.
  • Glen guided them throughout with story notes and corrections.
  • Darin Morgan looked at their story cards; he was the one that suggested the blob fish.
  • Glen wanted 4 things: the Tay tweets, drones, AI, no dialogue.
  • Kristen: there’s too much dialogue, David’s funny and they kept his improvised lines, but they could have been more disciplined. [I agree! It would have been great if there was absolutely no dialogue until the very last scene.]
  • Praise for production designer Mark Freeborn [TXF s10-11, IWTB, MM s1-2-3]. They both loved the sushi restaurant. It was a store of some kind before becoming that set.
  • Kristen did the voice of Wendy (at Scully’s house).
  • They were both on set for the whole shoot for about 3 weeks (except for Kristen for the final scene at the cafe). It was really freezing and raining a lot. It was shot around end of October-beginning of November. It’s rare that writers get invited on set, especially if it’s out of town, but this happened with TXF.
  • Mulder’s house exterior was shot on location; the interior was a rebuilt set at a studio. Scully’s house was a real house.
  • There were about 8 drones on set, they were replicated with CGI.
  • They storyboarded everything. Despite no dialogue, the script was about the typical length.
  • Gillian didn’t know the “Treat Your Children” song, and Shannon did a karaoke version in front of the whole crew during the shoot, the crew joined in the singing.
  • The end scenes were shot at a plastic bottle making factory.
  • “This Man” appearing in every episode: this was a joke between Glen and Kristen’s daughter Greer. [As could be expected — no “alternate universe” theories were mentioned.]
  • Above Scully’s head there’s a drawing made by Kristen’s young son. [Unclear where this is: at the final drone scene, or at the final cafe scene. It’s not the robot Nighthawks.]

And also this unexpected bit of information:

  • Kristen originally auditioned for Scully. [This is the first time I hear of this! Imagine what could have been. Kristen as Scully, Gillian as Lara Means. Sacrilege: it could have worked!]

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