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BlogCritics: Interview: Catching Up with The X-Files’ Dean Haglund – Part One

Nov-24-2012
Interview: Catching Up with The X-Files’ Dean Haglund – Part One
BlogCritics
Barbara Barnett

[Original here]

Actor-comedian Dean Haglund is probably best known for his role as Richard “Ringo” Langley, a Lone Gunman member on the iconic Fox series The X-Files. The Lone Gunmen were so popular, they were given their own show, and although that only lasted 13 episodes, it had positive reviews when it aired in 2001. In the aftermath of 9-11, some of the parallels between the series and the real-life horror of the tragedy were incredibly eerie.

I caught up with Dean last week to hear about his post-XF projects, which include his long-running podcast Chillpak Hollywood Hour, his new graphic novel, the very cool-sounding documentary The Truth is Out There, and a forthcoming graphic novel. We also talked about comedy, our mutual admiration of beautiful British Columbia, and of course, The X-Files. Because of the length of our conversation, I’ve split the interview in half. Part One is largely about The X-Files; Part Two is largely not.

I was really delighted that I made the connection through Denise Dorman of WriteBrain Media. When I mentioned, among other things, that I had done a lot of writing about The X-Files, she thought it would be a nice opportunity for the two of us to talk.
Aw, that’s awesome. So you’ve written extensively in terms of critical reviews of The X-Files, is that it?

haglund-2

It was probably how I ended up writing TV criticism at all—doing X-Files reviews on the old X-Files listserves back in the day.
Oh my gosh, that’s going back, isn’t it?

It is. And it led me to eventually write critical analyses of other TV shows, and the rest is history. Anyway, when I tweeted out this morning that I was going to be talking with you, I got all these tweets back asking me information on the alleged X-Files 3 movie.
There was a big push for getting that out before 2012 ended, but they would’ve had to already been shooting by now to get that out by 2012.

Hold that thought for a minute, because I want to get back to the movie. But I want to  talk about The X-Files series first. The Lone Gunmen were introduced how early in the first season?
We were just supposed to be day players back in an episode called “E.B.E.” which stood for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. And I think it was a way to get Mulder inside a top-secret facility. They needed some guise. And at the time [episode writers] James Wong and Glenn Morgan said they saw these three guys in an airport handing out UFO pamphlets, and they were all very diverse, and they thought that was hilarious. So they created these characters, and it was just going to be a one-off thing. But I think because suddenly realized that the Lone Gunmen were the representation of the online, the early, early online fan gatherings that were happening back then. And they were happening in newsgroups. There was a newsgroup called alt.tv.xfiles.

Aha!
Do you remember that?

I not only remember it, that’s where I wrote my reviews back in the day.
That was the thing; everybody assumed that [creators] Chris Carter and Frank [Spotnitz] and [writer] Vince [Gilligan] were all lurking on the site. And in fact, they were, because they were so excited that this was the first time writers got a chance to get direct feedback anonymously. Like, you could see the feedback honestly. Because if you go, “I’m Frank, I write the show.”  Then everybody goes, “oh, I love the show,” and it’s hard to get honest feedback of what they [really] think of the show. But if you’re just lurking in the newsgroup, you can see how everybody is complaining about this, or you know, some of the ideas that the fans had back then were very, very passionate and very cogent. So Chris Carter really appreciated that, and [after] putting in the Lone Gunmen, the newsgroup went wild, going, oh, well, this proves it. And for seasons two and three, we would say lines that actually appeared on the newsgroup. So we would take an actual sentence from the newsgroup and give it to the Lone Gunmen to say.

Oh, that’s wild.
So we had this great symbiotic relationship with the fans early on, and I don’t think the Lone Gunmen would have been as popular were it not for the Internet and the newsgroups at the time.

At the time, the Internet was really sort of new. I mean, there had been newsgroups before, for a long time before, but I think that because being on the Internet had become all of a sudden fairly cost-effective, especially with AOL, suddenly everybody was online. You didn’t need like some crazy, $95-an-hour subscription anymore to hang out. There was some very serious discussion on alt.tv.x-files and alt.tv.x-files.analysis. Maybe for the first time about a TV show.
Yeah, and it actually sparked, like whole communities of debate, which I always found fascinating. But, you know, scientists would gravitate, and talk about the science aspects of the TV show, and then the [Mulder-Scully] “shippers” and the “no-romos” had their own newsgroups, and I really thought that was a great fragmentation of how you could find your own collective group and hang out with them.

And, for the most part, the discussion was very intelligent. I remember a lot of the participants were writers themselves, especially fanfiction writers, including me, and it was really cool. There was tons of X-Files fanfiction: some fairly brilliant novels, scripts, short stories…
I tended not to read a lot of that. Sometimes it delved into that slash universe that I wasn’t into, so I stayed away from it. And early on one of the executives said, “You know, if you read anything online, any fanfiction, and then that shows up in the series, and there is a lawsuit, you’re left out, hung out to dry. We’re not going to support you on that. So be careful what you read, because if it mirrors on the TV show, the lawsuit lands on your shoulders, not the Fox Network.”

Back then, writing fanfiction was a real risk, and frowned upon by the networks. And now, it seems it’s really encouraged. Over the last couple years I’ve talked to a ton of TV writers, people who write amazing scripts for major shows. These days, the writers I ask about it really appreciate it as a compliment to their characters and their own work.
Absolutely, and that was a huge learning curve too for the executives, because I remember even when you could show video for the first time, when the bandwidth increased and you could show video on your website, all the fans used to put The X-Files up there, and they would get a note from Fox saying that’s licensed stuff; take it down. And then I would get e-mails saying, hey we’re fans of the show, we’re promoting the show, we want this on our website, why can’t we do it?  And I had to then get up on the legalities of copyright law, and be in the position of defending Fox.

And that too has changed, because now they have, you know, embeds, so the studio will release something and you can just embed it and everyone’s happy.
Yes, I think that was the thing. Before embedding, they felt like it was just being released in the wild. Now with embeds and all the tracking stuff, you can still get all the metrics back so that you know exactly how it’s being used and where, and still use that to sell advertising, I think was the biggest issue.

So I have to confess, I think I stopped watching The X-Files after season seven.
Right, when Mulder left.

When Mulder left, yeah. The show changed when it came to L.A., a little bit.
It sure did.

And it wasn’t just the move to L.A., I think the whole show just sort of changed, and I’m not sure if I could put my finger on why, but it just…
I know Chris Carter originally, said “we’ve got a five-year plan for this series, and then at the end of five years, we can go and do movies”—that kind of thing. And of course when you sell your show to a network, the network tells you when it’s over, so…  That’s sort of changed now too. I mean, there’s a way of ending series properly, but back then, because it was so successful, the network demanded more seasons than perhaps the writers wanted it to continue.

Right, right. And I think the fans kind of picked up on that.
Yeah. At that point everybody kind of burnt out. We were doing sixteen-hour days, every day.  Nobody saw a Saturday towards the end of the show because you were shooting all day and Friday night, and just slept all day Saturday. Sunday you did some chores and then Monday you’re back at work. And so it burnt out a lot of people for sure.

And after awhile the conspiracy got kind of crazy after a while as well, don’t you think?
Yeah, it became more and more—It got larger and larger, and it was a large—any time you brought it up there was a lot of strings that you had to keep—a lot of plates you had to keep spinning on the poles, as it were.

Right. Was there ever even a Bible for the show?
Not originally. In fact, it was just going to be sort of an anthology of monsters of the week—

I remember.
Absolutely. And then Gillian Anderson got pregnant and had to sort of be written out for a couple episodes, so they just wrote in an abduction story that arced over three episodes, and then from that became, well why was she abducted? Now the conspiracy, now the alien-hybrid thing, all of that started because she was pregnant, so—

Wow.
Yeah, I know, right?  If that didn’t happen, the series would have just continued on as a crime-of-the-week kind of thing.

The conspiracy arc was actually pretty compelling, until it got really convoluted…
We kept adding different layers; the layering of the onion, sort of was working in two directions. So I think, yeah, around season three, they sort of arced out a Bible, but definitely in the beginning there wasn’t one.

Unfair question time: Do you have a particular favorite season or a particular favorite episode or episodes?
Wow, so, yeah, difficult. I guess my favorite season is… Well, no, there’s no favorite season because some of the shows stood out so great without a season, that you couldn’t really connect them. The truth of my favorite episode, I still think is [Darin Morgan’s] “Humbug” with the Jim Rose Freak Circus—

What a fabulous episode that was: pathos and comedy rolled into one.
I saw them live in a bar when I was in college, and I thought the show was hilarious, Enigma and all of them in the show, acting and doing what they do as well. And I thought that was so cool.

So they were a real act, then?
Yeah. Oh, yeah, there was a live stage act. It was almost like an old throwback to a big circus that you would see on the road in the south or something like that, and each person would come up and they would do something horrific or bizarre. And there was one guy who wasn’t in the show, and I don’t know what happened to this guy, because it was the most amazing act I’ve ever seen, but he would step off the stage to the pool table that was in the bar, and he’d put in some coins and release the balls. And then he’d take all the solid colored balls, you know, one through eight, and he would swallow them. And then he would say, call up any number, and people would shout out ‘five’, and then he’d sit there and wriggle his stomach, and he’d bring up, out of his mouth, the five ball.

That is very strange and bizarre.
I know. How do you keep track? How do you do that?  How do you train for that?  How do you not throw up everything you ate all day?  I mean, like, there were so many questions. And then everybody—It was so stunning that the applause was just a smattering, because you couldn’t believe what you were seeing. And I never saw that act again. I don’t know what happened to that guy. I don’t know, but it was the most amazing bar show I’ve ever seen, so, So Humbug is my favorite.

I can imagine. Darin Morgan wrote some really great episodes in addition to that one.
Oh, yeah. He was so good. I loved Clyde Bruckman’s Return. He’s a brilliant writer.

And he didn’t start out as an X-Files writer, as I recall.
Well, no, he came because of his brother, Glen, and acted in one episode. (He played the iconic Flukeman in the early season two episode “The Host.”) He’s the guy with the tail [in the fourth season episode “Small Potatoes].

And then, of course there were the various “shipper” camps. I have to confess, I wasn’t really a Mulder-Scully shipper, I was more of a Mulder-Scully USTer.
I was a Noromo myself, frankly. I appreciated a relationship that was based on respect and intellect, even though they didn’t agree on their points of view, and that they could be working together and not have to make it all kissey-gooey, so I was disappointed when it became kissey-gooey, as… Yeah, and it’s not just the tension, but it takes out the idea that you could work with somebody on a professional basis and still call that a relationship, you know? And have it as satisfying, and not be boyfriend-girlfriend or whatever, cohabitation thing. So when the second X-Files movie came out and you know, they’re just in a cabin together…  Just wrote me out of the movie.

Oh, yeah, well, in the first movie, there was that infamous “almost-kiss.”
Yeah, well, you know, there were a lot of executives involved in how that movie needed to play. So, yes, you had to answer everything from season four, and it had to be a lead-in to season five, and it had to be a stand-alone so that, for people who had never seen the TV series, they could watch the movie and still get it. And so, because of all of these demands put on that movie, I was surprised it was as good as it was.

What did you think of the second movie?
See, now here was the harder issue. I mean, already you had the romance thing. They’re already cohabitating in a cabin. And then, aside from the [2007-2008 Writer’s Guild] strike, they had a lot of restrictions. The writers’ strike was coming; they couldn’t do re-writes, so they basically had the script that they had. And I didn’t realize this, but they had written another script, and they had it in story notes, and Frank moved production offices and that shoebox went missing. So they basically had six months to write that script, and then had no opportunity for re-writes because of the—

Strike.
The writers’ strike, right. So that was a really tough position to be in. And then, for my taste, you know, a lot of the conspiracy of the government stuff [in the second movie]… I mean, here you are at the height of the Bush administration with, you know, Karl Rove and all these guys, and then you write about Russian head transplants. It just seems like you missed a real opportunity to explore conspiracy in the government.

I mean, when we had our own real-life insanity going on, real time, how do you not…?
Exactly, I know. You had this opportunity to do—Even if you couched it in some other thing, you know, different names and stuff like that, you could’ve still explored all of these ideas, and instead chose two-headed dogs, you know?

Yeah, yeah. That was a missed opportunity.
I agree.

So do you think there is going to be a third movie?  You think they’ll get a redux, or a do-over?
A do-over?  Well, you know I talked to Frank that—He moved to London, and he said he’s into it. It’s just once Chris comes up with something that his heart’s really into, then there will be a third movie. But right now it’s all resting on Chris Carter’s shoulders and his impetus to come up with a really great story.

Stay tuned for Part Two.

Beyond The Sea: Mark Snow speaks to 'Beyond the Sea'

Feb-23-2009
BeyondTheSea.it
Mark Snow speaks to ‘Beyond the Sea’

[Original article here]

Mark Snow

Mark Snow doesn’t need any introduction. For all the X-Files fans, he is just the man who wrote the extremely famous TV show theme and who emphasized all the Mulder and Scully’s stories with his music, from the Pilot to the “I Want To Believe” movie.
When you think to “Existence” finale, don’t you hear the “Scully’s Theme” in your mind? Speaking about one of the last pieces, how many of you were moved by the “Home Again” theme in the “I Want To Believe” last scene?

From the first arrangements created using a synthesizer and samples to the classic orchestras and live instruments, the pieces and the genius of this composer were an extra values for X-Files since the beginning.

X-Files, Millennium, The Lone Gunmen and Harsh Realm. All these TV shows created by Chris Carter have the voice of Mark Snow and it was just one year ago when Frank Spotnitz officially announced, at the WonderCon, that the second X-Files movie would have had the same voice again.

Mark Snow kindly answered some questions we made him and he told us about his work for X-Files. He talked about the pieces he made for the TV show, the music he composed for both the movies, and how it felt like to write once again for a new chapter of this incredible story after a very long time. These are just some of the issues we talked about. Besides, he revealed us that a 4 CD boxed set of the X-Files TV music from the TV shows only will be released this spring.

Many moments of the show are still vivid in all fans mind thanks to the music, for example the “Scully’s Theme” that plays during the pregnancy story arc. In order to get to orchestrate music like this, do you get inspiration from pictures or is that a separated creative process?

I was inspired for “Scully’s Theme” from the incredible emotion of the story. I actually felt like part of Scully’s family, and it was almost a religious experience for me, and how great that I was able to use a live singer!

The “Teaser” from “Trust no 1” episode, which music is based on works such as Tchaikovsky’s “Barcarolle”, or also “We Wanted To Believe” from “Little Green Men”, based on Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F”, are just a couple of examples where classic music, joined with some of the X-Files characters voices, creates a style that perfectly fits with the show. Why did you choose to use classic music for the score?

Those classical pieces that we used, I chose them because they just seemed so right, and as a former classical musician, I had a lot of classical repertoire “spinning” around in my head. That Brandenburg Ct. #2, is a piece that I use to play as a student at Juilliard, as an oboist. So, working on those shows was especially great because I was able to delve into my past life.

Mark Snow, Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz at the I Want To Believe premiere in Los Angeles

In many pieces from “The Truth and The Light” you used the music with the insert of some voices from the X-Files dialogues (Mulder, Scully, Deep Throat) that made these pieces unique and original. How did the idea to use this approach come to you?

The idea of using the dialogue from the shows in the “Truth and the Light” CD, came from my music editor Jeff Charbonneau, who thought it would be very original to do this, and in a way, to make it sound like a radio show, that without watching it on TV, it really got you into the moment of the experience.

Sometimes in X-Files we can listen to very famous music like, for example, Cher’s or Moby’s. How was this music chosen? Have you had to adapt them to the show?

The Cher piece as well as Moby, was chosen by Chris Carter, who thought they would be especially effective. I think he was right. I also know that at the time, Chris was a big fan of Moby’s, and when I did the theme for Harsh Realm, he requested that I do something like Moby.

How did you feel to go back to write music for X-Files after many years? Have you tried to get back again to the old ‘classic’ X-Files style or did you just watch the movie and then began to orchestrate the soundtrack?

It was very easy and exciting to do the film score, especially being able to use the full orchestra and the singer. The music did not sound so good in the movie because it was mixed too low, but at least on the CD it sounded good, I hope you enjoyed it.

Has Chris Carter, or someone else, given you some input about the “I Want To Believe” music?

For “I Want To Believe”, Chris asked me to compile a CD of some of my favorite film music, and /or any music that I thought might have the right mood for his movie. He seemed to like what I chose, and it helped me to come up with a sound for the movie.

Were there any differences to orchestrate “Fight the Future” and “I Want to Believe”?

I thought that “Fight the Future” was much more of a traditional score then “I Want To Believe”. “I Want To Believe”, was I think more modern, and reflected more the sounds that are current now. The “Fight The Future” score was more heavily dependent on electronics and samples.

Is there any difference in writing music for a movie and for a tv show?

Writing for a movie you usually get more time, and have a much bigger pallette to work with. The modern film score today is made up of huge orchestra’s and tons of samples. In fact in “Bat Man: The Dark Knight” Hans Zimmer used 1000 tracks of music in his score, sampled orchestra , live orchestra, electronics, and anything that can make a noise!!

Mark Snow working at the I Want To Believe score

I think “Home Again” and “The Surgery” are very emotional and moving. Compared with the rest of the soundtrack, they have a sort of more positive “breath”, they are bright, less oppressive, less dark… less X-Files, maybe just to point out the new style Chris Carter gave to X-Files in the movie. What do you think about that?

Those are some of my favorite pieces that I ever wrote. The idea of writing beautiful melodic music in X-Files land, is really great. Yes, Chris wanted these emotional pieces in the movie and made it a point to make sure these were included. Thank you for noticing.

Is there a music you wrote for X-Files that after many years it’s still your favorite one?

That’s easy. “Surgery” and “Home Again”. (also, “Post Modern Prometheus”, “Beyond the Sea”, “Scully’s Theme”, hard question to answer)

The X-Files Theme is famous all over the world and people can connect it immediately to the show. Was there a moment in which you understood that your music contributed to create the X-Files phenomenon?

I didn’t think that my music and the theme were that great until after show #6, people started talking about it, and people were telling me how great the music was. All that music I wrote for the show, came so easily for me, that it was such a gift to have it be so successful, and I doubt that it will ever happen, a miracle!

Frank Spotnitz told in his blog that some of your X-Files works will be released in a new album. Could you say us something about that?

In this spring, La La Land records will release a 4 CD boxed set of the X-Files music from the TV shows only. It will have all the shows that I have been nominated for plus probably pieces from episode, I’m sure some of your favorites will be included.

Our huge thanks to Mark Snow for the helpfulness and niceness he showed us upon this occasion.

Last, but not the least, a special thanks to two users of ours, Virgil and Bittersweet, who made all this possible through their “behind the scenes” work.

Sci Fi Wire: Duchovny Still Believes In X-Files

Dec-11-2008
Sci Fi Wire
Duchovny Still Believes In X-Files
Staci Layne Wilson

[Original article here]

The X-Files: I Want To Believe didn’t do blockbuster box office, but star David Duchovny still wants to revisit the role of former FBI agent Fox Mulder, whom he refers to as “mine.” He adds that he wants to believe that The X-Files could live on in a spinoff TV series.

The movie–the second based on the long-running Fox TV series–is out now on DVD, and it is hoped it finds the audience that eluded it in movie theaters over the summer.

That includes Duchovny himself, who confessed that he never saw the film on a big screen. “It’s not a special-effects movie,” he says. “It kind of was coming out in a time when you expected it to be–in the summer. To me, it was more a fall movie.”

Duchovny adds: “It’s a beautiful-looking movie. The location, the glow of the snow and the eeriness of that part of it, I think that looks great on the big screen. Everything looks better on the big screen, but I think that, yeah, it’s less of a popcorn movie than it is a fall movie, … for lack of a better term.”

Duchovny, who is undeniably an SF icon, says that he’s not looking for any more fantastical roles. “I don’t feel a need to score in any sci-fi movie or television show for the rest of my life,” he says. “I think that we can check that one off for me. But I don’t choose genres. I choose characters, so I would never rule out a science fiction movie just because it was the genre. If it had a character or a story that I thought was really interesting, I would do it.”

As for The X-Files, Duchovny says, “I never thought of The X-Files as science fiction. I always thought of it as playing this character in this world. The world was recognizable to me. It wasn’t The Jetsons. It was present time. You couldn’t fly. You couldn’t transport our bodies over a teleport and all that stuff, so it was the real world, and it didn’t feel like sci-fi to me.” Following is an edited version of the rest of SCI FI Wire’s interview with Duchovny.

Do you suppose that the Fox Mulder character could somehow endure along the lines of a Sherlock Holmes or a James Bond? Do you think that other actors could play him, and how would you like to see him go in the future?

Duchovny: I’m sure that someone else could play him, but I’d like to play him for a little while longer. I certainly think it’s a pretty good idea to try to make another X-Files-oriented show on television. I wouldn’t be an actor in it, but I’ve always thought it was a great plan. But I would like to continue on as a movie serial. As far as what actors … I’m not ready to go out to pasture just yet.

What is it about Mulder that keeps you coming back?

Duchovny: He’s mine. I feel protective of him and of it and of all of us. It was the first real, real success of my career and will always be a cornerstone of my life in many ways, the creative endeavor it is. I feel protective of the character and of the show in many ways, and I’m proud of it. I think that it can expand and grow, and .. I find that we have bonds.

I guess Indiana Jones gets aged, but it remains the same movie even though he’s aging. Bond doesn’t age, and I find that a little less interesting, at least for me. I’m not just saying this because I would like to keep doing it, but I always talk to [X-Files creator] Chris [Carter] about how fascinating today it would be to take this guy from his early 30s and let’s take him into his mid-50s, late 50s. Maybe nobody wants to see 60-year-old Fox Mulder, but we can grow him. We can take him through life’s hardships and changes. It doesn’t have to be this cartoon where nothing changes. You can actually form the flow of this movie and the expanse of this show to embrace actual passage of time and what that does to a person and relationships. To me, that’s interesting as an actor and as a person. As an intellectually based character, you don’t give a damn what he looks like.

Since The X-Files: I Want to Believe may not have been the huge blockbuster that everyone was hoping for, we’d like to know: What is your own measure of success for the movie?

Duchovny: I guess it’s always the first time I see the movie. What’s my feeling when I come out? I always felt like the subject matter of this particular movie was limiting. It was dark, and it wasn’t going. I mean, it could always bust out and become something huge, but as you recall, Batman was just suffocating everything at the time. Even so, it was also a $29.9 million movie competing during the summer. It had some stuff going against it in terms of me thinking it was going to break out. I didn’t think that it actually would. It was very dark. The subject matter was limiting in that way. Even though I would hope any movie I do would do the best business it can, that was never going to be a measure of this particular film.

I’ve only seen it one time, and I was sitting in Chris’ editing room. I watched it on a little screen. I guess I missed the chance to see it on the big screen, and that’s too bad, but when I left that initial screening at Chris’ house, the film was pretty much almost done except for some special effects. I just felt like it was really strong and kind of a strangely moving piece of work. Still dark, and still, I thought, limited, but the way that the movie performed did not surprise me so much, and I think that if we do get a chance to do another one … what I always really liked about the show was that it had a dark vision, but at the heart of it being driven by Mulder was this real optimism or wonder or sense of belief, and then it would kind of open out. Most of the best shows that we did would open out into real wonder at the end, if only because you didn’t have an answer, which was the mystery of it, but the wonder.

Mulder’s quest, to me, is a very positive one. If we get a chance to do another one, I think because in this movie Mulder kept getting reinvigorated, Mulder was in a down place for much of this film; he wasn’t driving the way he drives, the way he drove everything before that. In a way, the nature of how we had to get back into the show, which was to take the guy out of his job, also deprived the movie of some optimism and wonder and enlightenment that occurs when you’ve got this unhinged guy trying to prove wonderful crazy things.

Los Angeles Times Hero Complex: Chris Carter hospitalized

Sep-04-2008
Chris Carter hospitalized
Los Angeles Times Hero Complex
Geoff Boucher

[Original article here]

-

I just saw that Chris Carter,the mastermind behind “The X-Files,” is reportedly getting medical care for exhaustion and “an acute sleep disorder.” Whitney Pastorek at EW.com has this brief item:

Chris Carter, writer, producer, and director of “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” was hospitalized on Tuesday due to “physical exhaustion and an acute sleeping disorder,” a source close to Carter tells EW.com. The source says the hospitalization stems from Carter “working on multiple films back to back over a two year period” — the recently released “X-Files” sequel and “Fencewalker,” a covert project he is rumored to have begun shooting earlier this year. He is expected to recover quickly.

This news follows the announcement last week by David Duchovny’s attorney, Stanton Stein, that the “X-Files” and “Californication” star is in rehab to deal with his sex addiction. Roger Friedman at FOX is reporting that Duchovny was in a program to deal with his pornography addiction and went public with it because a fellow patient took that tidbit to the tabloids, which were about to pop the story. Friedman has been wildly wrong before so I would take that with a grain of salt.

 It was a grim summer for the X-folks. “X-Files: I Want to Believe,” was an afterthought even among sci-fi and genre fans because of the massive competition in the sector this summer. The $30 million film pulled in about $21 million in the U.S. (and about $57 million worldwide), far below expectations. I think it will do quite well as a DVD (people are accustomed, after all, to watching Mulder and Scully on the small screen), but I can’t imagine we’ll ever see another “X-Files” project at theaters.

I interviewed Duchovny over coffee a few months ago for a feature on the film and he was great, very droll but bright and engaging. I wish him well with his efforts to keep his marriage and family intact. I’m sure he loathes that this happening in a public space now. It’s hard to tell if there is some Hollywood code-talk at work, meanwhile, in the announcement about Carter’s medical treatment. I hope things go well for him. I absolutely adored the early seasons of “The X-Files,” and Carter has always seemed like a cerebral innovator as a storyteller.

Access Hollywood: Celebrities Uncensored: David Duchovny & Gillian Anderson

Sep-??-2008
Access Hollywood
Celebrities Uncensored: David Duchovny & Gillian Anderson

[Original article here]
[Youtube version here]

http://widget.accesshollywood.com/singleclip/singleclip_v1.swf?CXNID=1000004.10035NXC&WID=482a0d55893fbe3f&clipID=277667

Los Angeles Times Hero Complex: Spotnitz on ‘X-Files’: ‘If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully…’

Jul-31-2008
Spotnitz on ‘X-Files’: ‘If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully…’
Los Angeles Times Hero Complex
Geoff Boucher – Gina McIntyre

[Original article here]

I haven’t made it yet to see “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” (I’ll blame those five days gobbled up at Comic-Con) and I think a lot of other longtime X-fans fell into that category on the movie’s first weekend of release. Maybe it’s the passage of time or this summer’s glut of must-see genre fare, but I just haven’t felt a great sense of urgency to get out to see the movie.

Gina McIntyre, one of my colleagues here at The Times, had a chance to sit down recently with Frank Spotnitz, the producer of the film and longtime creative presence in the franchise’s history, and here is her Q&A with him, appearing for the first time anywhere. Reading it does make me want to see the movie — not unlike reading a letter from an old friend — but it’s still a surprisingly faint urge.

You’ve said that the movie is a standalone story that doesn’t require people to be all that familiar with the show. Was there a sense that the mythology became too complicated to update or were you looking to create something outside of those narrative constraints?

If we’re lucky enough to be able to do more movies, at some point, we will be revisiting that mythology. In the show, we said that Mulder believes the aliens are coming in December 2012, so that’s a date we’d certainly hit if we’re fortunate enough to keep making these. But for this movie, from the very beginning, when it was first discussed six years ago, we wanted to do a standalone. We had to do a mythology movie last time. We were in the midst of the TV series, and the studio wanted a big event movie that would clearly be something you couldn’t get at home for free. This time around, we didn’t feel any of those constraints. We felt we could really do what the show did most of the time, which was deliver a scary supernatural mystery.

You’re keeping the film’s plot secret, but can you give any sort of broadstrokes description of the story?

It’s real time, six years from where we last saw Mulder and Scully. It’s a scary, creepy intimate story, a mystery obviously. It’s really more about them and their relationship than the show usually was. When you’re doing a TV show, you’ve got to do so many episodes that unless you want to risk becoming a soap opera, you really can’t spend that much capital on their personal lives week in and week out. The audience would get compassion fatigue after a while. So, we were very stingy about that in the TV series.

What’s the nature of their relationship in the film?

It’s obviously one of the big questions fans want to know — are they together? Have they been seeing each other these past six years? If they are together, what’s the nature of their relationship? Is it romantic or not? That’s one of the big cards that we’ve been trying to keep hidden until the movie comes out. But we didn’t want to take for granted that there would be any more movies after this. This could be it. If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully, we didn’t want to leave anything on the table.

Since the last movie was released and the series ended, there’d been talk of doing another film, so you must have had ideas in mind. Is this film based on one of those ideas or did the story emerge more recently?

We spent weeks in 2003 working on this. It actually was quite difficult to come up with something that was sufficiently different from anything we’d done on television. We came up with something that’s not 100% unlike anything we’d ever done before, but we felt it was different enough to justify making a movie about. We pitched the story back then to the studio. Deal-making started and then there was the threat of a lawsuit that stopped everything dead cold for four years. The issue got resolved in 2007, and suddenly we were back at work and we’d lost all our cards [plotting out the story] from 2003. At first it felt like a disaster, but it ended up being a real blessing because we had to start from scratch on Mulder and Scully and on the personal part of the story. In those four years, we had changed. We realized Mulder and Scully would have changed. We found we had a lot of stuff to say that was completely new and unlike anything we’d done before.

Have the intervening years affected the ways in which you and Chris Carter collaborate?

I’d say what was really different was the pressure was very different. There’s a certain amount of pressure you put on yourself all the time, the pressure to do good work. But it wasn’t like doing a TV show, where it’s not just this script, it’s the five others that you have to be working on at the same time. We sat for days at Pete’s coffee in Brentwood before we even started to work on the story again, talking about life and ideas. Then we spent weeks and weeks in his office in Santa Monica outlining the movie before we started writing. The writing we didn’t do together — Chris would write and send me his files from Santa Barbara, and I’d go over them and send them back. It reminded me of going back to my earliest days when I was new to television working with Chris on a story.

Can you describe the atmosphere on set?

It was a really nice atmosphere on set because everybody wanted to be there. David and Gillian wanted to be there, they focused so hard, especially on their scenes together. We had a great guest cast that were so much fun. We were laughing all the time. The hard part was being in the snow because we were in Pemberton, north of Vancouver, subfreezing temperatures, 14 hours a day for three weeks, often through the night and that was challenging.

Chris and I developed a great affection for a place called the Mount Currie Coffee Company. They make something there called a Canadiano, which is an Americano with maple syrup in it. After about a week, they ran out of maple syrup because they were not used to selling so many Canadianos. So we bought our own maple syrup and we stuck it under the counter and if you had the password, then they would bring out the maple syrup for you. The password was Peter Nincompoop.

Why did you decide to keep the film’s plot so tightly under wraps?

We realized early on that we were in an extremely unique position because it would have been six years since people had seen these characters and there was going to be many, many questions people would be asking about what Mulder’s been doing, what Scully’s been doing, the nature of the relationship. It seemed a shame to spoil everybody’s fun by telling all that before the movie has opened. There’s nothing like the experience of sitting in a theater and watching a story for the first time. It is not the same if you know in advance what’s going to happen. And everybody knows that. I have to say the attitude of the fans out there has been entirely supportive.

Having said that, it has been extremely challenging trying to keep it secret. We realized pretty early on that we actually had to engage in disinformation. What happened was we put out enough disinformation that even if something genuine did leak, no one would know the difference between what was fake and what was real so everything became suspect. We didn’t do that to mess with the fans. The one risk we had in the disinformation we put out was you don’t want to put out a false story that people get so excited about they’re disappointed when that’s not what the movie’s about.

How do you plan to appeal to new audiences who didn’t watch the series?

I don’t know. We’re certainly trying, and we’ve certainly written the movie to work for people who have never seen the show before. I still believe in these characters and their appeal and the power of this fictional world that Chris created, so I do think it’s a natural for audiences of any age, not just people who were born before 1980 or however old you would have had to have been to watch it when it first came on television.

The interesting thing is that “The X-Files” is its own little sub-genre. It’s such a specific thing the way these two characters go about investigating things. It’s not just the relationship between Mulder and Scully personally, but the fact that one is a believer and one is a skeptic and they’re such super-smart people. These stories can’t help but be smart and work on that level. I continue to find it fascinating and just hope other people do too.