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!]