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Posts Tagged ‘chris carter’

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.”

Duchovny/Carter podcast

After the Gillian Anderson interview a few months ago, David Duchovny received Chris Carter on his podcast, to talk The X-Files and more. This time there’s a video version, and thanks to advancing AI and autogenerated subtitles it’s easier to pull quotes. I am also doing this to help people who prefer a text version instead of audio, or people who might want to automatically translate this page into their own language.

Overall a very enjoyable exchange with plenty of info. However, there are also some very weird parts. Once more, David tries to focus on how one becomes better after dealing with difficulties in life or in a career. Once more, Chris acts as if the world failure never applies to him and that the critics or the fans just don’t ‘get it’. There’s a lot of pop psychology that we could go into thanks to the many things said here, on why Chris has this attitude in life.

Here are the two highlights [with my comments]:

On the revival:

CC: “I thought, why why do I want to come back? What story do I have to tell? I don’t want to just come back and do a victory lap.” “I did a four part arc through two seasons to say all the things that I wanted to say. And the first story is a prelude to my point that I wanted to make.”
CC goes on scorning New York Times critics calling ‘My Struggle I’ and ‘The After’ as “a dud” and “terrible”.
CC: “[My Struggle I] was the episode that led us to the ending of the following season. And the big point which I was delivering, it was all a plan, was all veiled and complicated, and we get to the end and no one got the ending. I’ve already talked to you about this, that I laid it out there but no one got the ending. It’s a big, it’s a huge ending. Scully reveals that she’s pregnant, and I had a lot of haters, that Scully didn’t have agency, women are only good as mothers… I had a big idea and I put it right there, front and center, for people to make the connection that no one, literally no one, made. And you know what it is because I told you, you were the only one I told.” CC then stops talking and takes out the alien embryo prop from ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask‘!

[This is not the first time he hints at some bigger truth that ‘haters’ missed. But despite what he thinks, there’s been so much analysis by the fans that I don’t think absolutely nobody got it. Take your pick: Scully’s pregnant and this is again a miracle, possibly related to some new alien experiment, or man-made experiment, or triggered or enabled by William, who smiles at the end (and is shown hatching an egg in the teaser of the episode, having thus a life-giving force). Scully’s alien DNA generates alien-human hybrid babies (end of My Struggle IV echoing Sveta’s hybrid babies who were taken from her in My Struggle I) and the human race is slowly being manipulated into becoming a hybrid race, either by action of the CSM, or some secret human conspiracy, or by some covert action of aliens that have remained hidden for the entire revival. In terms of more general themes, the Struggles show we all have our biases and subjective truths (each Struggle episode has a point of view character) and we can get gaslighted by manipulators (CSM, William) but there is an objective truth we can reach to if we pierce through the lies. What more can the overall arc be possibly about? He should also reflect on why nobody ‘got it’, maybe these episodes are not his best work and not the masterpieces he thinks they are.]

On a new cut for IWTB:

CC: “I got just got the go-ahead yesterday to do a director’s cut of ‘I Want To Believe‘, the second movie, and I can’t tell you how excited I’m about this.” “I made it too scary basically and I was told so by the brass at Fox and they wanted a PG-13 movie, so we cut it back to be a PG-13 movie and we thought ‘OK we’ve satisfied their demands’. The critics, the people who rate the movies said, ‘no it’s not PG-13 yet, you’ve got to cut it back even further’. I can tell you that you can do more on network television, they’re more permissive than the sensors are for the movies. And so now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended. So it’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut, it’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.”

[This is very surprising! Is Disney/Fox investing in this because of some new edition or 4K/UHD transfer of the movie? I’m certainly eager to see an edgier version of IWTB, but I don’t think the lack of scares or violence was its weak part. Making certain already-existing scenes longer will enhance it, but I don’t know that this will turn it into a better movie overall.]

Much more stuff follows:

All big 3 (DD/CC/GA) had lunch last week in Los Angeles. The podcast closes with the hope that they can do one all three together. [Nice that they still meet! could this be related to the recent series reboot project?]

Inside joke on set of TXF: “John Bartley, poet and a prophet / John Bartley, taught me how to off it”, to the tune of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away” [“Bob Marley” in the original lyrics; Bartley was the director of photography]

CC loves Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino movies. [Yay for the Malick reference!]

CC: “Story was very important”: “I did the pilot for The X-Files, I wrote a 17-page single-space outline.”

On the 3×5 cards for plotting out episodes in the writers’ room: “[Glen Morgan] actually had beautiful penmanship, and he would make these cards and so that became also competitive: who could make the most beautiful cards?” [everything became competitive in there, but in a good way!]

CC: “The great thing about The X-Files was that you were surrounded by people who wanted it to be good from the beginning. And that’s not, in my experience, always the case. Some people just show up for work. But certainly when we shot in Vancouver, it was that esprit de corps, it was the reason I got up every day to do the show, do the job.” [This team spirit comes up again and again in interviews by many crew members.]

CC: “By season 7, we were all tired.”
During s7 when DD had a lawsuit against Fox, DD had his trailer checked for bugs, there was tension and distance with CC. Despite that, CC remembers seeing DD and his wife in Malibu, and hugging him.
DD: “I was number one on the call sheet and you retired the number one which was really nice.”

On that “annus horribilis” when CC produced TXF S4 + Millennium S1 + preparing to shoot the first TXF movie:
DD: “these are the fruits of success, that you’re going to work yourself to death.”
DD on CC at that time: “I was pissed off because I thought Chris is not with us.”

CC on Millennium: “I didn’t want to do another thing, but Fox came to me and said, “You’ve got to, this is your brand, and run with it.” [Interesting that this was really a push from the studio and less of CC’s desire to expand to other things.]
CC: “I pulled the plug on Millennium too soon.” “I thought [Harsh Realm] was going to be a hit and I didn’t imagine myself doing three shows.” [I can’t blame him! He pours his soul into his shows.]
If not for CC’s decision, Fox would have gone ahead with Millennium season 4: “It was going to keep on going, they would have gone with it.”
“I got excited about Harsh Realm because I got a chance to work with Dan Sackheim again, who had produced The X-Files pilot with me. There were a bunch of us that I was excited to work with. I thought it was a really good concept and that’s a story in itself. I thought it was and I still think it was a little bit ahead of its time.” [I can’t imagine HR going on for 100 episodes, but the 9 episodes that were produced were amazing and it was cut short way too soon. I don’t know what I would have preferred, a full season of HR or MM s4.]

CC on pottery and the creative process:
“I went to film school when I was making pottery. I would have the TV on for 10 hours a day while I was making pottery.” “And then I would listen on Sunday nights… I just loved the Dr. Demento show.”
“This is a story about my serialized brain.” “I could be called a production potter, which means I would sit for hours at a time and make the same thing over and over and over or the same six things over and over.” “It’s about the process. There’s something actually meditative and engaging about doing the same thing over, serialized. And what is television? It’s serialization of a concept.” [I love this parallel!]

CC remembers important experiences that made him into a writer: writing blue book essays for a writing teacher (Mr. Lackman) on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd“; in journalism school with a teacher (Dr. Stein), writing a piece on Gaylord Carter (silent movies organist). “I’m a hard worker and I hate to hear the word ‘no’. And I wanted to be good at what I was doing.” [He has this work ethic still.]

On how CC got into Hollywood:
He was next door neighbours with James Mangold [director, ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ among others].
He met his wife-to-be Dori, whose cousin was Dianne Crittenden, an agent and the casting director on ‘Star Wars’. They got him to write scripts and shop them around. [Sounds like it was quite easy for him!]
CC: “The first script I wrote was… I’m from Belfflower. I wrote a script about three kids in Bellflower in the early 1970s who are baseball players, who have no idea that they can get out of the Vietnam draft, and they’re going to war because they don’t know how to not go, they don’t know about bone spurs. [Donald Trump avoided the draft claiming he suffered this ailment.] “The script is called ‘National Pastime’. It’s near and dear to me. It’ll never get made.” [Sounds like his own ‘American Graffiti’.]

In season 1, CC wanted DD & GA to go to couples therapy. CC: “You guys were at odds” “sometimes on set, that kind of thing rocks a crew” “if there is tension and you guys are the center of attention, if there is tension in that relationship, everyone knows it and it affects…”

Shooting “Squeeze” (season 1): DD had already done his ADR (re-recording voice in post-production) and was unavailable, so CC recorded his own voice for Mulder instead, for that shot when Mulder finds Scully’s cross: “damn it”. CC: “I don’t remember how you figured it out, but I remember your reaction, which was not good.” DD: “I was really pissed off and I remember you being bemused.”

The “widows and orphans” in CC’s scripts:
DD: “in your chunks of dialogue, you wanted it to look symmetrical, and so you would make sure that each of your lines added up”.
DD: “I’m reading your dialogue for 20 years on and off. And there’s always ellipses, ‘—‘. And in my mind, when I read a script like that, especially when it trails off at whatever in the middle, I’m thinking there’s a thought that’s not being expressed, and I’m thinking, well, what is what is the thought? And I’m always trying to fill it in.”
DD: “So it it goes with my kind of philosophy that that self-imposed limitations which you’re giving yourself that it has to look a certain way are actually ways to get at deeper meaning and and freedom.”
CC: “People don’t speak in complete sentences.”
CC: “For me it was an exercise because I always think, if you can say it in four lines instead of four and a half it’s going to be better.”
[I understand the will to have more natural dialogue. But compare a typical page of his early scripts with one of his revival episodes and maybe he’s overdoing it.]

Casting TXF:
DD: “I had to convince the suits that I was the guy. And there was a line in the pilot in the description where you you described Mulder as like more MTV DJ than like FBI. So I was like, ‘Oh, he’s a bit irreverent, whatever’. So I came to the test wearing a pig tie.”
CC: “We left the casting session. I actually talked to you outside and I said, ‘You’re good. I want to take you to the network’ and I said the stupidest thing, ‘I want you to start thinking like an FBI agent’.”

DD’s revelation about Mulder’s psychology:
DD: “I gave thanks to you for kind of giving me a structural education in storytelling, I was coming to storytelling in a completely psychological sense.”
DD: “Mulder is traumatized by his sister’s disappearance. Trauma is a word we use now, but we might not have said that back then, we could say something like PTSD now. He failed to protect her. That’s his trauma. He failed. But now he’s returning to the scene week after week and putting another young woman in jeopardy and sometimes failing, almost failing, to protect her. As if he’s trying to heal himself by protecting Scully in the way he couldn’t protect his sister. Yet he’s also reinjuring himself by putting her in danger and sometimes even having to be saved by Scully, saved by this sister proxy.”
CC: “I never thought of it that way either.” “I guess you you could make a case for that. I don’t know.”
[This is very insightful and I love this angle, it really makes the Mulder character work for me, to the point that it’s surprising Carter never thought of this. It’s also the type of analysis that I think fans were producing already back in season 1.]

On when DD was feeling low after receiving bad reviews for ‘House of D’, DD was mumbling/crying, CC told him “I want to hear your big boy voice”. CC: “That’s a Bill Carter instruction. He wouldn’t have said that exactly, but it was like, ‘buck up’.” [Sounds like Carter received some tough education from his father.]

CC: “Doing the X-Files was a perfect opportunity for me to talk about the world and my point of view in the world, or I should say my competing points of view, which are science and faith.”

CC: “I once told David long long ago, 30 years ago, that my first novel was going to be called Men in Their Hair.”

DD: “the reason that The X-Files was so scary in the beginning was because we couldn’t afford to show the scary things. It had to be dark” [He makes fond fun of director of photography John Bartley’s accent, who was from New Zealand] “If you have a small budget, you have to figure your way around the scare. And that explained or that drove The X-Files when it first aired, it was so dark compared to any other show on television — and I’m talking about literally — and that became its trademark, and that became the art of it.”

31st anniversary + short Carter interview

31st anniversary of #TheXFiles today, wow!

Here’s a quick interview with Chris Carter about the new book “Perihelion” in this episode of XF Diaries: in short, he is very glad that there are still new things TXF coming out. He was consulted and offered notes, but this was really Claudia Gray’s work. As usual, he avoids answering anything directly, but he stresses that the book is “keeping with the canon” (a nuance of “canon” per se), I think he just makes the distinction because this is a novel and not a live continuation and it’s not his own work; but it also means that whatever happens in the novel does not comes into contradiction with what he would have done were there to have been a season 12. It’s not clear if he directly shared his own ideas for the future with Gray or just tried to steer Gray away from something. But if the book series continues, more answers will have to be given and we might end up knowing what he’s hiding. For what that’s worth.

He also teases that there’s an easter egg in “My Struggle IV” about where the show and the characters were going and leaves us wondering My bet? William/Jackson was shown holding an egg hatching, and the episode ends with Scully pregnant: he is a life-giver, and he could have had a role in Scully’s new pregnancy, hence the final smile. What do people think?

PhileFest: Creatives panel

I wrap up my notes on last year’s The X-Files PhileFest events with the Creators panel. This one is so long and full of cool info that I’ll split it in two. Featuring: R.W. (Bob) Goodwin (BG), Frank Spotnitz (FS), Chris Carter (CC), James Wong (JW), Glen Morgan (GM), Kristen Cloke (KC), Darin Morgan (DM). [+ my comments in brackets]

  • CC on Scully’s 2nd pregnancy being mysterious and science-fictional as well [eh, rinse and repeat… that My Struggle IV finale will haunt CC’s public appearances to the end of his days!]
  • GM cheers on CC repeating GA’s comment about firing all the writers! [I love how they are all comfortable enough to troll each other!] BG praises the writers [in response to GA’s comment] and that he and Sheila had their last child at age 71 [what does this refer to? a grandchild? a film/series he did? BG’s last film credit is “Alien Trespass” from 2009, when he was 66]
  • GM on the unwritten “Lincoln’s Ghost” episode
  • JW and GM on “Home”, trying to have a sequel in “Millennium”; they get no residuals
  • JW: “Home” was the reason for a “violence” check from FOX; BG: Deep Throat’s death in “The Erlenmeyer Flask” had been used to illustrate violence on TV [how times change!]
  • GM on doing sequels/prequels (DM: Flukeman as a tadpole! Small Potatoes: The Series!)
  • BG on meeting DM in the Flukeman costume
  • FS tried to include Charles Scully in “Christmas Carol/Emily” but Pat Skipper was very good, no place for Charlie
  • GM on inspirations for “Home” (“Brother’s Keeper”, Charlie Chaplin autobiography, “Dark Nature”), JW on reception of the script by FOX executive Charlie Goldstein (“you’re sick!”), GM on Karin Konoval
  • BG on having a nervous breakdown upon reading the “End Game” script with the submarine conning tower (CC had said “Bob will figure it out”), FS pitched that idea based on a New York Times article CC had on his bulletin board with such a photo
  • CC on directing Steve Railsback in “Duane Barry”, BG on casting director Rick Millikan, CC on Vancouver extras appearing over and over, BG on using girls after facing difficulties with boys as aliens in “Duane Barry”
  • JW on directing “Musings” (GM: “you also had an amazing script!”)
  • GM on their 3 main directors, Rob Bowman, David Nutter (“treat yourself”, he got that from his college film professor, that’s where DM got it for “Small Potatoes”), Kim Manners; shooting “The Field Where I Died”, DD’s hypnosis scene originally lasted 12 minutes! Someone fell out for directing “Die Hand die Verletzt” and GM & JW brought over Kim Manners.
  • DM on getting help from Rob Bowman on directing; wrote last act of “Jose Chung” in one go during the night before it was due; filming “Forehead Sweat” UFO scene at 3 am
  • KC thanks CC for being open to possibilities, that’s what made the show (unlike modern TV); talking with Bowman when shooting “The Field Where I Died” about music and the feel of a scene
  • CC thanks BG for producing, pushing for increasing the budget; BG negotiated one extra day of shooting for “The Erlenmeyer Flask”, the studio didn’t think TXF had a chance, proved its worth on its own and so there was no studio interference, studio said “spend what you have to spend, just don’t miss an air date”; budget went from 1.1 M$ in the “Pilot” to 2.8 M$ in “The End” [all hail Bob Goodwin!]
  • Did Scully sleep with Ed Jerse in “Never Again”? BG: there was a time he thought everybody slept with DD!
  • “Humbug” was a writing assignment from GM to DM, do something with circus freaks and Jim Rose; BG: was supposed to be Florida but it was Vancouver in winter, the crew had to melt the snow
  • “Rm9…” was a writing assignment from GM to KC, do something with drones with no dialogue; JW: GM broke up with me because of KC; before that, there was a “Space: Above and Beyond” episode with no dialogue; KC: there’s a real vibrator that tracks your “activity”; CC: the gifts M&S exchange in “The Ghosts Stole Christmas” were vibrators [crowd goes wild! CC is such an enigma, both enraging and enchanting fans and especially shippers!]
  • JW: “Beyond the Sea” was written as a reaction to online comments that “Scully’s a bitch”; FS read online comments a lot; CC: we heard fans, we didn’t necessarily incorporate feedback; CC: after “The Erlenmeyer Flask” there was an uproar, that was a great thing [CC likes controversy!]
  • BG showed director of photography John Bartley a Caravaggio painting, “The Calling of St Matthew”, as inspiration for the look of the show, to get darker and darker
  • GM & JW shot the footage of Frohike being killed at the end of “Musings”, they wanted to put it in the edit, but the footage had “mysteriously” disappeared [CC was against it]; FS lobbied CC not to kill Frohike

Second and last part of the Creatives panel from last year’s #TheXFilesPhileFest. There were more panels, especially one focused on #Millennium, but no recordings have surfaced, unfortunately. Below, more trivia and stories from the past, and some more Carter controversy [+ my comments in brackets]. Here’s to TXF’s longevity!

  • DM: “Forehead Sweat”: the only note from the studio was not to mention Trump by name (although they quote him directly); he would change “War of the Coprophages” so that cockroaches kill Frohike! He apologises for killing Queequeg; he remembers struggling with writing “Quagmire”, the writers had floated the idea of giant clams eating Scully’s car (Mandela effect: FS doesn’t remember that story)
  • BG on directing 15000 people in “The End”
  • CC: the reboot [he still calls it that…he means the revival] aired around Trump’s inauguration, and it predicted everything that came to be in the next 4 years; TXF is not science fiction, it’s a documentary [he really dislikes the term science fiction]; he mentions alien artifacts in TXF and David Grusch [UFO/UAP whistleblower that testified in a congressional hearing in 2023] and the episode “Eve” that dealt with cloning before it was a thing [interestingly, he mentions that episode was “largely” JW & GM, although different writers were credited]
  • CC: if he had wanted to end TXF after 5 seasons, FOX would have fired him and taken somebody else to continue [as much as we can fantasize about TXF ending at its peak before declining, that’s the sad truth…]
  • FS remembers that the original plan was that Mulder would find Samantha alive at the end of the show [CC doesn’t react to that, it would be nice to have a first-hand confirmation]; but by season 7 they made a “brave and controversial” decision to end differently [and by that time that was a good choice, but we are still left to wonder about that Redux II Samantha]
  • When did they know that there was something romantic between Mulder & Scully? CC: in the “Pilot”, in the mosquito bites scene, [FOX executive] Peter Roth asked “where’s the sexual tension?” CC said there is sexual tension, it’s just not of the same kind; FS: he knew from season 1 “Tooms” “if there’s iced tea in that bag, could be love” [ironically, a compliment from the most shipper-friendly writer to the least ones!]
  • GM on how a mysterious quarter in his mom’s belongings when she died found its way to “Home Again” (mentions his daughter Chelsea, DM’s wife Caroline)
  • GM & JW: quote George Roy Hill, 80% of anything is directing and casting; describe how casting director Rick Millikan was bringing them typical network TV people but they wanted freaks; after the casting of Doug Hutchinson as Tooms, he knew (describes Hutchinson’s casting session; mentions he didn’t hit it off with the episode’s director [Harry Longstreet, indeed he only directed that episode]); “Pilot” casting director Randy Stone saw DD as Mulder directly after reading the script.
  • Was the CSM William’s father? CC mentions mitochondrial replacement/removal, thanks to which a child can have two fathers and one mother, and “that’s the answer”; DM and the audience boos him! [a way to have your cake and eat it too – both Mulder AND the CSM are biological parents, according to CC, and that’s final; so much for the CSM just enabling the pregnancy; not to mention that biologically this is wrong, mitochondrial DNA is passed on from mother to offspring only and does not consist in the main cell’s DNA, so at best William is biologically Mulder and Scully’s and has CSM’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, plus some alien DNA here and there; the more you think about it the less it makes sense]
  • How about a season 12? CC doesn’t want to answer [fine by me!] BG gives an impression of how CC works: when shooting the ending of “Anasazi” with Mulder inside a burning box car, CC had said “I wonder how he’s going to get out of there”!
  • What was so important about TXF 30 years later? CC: Mulder and Scully! The best advice he got was when he showed the “Pilot” script to a production designer for Spielberg and Cameron who won two Academy awards [that would be Rick Carter, no family relation], that with no money and no time the best thing to do is to keep the scary stuff hidden. BG: there are three elements that define a success, the casting, the writing and the execution (it could have been cheesy) [I especially agree about that underappreciated third item] and “we got it”! BG got a call from Spielberg at some point, he told him that TXF was the greatest TV series ever made! GM: DD & GA! GM credits CC’s thing of “I want to believe”.

Top photo from XFilesNews

Carter at TXF documentary screening

I’ll just leave this here. At The X-Files documentary screening at New York City yesterday, Chris Carter had the time of his life ending the panel with a bang! He sure likes controversy.

“She [Scully] admits or tells Mulder about her pregnancy in the final episode and that became very controversial. I mean a lot of people, I mean Avi Quijada, she closed her website down [XFilesNews], her blog, and Gillian got very angry at me and it’s like I wasn’t sure why that was but I actually sort of welcomed the controversy and I thought it was a good thing. But if you follow Scully’s maternity if you will, with Emily and with William, and — why does anyone think that this pregnancy is anything other than science fiction? This is a science fiction show, that pregnancy is… It’s spelled out actually at the beginning of the episode, where ‘The Truth Is Out There’ is something else [‘Salvator Mundi’, saviour of the world, for Jesus Christ] and it is what I had in mind. So I just want to go on record to say: it’s not necessarily Mulder and Scully’s child.”

So, the story is not over, the mystery continues, and the third child of Scully is still not quite her own. I understand his punk attitude with wanting controversy, after all here we are still raging about this, but don’t know why he persists so much with this long-dead horse. Good stories end, most would have been happy with M&S just continuing their lives, still investigating or not, with child or not.

https://twitter.com/alimen_222/status/1786585883627425933

https://www.fangoria.com/the-x-files-30th-anniversary-with-chris-carter/

TXF reboot rumors update

A summary of recent The X-Files events:

Chris Carter and wife Dori Pierson have some TV mini-series project, completely unrelated to sci-fi/genre; whatever Carter does next, he wants it to be different from TXF. I hope he does manage to do *something*!

Carter went as far as to say that he took the decision to pull the plug on season 12 and end with season 11 (“I needed some time off”), not mentioning the falling ratings or Gillian Anderson’s dissatisfaction (this is rewriting history somewhat, but from another point of view it’s a professional executive producer taking responsibility for his product, keeping the business information only to insiders).

Inevitably, people ask Carter about the rumored TXF reboot to be handled by Ryan Coogler. Contrary to his systematic involvement for the past 30 years, Carter now seems to have distanced himself from TXF, whatever happens now will not be under his supervision. This is an important change compared to even one year ago.

Gillian Anderson has said she would be open to making an appearance on a reboot/sequel/rewhateverthisis, going as far as saying that Coogler is “a bit of a genius” — which in line with what she said she would think about continuing the role of Scully if “a whole new set of writers and the baton would need to be handed on”, making it clear that for her Carter was the issue. Incredible that this feud has become so public.

Meanwhile, Dean Haglund (Langly) appears to have insider information, that the reboot would tackle the topical issue of AI instead of the alien invasion conspiracy. Given that no other information exists out there and that thanks to the AI angle this would allow Langly specifically to have a role, take this with a grain of salt.

For over a year, the only source for the reboot’s existence has been Carter, and now hopeful actors. Zero word from Coogler or Disney or anybody else, which by now is weird — but then most projects never materialize and it’s only media obsessiveness of recent years that has resulted in us hearing of so many details. Coogler’s current plate seems to be very full, with plenty of film and TV projects officially announced left and right. Whatever happens, it doesn’t look as if it will happen any time soon (and I’m not in a hurry).

Links:

  • Inverse: Chris Carter interview
  • Today: Gillian Anderson interview
  • Rumble: Dean Haglund interview