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Posts Tagged ‘chris carter’

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Jan
25
2026

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

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

“I Want To Believe” Director’s Cut

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

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

The 2016-2018 reboot

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

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

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

The “My Struggle IV” clue and season 12?

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

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

A third movie?

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

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

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

Misc and non-TXF projects

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

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Dec
11
2025

Chris Carter and Glen Morgan on Strange Arrivals

Here are two older interviews (November-December 2020) that came to my attention recently: Chris Carter and Glen Morgan on Strange Arrivals, a podcast researching the UFO phenomenon. As always, some interesting thoughts here, and some surprising musings from these creators looking back at what made The X-Files the success it became.

Chris Carter

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-strange-arrivals-59865365/episode/interview-2-chris-carter-85918210/

  • Big influence: “The Silence of the Lambs”.
  • He turned the tables on gender on who would be stereotypically believer and skeptic.
  • He had been reading the UFO literature before writing the Pilot; his 3 “go to guys” were John Mack, David Jacobs, Budd Hopkins. [The 3 collaborated in the Roper survey on alien abductions that Carter used to pitch The X-Files to Fox.] What interested him was that these people doubted themselves, that they were smart people conducting a serious investigation.
  • If you watch the Pilot + “Deep Throat” + “The Erlenmeyer Flask” “you will get a foundational view of The X-Files mythology”.
  • TXF was about “imagining the world before disclosure”. [“Disclosure” is a UFO literature term for the secret of alien contact being revealed to the public.]
  • When they started, he didn’t want to show an alien for 5 years; but that lasted just a year, they showed an alien in 2X01: “Little Green Men”.
  • Mulder and Scully’s investigations: they present theories to each other, are competitive, “it became a 9-year flirtation, a seduction of sorts”.
  • The disclaimer in the Pilot about being based on actual documented cases was asked to be added by the network. It was a hard sales pitch to get the network to understand that it’s better to be left wondering at the end of the episode instead of wrapping everything in a neat bow.
  • Mythology: he was trying to create a sense of awe, the idea that science doesn’t have all the answers, that religion either, that there are things beyond the pale.
  • He has a Scully bias, a prove it to me philosophy. He is skeptical, but he has met so many people who believe in the story that they tell. “Who am I to question them?” He sat on a regression hypnosis session during the time the show was being produced, it was powerful and vivid.
  • He got very lucky in getting the writers he did. The characters developed over time, everyone added in nuances. But the fundamentals were there from the beginning.
  • The appeal of the alien stories is the fear of the other, the unknown of whether they have a good or evil intent.
  • On wanting to declassify UFO documents: Clinton, Obama, now Rubio, they are a long line of people who want to know.
  • While TXF was about a file cabinet full of the unknown, it was really about Mulder and Scully and their relationship. [Whatever you want to say about Carter styming the relationship, he is clear-sighted about what made the show what it became and what it’s remembered for.]
  • He singles out production designers Michael Nemirsky (Pilot) and Graeme Murray (seasons 1-5, with things like the examination table in “Duane Barry”), they made better things than what the writers imagined.
  • A Fox executive literally wanted Gillian Anderson fired because she was pregnant.
  • He read all of Sherlock Holmes as a kid, it was a big influence on Mulder and Scully’s dynamic.

Glen Morgan

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-strange-arrivals-59865365/episode/interview-5-glen-morgan-86644852/

  • He grew up in Syracuse, NY: there were cult groups, mediums, seances in the area, his family were all believers in paranormal. He only started considering the skeptic side due to his work on TXF, writing for Scully.
  • He read “Chariots of the Gods” when he was young, he was into NASA space exploration, loved “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The UFO Incident” [1975 TV movie, a representation of the famous 1961 Hills alien abduction incident, with James Earl Jones], he grew up with all the monster movies and paranoid movies (“All the President’s Men”, “The Parallax View”, “Klute”), “The Twilight Zone”.
  • The network didn’t want a UFO story every week, they wanted Mulder and Scully to help people. The writers brainstormed and came up with the monster-of-the-week format.
  • They all came up together with the idea of Scully’s disappearance to cover for Gillian’s pregnancy. They never set out to be serialized, it was brought up by necessity. Write, then just think about what happens next, figure it out, bring ideas. There was no writers’ room.
  • The XF mythology made new stuff up compared to the established UFO lore in order to have something fresh for TV, which eventually became difficult to manage.
  • He went to a UFO community show in the Los Angeles airport with writer Marilyn Osborne. There were the exact prototypes for the Lone Gunmen there, down to the “Byers” taking out the magnetic strip out of a dollar bill. He discovered there was a whole industry around UFOs!
  • Carter was the one with the deeper UFO research.
  • He read the Science News publication every week for ideas. There was a story about Greenland ice core deep drilling. You take two truth, make stuff up, you make an X-File (like Deep Throat’s quote from “E.B.E.”). He sees that approach in modern myth: people believe in made-up stuff.
  • The best thing Carter did was “I want to believe”: everybody wants to believe, even the hardcore scientists.
  • “If TXF played any part in the proliferation of this conspiracy stuff, I’d have big regrets.” It’s now ridiculously out of hand, it’s no longer for entertainment.
  • When they started the show, Scully would never see an alien ever. But by episode 12 she was seeing the ghost of her father. Mulder is the interesting character; as the show goes on, Scully bends towards Mulder, otherwise the show would have become “Scooby Doo”. Scully experienced things, that’s the benefit and necessity of a TV series, to keep conflict and momentum.
  • Mythology over time: in the 1930s, the scientist was bad (“Frankenstein”, “The Invisible Man”). In the 1950s, the scientist is creating the trouble and solving it, there was trust in government. 1960s, “The Andromeda Strain”, Vietnam, 1970s, “Close Encounters”, “Star Wars”. Where are we now? How to create a myth about the pandemic? [interview recorded November 2020] Storytelling-wise, you would never come up with a head of a country that is obstructing it. What is it about science and conspiracy, what is it telling us? Where were we then? What does that type of story tell us about where we are now? [All of these are excellent questions and a great way to think of the show in its historical context. These are things any reboot would have to consider and find a reason for its existence — good luck!]

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Oct
25
2025

Chris Carter interview on surfing and more

A long interview of Chris Carter almost went by unnoticed, and it’s because he talks quite little about : this is “L8night with Choccy”, the main focus is surfing! Still, some notes on everything else (that was not mentioned elsewhere):

His father was a construction worker, his mother a housewife, both hard workers, he got that from them. His brother Craig, 5 years younger, was always smarter than him, ended up at MIT. His first job was being a paperboy, then at ice cream parlor. He read a lot as a kid, Readers’ Digest, Life Magazine.

He started surfing age 12. First plane ride at 18, to Hawaii. Lots of talk about surfing spots, surfers, California surfing culture of the 1970s (including surfer movies, like “Pacific Vibrations”, “Endless Summer”, “Five Summer Stories” with its soundtrack by Honk)… Parties, girls, surfing. [Drugs? Look at that poster!]

He started working on Surfing magazine as an intern at 22, writing the captions for the photos, ended up staying for 5 years, left as a senior editor. He was very proud of his first full article, a profile of surfer Jack Lindholm, in Hawaii.

He had been registered on the draft list to go to Vietnam, he was about to get the lottery ticket to go, but the war ended.

He’s left handed.

He wrote a chapter for the book “Surfer Stories: 12 Untold Stories by 12 Writers about 12 of the World’s Greatest Surfers“, a profile of Shaun Tomson.

He met his wife Dori because her cousin and writing partner was a surfer, he also wrote for Surfing magazine.

After TXF wrapped, he learned how to fly with the series’ flight coordinator. [That must be Steve Stafford.]

He bought a house with his wife when he was 30, they have sold it since and now it has burned down. He was living paycheck to paycheck paying his mortgage until he finally got a good pay with Fox.

First thing he did at Fox was a TV pilot for ABC inspired by the movie “The Verdict” (with Paul Newman), a lawyer that wins against all odds; they liked it but it was not picked up. The second thing was TXF.

In the Vancouver years he sent the writers to follow closely their episodes’ production: “I wanted them to be there to protect the work”, “protect the script”.

They started production of the pilot in LA then they realized they needed a forest. He had gone to Vancouver with his wife to produce a Disney Sunday movie in 1986 and saw the forests there.

He singles out Bob Goodwin for the success of the show, convincing the studio to give them more budget.

Rick Carter’s advice after making “Amazing Stories” was that you will have no money and no time, hide spooky things in the dark.

For the movies, they got more than a season’s worth of budget (25 episodes). [This is probably for FTF, whose budget was about $66M. Budgets per episode grew from about $1M to $4M in the first 5 seasons, so this sounds about right.]

Due to work on TXF, he essentially hadn’t surfed for 9 years. He surfed on the very day he won a Golden Globe. [That was in 1995, 1997 and 1998.] Making TXF between LA and Vancouver, he spent his life on air with Air Canada or on the road.

“Twin Peaks is a show I could watch every night of the week. David Lynch was an original, a titan.”

“Chris Carter is back in business!” He is doing the IWTB director’s cut. “We are doing a spin off of TXF.” [Note the “we”, meaning he is involved to some capacity in the upcoming project led by Ryan Coogler.] He is also writing a movie, the script will be done by end of June. [No indication as to when the interview was recorded precisely.] “It’s going to get made because it’s timely.” “I know where I want to make it, I know who I want to make it with.” [I hope this happens, I’d love to see more by Carter. Although “Fencewalker” is probably sitting on a shelf somewhere.]

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Oct
13
2025

Chris Carter on Tetragrammaton

It’s Ten Thirteen! Happy 69th birthday, Chris Carter! For the opportunity, I am posting the analysis of a long-form interview with him that came out in July: Chris Carter on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton. Lots of talk on , how the TV production business works from the inside, discussions of the intersection of mysticism and science, and also unexpected insights on aspects of the mythology that Carter keeps thinking about. The whole thing bathing in Paul Mauriat’s “Love Is Blue” (heard on Millennium)!

I’ll focus on The X-Files’ future first.

Throughout the interview, Carter talks of a big idea he had for the mythology, that he hinted at especially in the last episode. He comes back to that again and again throughout the interview, which is impressively and obsessively insisting on one specific thing in an otherwise wide-ranging interview: he really sounds as if he wants somebody to figure this out, and he wants to continue developing the mythology further in the future. Here are all the mentions of this big idea throughout the interview, [along with my comments]:

  • About putting a clue in the last episode for what would come next: “I just thought TXF would go on forever.” “The story goes on in my mind.” [It’s never over! I guess the ideas keep coming as long as the creative mind continues to think about them.]
  • About Coogler’s series reboot project: “He’s got something to deal with he’s not aware of yet”. [It feels quite…self-important to pretend that your ideas have to be inserted in another person’s project, but this is really what Carter is saying here: Coogler might have his ideas, but Carter is imposing his own. I don’t know how receptive Coogler would be to that: he already has to balance many things, let alone loose threads from over thirty years of legacy mythology. Cynically, perhaps this is a way for Carter to re-insert himself in TXF’s future after being sidelined, or after distancing himself from show business for a few years.]
  • The 4 My Struggle episodes “continue to be largely misunderstood”. In them, “I developed possibly what is the biggest idea that TXF ever posited”. [Big words!]
  • “Scully’s character will come to know shortly something that will not only change the course of her life, career, biology, but the course of all of our lives, and for generations to come. It’s a big idea that I built in. I laid it out sparingly, cryptically, vaguely. At the very end I laid in a clue that to this day, 4 years later, no one has figured out. I’m really looking forward to the revelation.” [More like 7 years since season 11 already, Chris! It sounds as if this is an idea that would break completely new ground, disconnected from earlier mythology, with a before and after. And it is connected to Scully’s biology and the alien DNA that she carries.]
  • His definition of the Syndicate: it was “in league with the aliens, with the colonists, and what the aliens have plans for”, related to this big idea he has. [He doesn’t talk of the aliens’ plans as something of the past or something that was a smokescreen for a human conspiracy, and he still uses “colonists” as a descriptive for the aliens: so whatever the revival seasons did, it was not a complete erasure of the colonization mythology of the first 9 years. Unless of course he compartmentalizes in his mind between what was true at one point in the series and what is not any more, but that sounds like a stretch.]
  • That big idea, “part of that…”: he goes on about an ongoing discussion with his physicist brother about existence, about whether we are creating or discovering math. “We are discoverers” and math is a way to describe the universe, or the universe itself. A higher power, God, mother nature, an intelligence created math. Same way that Rachmaninov was discovering his music. We are the filter through which we discover the universe. So back to his idea, “I want to take it a large step further: there’s this idea of the music of the spheres, the planets are in alignment and it’s a musical chord of sorts, we are seeing a shape of our solar system that may predict the shapes of everything else in our universe.” “I wonder if every potentiality, every possibility, is out there, and we are living our lives based on our finding the best potential outcomes.” “The universe has some kind of beauty to it like that. That’s what the aliens know.” “They know things that we don’t know.” [This harmony of the spheres philosophy goes all the way back to pythagoreanism and the Renaissance and beyond. Here it is mixed with platonism‘s ideas about the nature of reality. Carter mixes mysticism with science, as a creative mind is wont to do. He posits that the future is just another point in the timeline that can be read if one learns how to do that, and even influenced if one has the proper tools. As superior mysterious beings, aliens have knowledge that is inaccessible to us and operate in mysterious ways.]
  • Science advisor Anne Simon was the daughter of one of Dori’s long-time friends, she gave Carter the science in The Erlenmeyer Flask, which figures in this big idea of his. [So it has something to do with alien DNA, the extra nucleotides, experiments with an alien virus inside a bacteria.]

[So what is this big idea and what is this clue? I have offered ideas every time Carter has hinted at this before. It could be William having life-giving capabilities and having a role in Scully’s new miraculous pregnancy. It could be the final shot of William smiling at the fact that he and Scully and Mulder can go on living without the weight of the fate of the world on their shoulders. Here Carter is more specific (but also vague, as is typical!). The revival seasons’ mythology prominently features the idea that alien DNA has been inserted in the human genome, and that this is creating mutations that can be used for nefarious purposes (by the CSM) or for good (Scully’s vaccine against the Spartan virus, but also Sveta’s ability to read minds, or even the super-human abilities shown by the children of Founder’s Mutation and by William/Jackson. Humanity is becoming a hybrid, to the point that Scully has nightmares that her child might become alien (Founder’s Mutation dream) or even herself (My Struggle 2 teaser). Taking this further, we could have more and more humans with additional abilities thanks to alien DNA — an X-Men-like situation laid out in the novel Perihelion. Another more subtle situation would be humans gaining insights into the nature of reality. William emerges from the water (reminiscent of a baptism or a rebirth) with his bullet wound standing as a third eye that has been awakened, seeing possibilities. What were Scully’s visions (the entirety of My Struggle 2) but a vision of a possible future by William? With those visions, William gave Scully the tools to prevent a global pandemic. What was My Struggle 4 but William’s manipulation of events in order to prevent his own visions of the future where he himself was being used by the CSM and of the CSM executing Mulder? Throughout the revival’s mythology, William has been exploring the universe and adjusting it so as to obtain a desired future; perhaps we are seeing just the final iteration of several attempts. William was the end product of a long line of experiments that can be traced back to the origins of the Syndicate, an attempt for humans to gain access to mysterious forbidden knowledge. Perhaps the aliens themselves, the ultimate mystics, are even behind the entire attempt to prod humans to experiment, in a long game of evolutionary uplifting. The next step could be Scully, and others, gaining such a reality-adjusting capability, or part of William’s capability. A capability previously reserved only to the aliens, which would be several steps ahead of us, perceiving reality, refining it, planning for their desired outcome. What the aliens’ plans with us could be is the ultimate mystery.]

The whole of the interview is rich with detail and information about who Carter is as a creative person, how he built his career, what his inspirations, how he works as an artist. Definitely worth a listen. Here are my notes:

Early years:

  • How he met his wife Dori, via a surfer friend Mark, and how they got to be together 43 years ago
  • Dori encouraged him to become a screenwriter. Jeff Katzenberg read his second script, got hired. That script was “Bad O”, a Ghostbusters-like comedy. His first script got him in the door. He got a 3-movie deal. He said yes to everything, to get experience. He did TV work, Disney Sunday movies, did a movie with Dori, filmed a pilot with NBC. He realized he couldn’t only write to have control over his work, but be a producer. He could have worked on Michael Mann shows, but the family comedy Rags to Riches show was a opportunity on how to be a producer, he got to work with all departments. Then he got hired by Peter Roth to write pilots for Fox.

Inspirations and the TXF pilot:

  • He pitched TXF to Bob Greenblatt (who wrote a chapter about that in his memoir [The Rockford Files, published in 2023]). He included numbers in his pitch on how many believe in the alien abduction phenomenon, from a study that he got from a psychologist friend. He wrote a detailed 18 page outline. A lot of scenes took place in forests. Vancouver was suggested. He had been in Vancouver in 1984 with Dori for a film of hers, he had seen the forests. They were late shooting the pilot, they got the last people to hire. The only note from the studio was that there was not enough sexual tension (in the mosquito bites scene). Story of the Rupert Murdoch screening.
  • Inspirations: He played sports with Brandon Tartikoff of NBC, Tartikoff helped Carter out, Carter suggested him a Kolchak-like show, he didn’t buy it. Carter read about FBI investigating satanic rituals. He went to UFO conventions, those helped shaped the stories a lot.
  • He had a clear idea of the characters and the mood before casting or shooting. The pilot fits with his vision.
  • He developed a “look book” about what the series was going to be, with photos, episode descriptions, just as extra marketing material for the pitch.
  • Sandy Grushow, marketing at Fox, was sure that Adventures of Brisco County was to be the success; TXF was just the lead-in.
  • Did a screening to get audience reactions. Painful, but it was a revelation about how storytelling is a sequence of tension and release.

On science:

  • He had a meeting with Foster Gamble of the Thrive Movement to discuss free energy devices. Interested, but the devices never showed up.
  • He has a brother scientist at MIT. He corrected one thing in the pilot script: instead of “time is a universal constant”, “invariant”.
  • “I think of science as the search for God. We are going to find God through our search for things like quantum physics.” 
  • They tried to be meticulous with the science. Plenty of examples where they had science fiction which became fact afterwards, like cloning and Dolly the sheep, or My Struggle 2 and the pandemic.

Making the show:

  • The reason for the success was Mulder and Scully: their relationship and their characters. There was both sexual tension and respect.
  • When he was still unknown he called the FBI for information. Later when TXF was successful, he got called in to Quantico, got “the Jodie Foster treatment”, had many secret friends at the FBI.
  • He’s most proud of affecting people’s lives, of the Scully effect.
  • “My success is hiring a group of smart people”, to write and develop the show.
  • They tried not to show the aliens, the plan was to keep them unseen for 5 years; but all the rules were broken, they saw one on the first episode of season 2.
  • Advice from Rick Carter, who read the pilot script right after Amazing Stories had been cancelled: to put the scary stuff in the shadows, makes the experience more cinematic, the imagination is scarier than what you saw.
  • When Gillian got pregnant, executives wanted to fire her, it was a fork in the road, he insisted to keep her and work around it.
  • It was great to be at the Friday night time slot. His autobiography will be called “Fridays at 9”.
  • The many work hours he poured in was not micro management, it was an obsession with the success of the show. But it was not a healthy way to live your life.
  • Glen Morgan would go read reactions on the internet forums more than Carter.
  • Fans are mostly women, because of the M-S relationship.
  • During season 1 he got a letter from woman fan with encouraging criticism, which convinced him what to focus on for what came next. He named a character after her in the season 1 finale. [Mentioned in his 2023 commentary to the episode, that was Dr. Berube.]
  • The Vancouver personnel was completely invested in the show, he loved that esprit de corps.
  • The writer/director of Risky Business [Paul Brickman] gave Carter high praise for a writer called Vince Gillian, years before he expressed interest in the show.

About the mythology:

  • “The mythology was really the way to deal with Mulder and Scully’s relationship, among other things” [One doesn’t exist without the other, I say!]
  • After the movie, “the stories almost start telling themselves, because you’ve laid down so much foundation that the shape of the building is dedicated to what you’ve already laid out”.
  • Spotnitz and Carter were “the keepers of that faith”, “the keepers of the mythology”.
  • The Black Oil was his idea: oil is a fuel we use every day, it predates us, it was fitting that there would be something alien living in it. [I wish this allegorical dimension had been more developed.]
  • The Syndicate is “above top secret”, they are still part of the government but a separate entity. [This clarification is useful, as at some point it seemed like the Syndicate was a completely private independent entity; but it still is part of a governmental conspiracy in Carter’s mind.]
  • He loved Karl Ove Knausgard’s books, he decided to do 4 episodes inspired by them. [The 4 My Struggles.]
  • William is described as “Mulder and Scully’s son, they had a baby together”. [Despite many backs and forths on this, we should understand that the CSM only contributed to William’s creation but is not his father, but still that William somehow thinks of the CSM as his father?…]

The movies:

  • Duchovny pressed to do a movie, otherwise he would go do something else.
  • How he describes the first movie: it was about experiments and a “natural component” via a virus, and abductees held in an underground base.
  • The second movie had one third of the budget of the first. The studio said they wanted a PG-13 movie; it was a hard lesson to learn that PG ratings for movies are less permitting than in TV, many edits and back and forths. Hence the upcoming director’s cut.

Some more things about Carter:

  • He hasn’t quite experienced the supernatural, but he’s experienced kismet, serendipity, déjà vu…
  • He still watches All The President’s Men every year.
  • Carter admires Kurt Andersen’s book Evil Geniuses, it read like what he was writing about for decades in the show, about processes changing society over decades and carefully drawn out plans by certain people. Andersen’s book The Real Thing was a big influence on him. Story about comments Carter made about the Emmy awards in the 1990s and an article about that by Andersen on the New York Times; Carter called him to make amends, and quoted him with a haiku of his to show his admiration.
  • Tad O’Malley was based on Alex Jones. He got a call from Jones, who invited him on his show.
  • With his wife they decided to watch the entire show from start two years ago. He has forgotten many things about making the show, in many ways it was like watching it for the first time.
  • In the Vancouver years he usually watched the show at home with his wife, or during season 5 in a Vancouver bar with colleagues.
  • He remembers watching Apocalypse Now in a theater, getting a jump scare at a tiger; then going to the theater to watch it again, to watch the audience reaction at the jump scare. He realized how powerful cinema is.
  • He resisted the denomination “science fiction”, he went with Spielberg’s “speculative science”.
  • TXF is a political show.
  • 9/11 was a “very important turning point in the history of planet Earth”
  • Is it possible that TXF is actually non fiction? “Yes it’s possible.”

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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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Jun
16
2025

Carter & Spotnitz on 25 years of Millennium

Recently, the Millennium Group Sessions Redux podcast released two interviews that were conducted for the 25th anniversary of Millennium, which was in October 2021, so these are not quite recent intervews but they are newly released nevertheless. They make for some very interesting listening, Carter being his typical tight-lipped self and Spotnitz very well articulated.

If there’s one thing I’d highlight here is that Carter not only has (had?) high hopes for a Millennium revival, but that he has given thought to where the characters are and what the setting is, which…1) I want to know all about this! But also 2) How incredibly optimistic! Given how much time has passed, given how the XF revival was received, and given Frank Black’s age. I suppose it’s still possible with Jordan as the lead character, or as a complete reboot with a recast, but it’s quite a stretch.

Below, important quotes (made easy with automatically generated episode transcripts) [and my comments]:

Chris Carter

“[MM] actually maintained what I would call a solid audience through its three years. I think the show could have gone on, and for reasons that I regret, the show did not, but we had very solid ratings that could have carried us on.”

[On the 3 seasons] “I think of it as three different shows. I think of it as the first season. I think of it as the second season, when I had to step away. And I think of it as the third season, when we had to really respond to and answer to the second season, which was a departure. So I think the show benefited from that infusion of energy, and I think that, as I say, the fourth year and beyond would have been a very interesting continuation of something that I think still held a lot of promise and energy.” [Since this interview he has opened up that it was his call to cancel MM. We will be left wondering.]

[On handing over s2 to Morgan & Wong] “I don’t remember exactly what the hand-off constituted or what constituted a hand-off, but I know they had very strong feelings about the show, the characters, the relationships, and the storytelling.”

[IWTB and the rumour at the time that Frank Black would appear in it] “It’s funny, it has a Millennium theme to it, certainly a storytelling. The second movie was inspired by something that actually took place, and I met with a doctor in Cleveland at Case Western University who had actually conducted a head transplant on a chimp, and so that was kind of the inspiration. I don’t remember if Frank Black was going to appear in the movie or not, I’m not sure now looking back, he might have appeared in the movie. That said, I always look for any opportunity to feature Lance.” [He can’t recall for something as HUGE as Frank Black’s return? This is hard to believe.]

“You try to be an audience pleaser always, but you try to make sure that you are following your own instincts. Shows can be I think directed and misdirected by audience feedback. Looking at The X-Files, while we heard our audience, we were always true to the characters and the situations and the mythology, and I think the same could be said for Millennium.” [Completely agreed on both directed and misdirected by the audience.]

[Whether Peter Watts is actually dead or not?] “I actually can’t answer that question. It’s funny that in the season finale of the last reboot of The X-Files, Mitch Pileggi’s leg was the last thing you saw. So I think those are wonderful coincidences.”

[MM on streaming or Blu-Ray?] “I hope so, and I think so. I don’t know that it’ll come out on Blu Ray, which seems to be somewhat of a dying thing, but I think that it ultimately will find its way onto some platform, probably Hulu, which is owned by Disney/Fox.” [Still waiting.]

[TXF s10-11] “there’s a trick, and the trick is being respectful of the original fans, the fan base, people who have held the torch, but at the same time wanting to attract and entertain a new audience. With The X-Files that was the trick, we were responsible and receptive to fans’ desires to see the mythology and the stories within that mythology be continued, but at the same time we had to be mindful that we had a whole new audience.” [Nice insight — but whether he followed his own advice for the XF revival is up for debate.]

[A MM revival?] “If the show came back, I have some strong ideas about the direction of the show, the relationships, the characters, the situations, the circumstances, all those things are I think are have been on my mind.” [In typical Carter fashion, he doesn’t give us more — but it’s incredible that he has given it this much thought, he really thought there was a big chance for this to happen. Is this why he can’t answer whether Peter Watts is dead or not? It’s been 25 years! I think the boat has sailed, especially 4 years later after this interview. I hope he does open up eventually and will share these ideas with us.]

“Glen Morgan told me he had a meeting with some executives at a studio, I think it may have been Warner Brothers, and one of the executives says, if he had a show to bring back, it would be Millennium. Unfortunately Warner Brothers does not own the title, and so while that is always music to my ears it’s the wrong studio. That was recently.” [That’s impressive!]

[On continuing TXF without Gillian Anderson, possibly partnering Mulder and Frank Black in an episode] “I think that would be pretty cool. Actually, it’d be great crossover.” [That would have been very cool indeed.]

[On the TXF: Albuquerque animated show project] “I can tell you that, as it stands, that series is on the shelf, and for a variety of reasons I don’t think you’ll see it anytime soon, if you see it at all.”

[On what he’d do different in a MM revival] “You look at television now and people roll out 10-episode series, and we did 22 episodes a season roughly. […] I think I would look forward to doing a shorter run of the show and being able to write all the scripts before you ever went into production. […] It would be great to have the luxury of not writing while you’re producing and trying to stay one step ahead of this monster, this all-consuming monster who requires you to do way too many jobs at once. That would be a dream come true, and it would be make Millennium a better show.” [Good idea, although he still didn’t manage to do that with the 6 and 10 episode seasons of the XF revival, when he was still writing while shooting the episodes.]

[On offering Frank Spotnitz to run MM s2] “I had no idea about that. I don’t remember doing that. Frank was actively involved in The X-Files series and The X-Files movie. I think that would have been triple duty for him, so that actually is something I don’t recall. That may have been the case, but it has slipped my memory.” [see Spotnitz’s reaction below]

Frank Spotnitz

“the show didn’t reach the popularity of The X-Files, but the impact the show had on the people who saw it was really profound”

“Millennium was was really uncompromising in its way, and, honestly, I think that’s probably what limited the size of its audience, particularly in a network television landscape […] it was both what was great about it and also what probably kept it from being more popular than it was.”

“it was very much a movie type story every week”

[On his s1 episodes ‘Weeds’ & ‘Sacrament’]
Weeds: “it was really about fathers and sons and the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons”
Sacrament: “in a very different way in Sacrament I kind of explored the same idea, which was not so much the sins of the fathers, but sort of the gifts of the fathers, if you will, the gift that Frank had and how that affected Jordan. But that’s an interesting theme to me, just generations and fathers and sons.”

“it’s one of those shows that we found as we went along, and that changed dramatically each of the three seasons. So I certainly had no idea from the first episode what the show was going to become, I don’t think anybody did.”
“I think that that first hour is as good or better than anything Chris ever wrote, which is saying a lot, because Chris is such an incredible writer. I remember seeing it in a in a theater in Los Angeles because Fox so proud of it that they rented out theaters for the for the premiere, and just being absolutely blown away by it as a piece of filmmaking and a piece of television.”
“we certainly didn’t know where the show was going to go, that it was going to ultimately embrace some supernatural elements.”
“each season, it was like a triptych, each was a different way of seeing this world”

“the studio and the network were frightened by the show […] they could see that we were limiting the size of the audience by our uncompromising approach to the storytelling.”
“the reason the show evolved is because we were eager to grow and not repeat ourselves, so I think there was this restless creative spirit that kept causing the show to reinvent itself.”
“from the beginning of the first season, Chris sort of let go the original creative team and so he and I ended up doing double time on X-Files and Millennium that first season. And then obviously Glen and Jim came to the rescue in the second season, and then Chip and Ken in the third season.” [I don’t recall this about the original creative team, I wonder what happened.]
“the third season, we all felt really proud of the show and what it did become, and we were pushing so hard for that fourth season that we ultimately didn’t get, I think because the network believed if they put something else in there, the ratings would grow, which turned out not to be true.”

[On being offered to run s2] “I was really flattered and grateful. But honestly, I don’t think I was ready at that point, and I certainly wasn’t ready to let go The X-Files either. So it was a tough call because I really did love Millennium, but I think I made the right call.” [I also think that was the right call, especially since we got Morgan & Wong’s s2, but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to both MM s2+ and to TXF s5+ if Spotnitz had switched teams then.]

[On IWTB having some Millennium elements] “there’s a lot of truth to that. I think tonally it feels very much like Millennium, and it’s barely supernatural, so it could quite easily have fit into Millennium. But that’s where Chris’s head in particular was at at that point in time when we came back to The X-Files, he was more interested in the horror, psychological terror, and the thematic richness of it.”

[On the XF ‘Millennium’ episode] “we were so upset that Millennium didn’t get an ending that we were determined to give it an ending on The X-Files. I have to be honest, we didn’t appreciate how difficult that was going to be, because they are completely different shows, and we wrestled with that episode a lot. […] it was part of The X-Files, so it had to be an X-File first. I could totally get why some Millennium fans would be frustrated by that episode because it is more an X-Files episode than a Millennium episode. It’s an X-Files episode with Frank Black in it. […] it didn’t end up being the Millennium finale that we wanted it to be, but I couldn’t figure out how else to do it.”

[On Millennium compared to today’s television landscape] “X-Files and Millennium, to my mind, were both ahead of their time in terms of their cinematic ambition. In terms of the thematic element and the ambition of Millennium, it still gives all those [current] shows a run for their money, even twenty five years later, a lot of those shows don’t necessarily reach for the same complexity of theme and aren’t necessarily always as thought-provoking as Millennium was.” [Completely agreed, and that goes for all of Carter’s shows, it’s not ‘just’ good visuals or ‘just’ good plot, it’s a whole worldview, a philosophical stance.]

[Emma and Frank] “there was no social-cultural-racial agenda, it was like we loved Clea and what we thought she’d be bringing to the part and and that’s why we cast her, and I’m especially proud of that.”

“it was obviously influenced by Seven”

[About the three different seasons] “No, I don’t think it was a hindrance to the show at all. I think the show got as big an audience as it was always ever going to get, and it was creatively really strong and interesting all three seasons. […] What nobody realized in 1999 was that network television was already in decline, Fox [hoped to] recapture the X-Files numbers, which they never did. […] We were more a victim of changing viewership habits than of any creative mistakes or change of direction we may have made in the seasons.”

[On season 4 ideas] “I thought Chip [Johanessen] was going to do the fourth season and I think Chip really did have some ideas what he wanted to do. By the third season, it was not my show in any way at all. Chris and I would come in and make our contributions, but it was really Chip who was defining the show. I was really excited by what he was doing and was looking forward to, obviously, the actual millennium being on the show.”

“I really put my heart and soul into Millennium, like like I do all of these shows, and you do it because you’re hoping you’re going to reach other people. […] When people not only watch the show but like it enough to remember it and honor it and and keep it going for years, it’s incredible, I can’t tell you how gratifying that is.”

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