X-Files mythology, TenThirteen Interviews Database, and more

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Aug
29
2025

Interview: Chris Carter on “Triangle”

Recently, the “X-Files Diaries” podcast interviewed Chris Carter on his season 6 directorial riff on Hitchock’s “Rope”, the excellent fan-favorite “Triangle”! Carter was glad to get into the details here, on story choices, on technical details of making the episode itself, and reflecting back on the series that we cherish so many years later. Some insights on the larger structure of the series too — MSR and the mythology! Here is my summary/notes:

  • He got the technical details of one camera reel holding 12 minutes while shooting in Vancouver. 
  • He was interested in World War 2, and wanted to see TXF characters as a Nazi, a double agent, M&S saving the world. 
  • He slept aboard the Queen Mary while shooting. 
  • Bill Roe was the new director of photography. The problem was how to set up the lights when the shot shows everything. 
  • He imagined it as set during night, but night also helped with hiding some cuts.
  • Unheralded crew members for this episode in particular: steadicam operator Dave Luckenbach and focus puller Trevor… [No Trevor or focus puller is credited for the episode, unfortunately!]
  • They just shot the episode and there was no space to edit, miraculously it added up to the exact 45 minutes needed! 
  • David Nutter taught him how to block scenes, “the master”. 
  • Production designer Korey Caplan gave him a paper with the set drawings, he did the choreography of the scene on paper.
  • Moving to LA, Michael Watkins and Bernie Caulfield replaced Bob Goodwin to run the day-to-day business. 
  • Praise for Kaplan. The trashed ballroom was made and unmade in hours. 
  • The “Wizard of Oz” references were added in in order to fit in all the cameos. 
  • The original script had Fowley as the ballroom singer. He doesn’t remember if it was actor availability or budget that cut her. 
  • Mulder’s line for “what’s your name?” “John Brown. Ask me again, and I’ll knock you down. / Puddintame. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.” was from a 70s TV show, he doesn’t remember which! It was an inside joke with childhood friends. [Apparently it’s a quite old children’s rhyme from the US. There was even a 1960s Alley Cats song that used it!]
  • The move to LA was a lot of work. During the Vancouver days he used Air Canada like a Greyhound bus. 
  • He always wanted to shoot in the Queen Mary. 
  • About the fan theory that the whole of season 6 was a dream: “I don’t know that we were so organized.” Things were made up on the fly. [I find that quite telling, on how well-planned everything was — or not! — and this can apply to the mythology as well.]
  • If he wanted to have writing done, he’d have to do it before the phone rang. He’d get up early, get a Starbucks in Venice exit to Santa Monica at 4 am, becoming friends with the homeless, at 5 am he’d be at the office, and write till 9 am, then deal with the other parts of the job. 
  • The FBI elevator shot, the set was redressed while the doors were closed. There was not enough time for many takes, thankfully DD & GA didn’t flub (make mistakes).
  • The velocity of the episode allowed to include hidden cuts. 
  • Mark Snow’s music: a riff on big band, 1940s music. The “Sing, Sing, Sing” song was in the script. 
  • The M&S kiss: did we get because it was not for real? “Definitely!” It was a 1940s movie kiss.
  • He rewatched the show from beginning to roughly end 2 years ago with his wife. The specifics of making it are all a blur. 
  • About the shipper teases: “Hats off to the writers” for telling TXF stories and weaving in those threads. [He’s one of the writers, but the congratulations are for the whole team of writers.]
  • They would often work on the mythology episodes together with Frank Spotnitz; they talked so much that the stories started to tell themselves. “The architecture of the mythology would oftentimes tell us rather than us tell it.” [How I would love to have a recording of one of those brainstorming sessions!]
  • “I love you” at the end: the entire episode is silly, it calls on them to act out of character. “We all know they both love each other”, it’s just not vocalized. It satisfied expectations, and takes some “devilish liberties” with the characters. 
  • Did it really happen? “It’s the ‘Wizard of Oz’!” [Take note, fans, not everything really needs to be unambiguous!]

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Aug
27
2025

Interview: Anne Simon

The “Hey Danny it’s Mulder” podcast interviewed Anne Simon, who was Chris Carter’s science advisor for much of the duration of the show and contributed with many realistic elements of the show’s mythology specifically.

What was discussed:

1X23: “The Erlenmeyer Flask“: plenty of contributions from her! The name of the episode itself, the solution contained in the flask that looks like “weak coffee” [“monkey pee” according to Scully], using an image of pollen for the alien bacteria, the two nucleotides as undeniable proof of alien DNA, the use of a scanning electron microscope, Carter naming the scientist “Anne Carpenter” after her…

4X01: “Herrenvolk“: using a real DNA sequence of cowpox virus just in case somebody would analyse it (which someone did of course!) to avoid having a random sequence like in Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”.

5X02: “Redux“: the “blazing hot probe” story for the Southern blot test, which is normally done in two days but the script needed it to be done in four hours.

9X18: “Sunshine Days”: she and Margaret Fearon (TXF fan she met exchanging letters and became close friends with [a character in IWTB is named after her]) visited the set; they corrected several things in the set to make it more realistic (X-rays, position of the autopsied body, lab equipment…)

10X6: “My Struggle II“: all the details of CRISPR, Spartan virus (Margaret came up with the name), inserting the virus together with the smallpox vaccine, everything that got her and Margaret a writing credit for the episode. For the trigger for the loss of the immune system, she had many ideas around air pollution and climate change; but Carter wanted to use chemtrails specifically [it’s not very clear what the trigger was in the final episode].

[As noted in my My Struggle II analysis, this is all great science but it poses an issue of logic. It’s interesting that Carter asked them to come up with a way to have the virus and gene mutation inserted in all humans *specifically decades ago* and not recently: so the CSM’s Spartan virus plan was indeed set up a long time ago and that’s not a mistake or an overlooked detail. The CSM’s plan was in place decades ago, all the while the preparations for colonization and the hybridization experiments were taking place. This is all very difficult to reconcile: if the Spartan plan is in place and can destroy humanity, what’s the point of all the experiments related to colonization that we were presented for nine seasons?]

On scientists’ representation on-screen and scientists’ desire for a more realistic portrayal, on the Scully effect and the many times she became aware of it during her career.

But most importantly, Simon discusses the dire state of science funding in the new Trump administration, and how the United States is sabotaging itself by turning its back on science, and how a new generation of students is seeing its funding for research being taken away and its interest in science waning. [Progress based on science greatly helped make the American Empire during the 20th century. Now the situation is reversed and the US’s star, as a global beacon for people around the world and very practically as a leader of global affairs, is waning.]

More about Anne Simon on Eat The Corn:

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode7

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5IVTvR1RJSCDxdmxql7CFB

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Aug
23
2025

Interview: Ken Harwyliw

Another great interview by the X-Files Fan Retrospective documentary team, this time with Ken Hawryliw, props master for seasons 1-5. This is relatively fresh off another detailed interview with him and he still has many stories to tell.

Notes below [with some comments]:

  • He hit it off very well with Chris Carter, he knew all about the sources for the mythology/conspiracy and the UFO lore. Both had seen a TV rerun of the “Mysterious Island” (1961) with Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects which inspired them to get involved in the movie business. [I grew up with that movie too!]
  • Early on, Paul Rabwin was busy and Ken would be the one directing the insert shots; then he was stopped because he was not part of the directors guild.
  • It was shot on 35mm film. The mandate to all teams was to do work that would be worthy of a feature film. The props were made so they would hold up to high definition.
  • By season 5 the props team grew to 15 people, they had 1st unit, 2nd unit, an inserts unit, a photos unit. By then he’d rarely have the time to show up on set himself, he was too busy with prep [preparation of an episode before shooting takes place]. Shooting the photos [which were then used as props, like crime scene photos or evidence or portraits] was just as important as the main work, because it was guaranteed that these photos would get an extreme closeup shot and would drive the story.
  • The biggest compliment for him was that sometime in season 3 Chris stopped coming to the “show and tell” meetings, where the props were shown to the director and producers, he was trusting him.
  • Shooting “Blood”: they spent 2 days shooting crime scene photos. The director David Nutter called Ken to show him the dailies: they had used all the many photographs, in slow panning shots, to show him that his work was appreciated. [That must have been the shots during Mulder’s profiling early in the episode.]
  • Don McGill was the on-set props guy.
  • Shooting “Fearful Symmetry”: Ken had worked with the person in the gorilla suit before in “The Clan of the Cave Bear” (1986) and that person had previous similar experience [Ken is not credited in that movie, and the person that is credited in the episode, Jody St Michael, either…I suppose a lot of people with small roles go uncredited !]. That person asked for a toy prop for the gorilla to play with. A props guy was sent off to buy it; the director of photography John Bartley purposefully delayed the lighting setup just so much so that the props guy would have time. They made it just in the nick of time. There was a lot of solidarity between the teams, everyone was doing their best.
  • Shooting “Ice”: the episode was airing that Friday and on Wednesday he was still shooting two insert shots. It was too late to ship the reels to LA, they sent them via optic fiber. They made it just in time to be inserted into the already edited episode.
  • “It was ordered chaos.”
  • Importance of doing research pre-internet. Amazing help of researcher Jeanne Lister who eventually joined them [she is also credited only in two episodes, but obviously she worked on much more]. The story of an army Colonel in DC that got them the photos they wanted, for what the security police at Andrews Air Force Base looked like [see other interview for details; still unclear which episode this refers to, not “Deep Throat” as Lister was not preseant that early, possibly “The Red and the Black”]. They had a great relationship with the military. The relationship with the FBI had ups and downs, there was a before and an after Waco; some years they had props with “US Bureau of Investigations”, others “FBI”.
  • Ken designed the props too, not the art department. He worked with production designer Richard Hudolin as an art director and learned a lot. [They share some credits in the 1980s like “Stakeout”; Hudolin was also the production designer in “Stargate SG-1” and they worked together again in RDM’s “Battlestar Galactica”.]
  • On designing the faceless alien fire wand: Chris told him to “make it look like it came out of the same factory as the stiletto”. [to keep a consistent look for alien tech, or is there more to this?]
  • There was no 3D printing, it was all done on a CNC mill and a lathe, they worked a lot with metal.
  • Preference of doing practical effects over CGI. Importance of prep. Attention to detail.
  • The philosophy with Carter was that, if you made the show look as realistic and true as possible, then the viewer would be ready to follow you on the supernatural ride.
  • He learned everything about props and props design thanks to watching as a kid all the 1960s Irwin Allen shows on TV: “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Lost in Space”, “The Time Tunnel”, and the 1966 “Batman”. He has put various Easter eggs in his shows to those inspirations.

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Aug
15
2025

Interview: Angelo Vacco, PA and photographer

The “Hey Danny, it’s Mulder” podcast did a nice little interview with Angelo Vacco, who was a production assistant for nearly the entire run of The X-Files, plus he had small roles on the series: a gas station attendant in “F. Emasculata”, a victim in “Milagro”, plus a doorman in “Talitha Cumi” and a bartender in “Improbable”. He also holds an Instagram account with his own photos from the making of the show: “My Life on X-Files“!

Here are the cliff notes:

  • Fresh from New York to Los Angeles, he wanted to be an actor. He didn’t know TXF at all. He approached production between seasons 1 and 2, he was 22. On his very first day, Joan (Chris Carter’s assistant) told him he would be a “temporary production assistant”, in the LA offices.
  • Typical tasks would be to get coffees, make photocopies, distribute scripts, get dailies from Vancouver to be screened to the LA producers and executives. Wash Carter’s car.
  • Eventually the producers had to make a decision on him. Howard Gordon said “we have to keep Angelo”. He ended up staying for 8 seasons!
  • In the early years, the LA crew were few people. The editing was done in a movable trailer on the Fox lot. Building 49, Carter’s office, was an old 1920s bungalow. There was no space on the Fox lots.
  • Working on TXF was a dream job. They were a work family, doing 16-hour days. 
  • He did photography, developed his own photos, and took a lot of photos while at work. Many of these can be seen on his Instagram, “My Life on X-Files”.
  • He met Carter when he was returning from shooting “Duane Barry” (the first episode he directed). The episode was initially named “Duane Garry” but they had to change it when they found there was a real FBI Agent named that. He asked if he could be an actor.
  • The “F. Emasculata” script reads about the gas station attendant, “he looks so much like Angelo Vacco we could swear it’s him”! So he didn’t audition for that role, but he did for the others.
  • The Vancouver pool of actors was small, so there was the “X-Files rep”, a répertoire of actors with repeat roles.
  • He auditioned for “D.P.O.”.
  • “Milagro” was shot in Griffiths Park. He did ADR on his own scream.
  • He has a lot of stories to tell about shooting the Bree Sharp music video for “David Duchovny, why won’t you love me?” song, where he is also credited. The video’s two directors were involved in Millennium (Will Shivers, uncredited?) and TXF (Charles/Chuck Forsch, assistant to Chris Carter and to the producers). It started as an end-of-season video made by the crew. Then Bree sent the song, it got to David. They did the music video on the Fox lot and hence got people like Brad Pitt (shooting Fight Club), Sarah Michelle Gellar (shooting Buffy), he drove around with the golf cart and just asked.
  • (See also David Duchovny’s recent interview with Bree Sharp on his podcast!)
  • Here’s the video, remastered by Lyle:
  • Angelo also works in ADR (automated dialogue recording) doing things like background conversations, voices of police officers on the radio, TV presenters. He has been doing work with the same ADR group for 25 years and he did ADR work for the TXF revival seasons
  • “Paul Rabwin knows everything” about making The X-Files. [somebody interview that man!]

Here’s a selection of Angelo’s photos, there’s much more on his account!

Shooting “Talitha Cumi”
Shooting “Milagro”
Mark Snow’s studio
With Mitch Pileggi, Thierry Couturier (sound editor), Nick Lea
Season 3 writers (Darin Morgan, Jeff Vlaming, Kim Newton, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban)

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode4

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Jul
04
2025

Vince Gilligan on his X-Files episodes

Here are the highlights from some recent interviews with Vince Gilligan, who really started his career with The X-Files in season 2.

Starting on TXF:

His agent Rhonda Gomez: “she said, “Yeah, I haven’t seen it [TXF] yet. But, actually, I’m related to the fellow who created [the show], related by marriage to his wife. Would you like to meet him the next time you’re out to California on movie business?” ” [Dori Pierson really, really helped Carter’s career!]

“They had a 26 [episode] order for the second season of X-Files, and they didn’t have enough episodes. They were taking any warm body who walked through the door.”

On Soft Light, his first episode:

Inspiration: “The night before [meeting Carter], I was sitting on the sofa in my hotel on Beverly [Boulevard]. I was watching TV, and the lights were off. I was looking at my shadow on the wall, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be creepy if it started moving independently of me?” […] in the original version, this [shadow] was alive and it moved separately.”

Rewrites of the initial script: “If it had been produced as it was written, it would have cost somewhere — just for that one hour of TV — between $40 and $50 million.” “It was so big and over the top and insane and unproducible. And [the producers] took it — they said, “Thank you very much” — and then they rewrote, probably, 70%, 80% of it. They were very nice about sending me the script back after it had gone through the rewrite process.”

On Small Potatoes:

“I got to be on the set the whole time up in Vancouver, and I had the best time.”

“he [DD] really liked Darin, and he got to play Darin, essentially.”

On Bad Blood:

“I got to be on the set the whole time and I enjoyed it thoroughly.”

“Some of my favorite dialogue in “Bad Blood” is stuff I didn’t write. My favorite scene in “Bad Blood” is when David Duchovny and Luke Wilson were sitting in the cop car out by the cemetery and they just start riffing. Luke Wilson’s character is saying, “So the guy you’re looking for is kind of like Rain Man?” And David says, “No, not really.” And Luke goes, “Well that ol’ boy could count all those toothpicks.” All that dialogue in that sequence there, it was just David and Luke who came up with that. It makes me laugh so hard. I didn’t write a word of that.”

On X-Cops:

“I think it was one of their [DD/GA] favorites because that was the shortest shooting time of any episode of The X-Files. The X-Files typically took between 13 and 21 days to shoot an episode. But “X-Cops” was shot on video, and it was done in these long oners. That episode was shot in five or six days.”

“It was a big deal, for instance, as I recall, to shoot it on video, instead of shooting it on the normal 35mm Kodak stock that we shot the show on.”

“we shot with Bertram van Munster, who was a producer on Cops at the time […] He was one of their lead camera operators; he’d be the guy riding around with this big camcorder on his shoulder, riding around the back of these squad cars on Cops. He photographed a fair bit of the episode himself”

On writing and the humor in TXF:

“Darin Morgan showed everybody that The X-Files could, indeed, be funny, but I tend to think that Glen Morgan and Jim Wong don’t get enough credit. Really, the first little whiffs of humor, as I recall, were in episodes written by them. They had some killer lines between Mulder and Scully in certain early episodes.”

“I never really got to know either David or Gillian as well as I perhaps might’ve hoped to because they were busy on the set 14, 15 hours a day, and I was busy in my little cubbyhole, writing and rewriting episodes.”

“There was a lot of midnight oil being burned, trying to figure out how to get exposition across [in these episodes] in a way that didn’t seem expositional. One of the many things I learned working on The X-Files for seven years was, how little the audience needs explained to them. It took me years to learn that as a writer, but it was an invaluable lesson. And you don’t learn it just from writing many episodes of TV, you learn it from spending hours and hours in the editing room. You come to realize that there are whole reams of dialogue that you can cut out in an editing room — because the actors are so good.”

Links to the articles:
https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/online-originals/x-files-vince-gilligan-soft-light-interview
https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/online-originals/x-files-vince-gilligan-x-cops-episode
https://www.cracked.com/article_46032_vince-gilligan-on-finding-the-funny-in-the-x-files.html

In his speech accepting a top award at the Writers Guild, Vince Gilligan — creator of iconic shows with anti-heroes like “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” — argued that the ‘bad guys as protagonists’ trend had gone too far, and he urged writers to come up with more shows where the leads are actually good guys. (Hear, hear!) Looking forward to his next show, then.

Introducing that award was Gillian Anderson, with a hilarious intervention (“we did some 7065 episodes in the 9000 years that we were shooting”)!…

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Jun
19
2025

Interview with “Fight the Future” storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman

It’s The X-Files: “Fight The Future” Day! The movie premiered…27 years ago already. On that topic, here is an excellent and comprehensive interview with one person that was important in the making of that movie but that we had never heard of previously: storyboard artist Gabriel Hardman, who has had a very full career since! Courtesy of the “Hey Danny It’s Mulder” podcast.

Some notes and highlights:

He did pencilling for comic books. He started doing storyboards when the comic book industry contracted in the mid-1990s. As a huge “Twin Peaks” fan, he went to a book signing with Mark Frost; in the line, he met a guy, they almost collaborated in doing a CD-ROM of what would have been season 3 of “Twin Peaks” [wow TP fans are just as dedicated as TXF fans!]; he introduced him to who became his agent, and got him his X-Files job. He was just 22 years old, it was the first big movie he worked on. The recommendations he got from working on FTF were what got his career going.

In a bungalow in the Fox lot that became Carter & Bowman’s office for the whole shoot, he came in to read the script for what was then called “Blackwood“, it was printed on red paper. He was essentially the first person recruited, and was present for all the shooting until the very last day (not just for pre-production).
Robb Bihun was the other storyboard artist.

He draws visual storyboards, including camera cues, lenses, movement of camera, the frame… He submits an idea to the director, who gives notes, he refines it, does another pass… The storyboards were updated as various design decisions were being made.
Nobody could come up with a good design for the big ship at the end; production designer Chris Nowak told him to give it a shot, this is the drawing that is in the making of book.
He learned a lot from director Rob Bowman, practical things about filmmaking, visual storytelling tricks and ideas, how to design shots interestingly and economically.

He had a good collaboration with director of photography Ward Russell — but it can be that there can be tension between storyboard artist and DP. The DP was who said it was OK for him to direct the second unit. [This was great that he was given this opportunity!]
What he shot was with a helicopter, driving the car in the desert, coming to a stop on a crossroads — the shots without the actors.

He got along well with producer Dan Sackheim — stories about Dan having trouble unboarding a helicopter, and about Dan being stung by a bee!
He flew to the glacier for location scouting. Going on location makes it specific, allows to adjust the storyboards.
Shooting the hives scenes: they needed a wide lens to show the big space, but it was impossible to capture the small bees at the same time. The bees ended up being computer generated, the shooting was complicated by the bees that ended up not being needed.

Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was a big visual influence: the shot of Mulder & Scully in the desert, pull out to reveal a road barricade; or the shot with kids going over a berm, revealing the secret base.
There was going to be a car chase à la “French Connection” (Mulder after the ambulance that got Scully, instead of being shot in the head). The script specifically said “the car chase of Rob Bowman’s dreams”. But it got cut as there was too much in the movie already.

He still has the boards. They were pen & ink and grey marker on paper. The criterion was whether it could be photocopied and faxed well. For references for likenesses he only had some magazines and production photos — no internet, no computers.

About Carter:
Carter stayed in a producer role, he didn’t get in Bowman’s way.
Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” had just come out, and Carter was not thrilled, he thought Sagan got bitter at the end — it turns out 30 years later Sagan was correct. [That magnificent 1995 book about tending the fragile flame of scientific thought against lack of education and superstition came out shortly before Sagan died in 1996.]

https://www.heydannyitsmulder.com/episodes/episode6

Gabriel’s storyboards, in sequence, were included in the Blu Ray for the movie, the whole thing lasts for an hour and it’s like a mini-movie previsualisation itself! The intermediate level between script and what became the image that was captured by the camera.

Can also be found on YouTube:

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