You read my interviews with the creators of Lost and Heroes and they're really good at giving vague answers. Perhaps the predecessor to all of that was The X-Files. That show's off the air and the mystery still continues. They have a new movie coming out, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and Carter is still not talking about the plot. But then, it wouldn't be The-X-Files if he did.
Crave Online: Why was there such a long period of time between the first film, the end of the series and this film?
Chris Carter: Fox came to us a year after the TV series ended, and said, “If you want to make another movie, let’s go” and we went. We worked out a story, and they liked it. Negotiations began, then it all broke down over what I will call TV contractual problems, which took, unexpectedly, years to resolve. It’s the nature of the business. When it was finally resolved, they called us back and said, “If you still want to do that movie, we still want to, but you have to do it now. It’s now or never. There is a writer’s strike looming and if you don’t do it now, it might be two years before you get another opportunity and we think that’s too long. You will have asked the audience to wait too long.' We agreed. So that is why we did it five years out. It’s now six years since the show was on the air.
Crave Online: Why do a standalone story when so many fans want answers?
Chris Carter: If you look at The X-Files generally, we did 202 episodes. About 80% of them are not mythology episodes, which tend to be the epic episodes. They deal with the big conspiracies, the search for Mulder’s sister. They deal with what I would call the saga of The X-Files. When we finished the first movie, we said the next movie we do will be a story that stands alone, what some people call a monster of the week story. We wanted to do a story that didn’t require you to have any knowledge of that ongoing story arc. So that is simply why we chose to do a story like this.
Crave Online: Why was it important to go back to Canada?
Chris Carter: Returning to Canada was something we all talked about doing. Vancouver is one of the stars of the show. It helped put us on the map, and vice-versa. Working up there for five years, we had friends, many of the crew had become our friends. It was returning home again, it was a reunion of sorts, even though we did a number of TV shows up there. So sometimes we didn’t get X-Files crew, we had Millennium crew. Mark Freeborn, the production designer, did every episode of Millennium. So that was great. Filming in the snow is a challenge, but it is free production value. It’s hard. It’s 10 times harder than making a movie outside the snow, but what you get is beauty. You pay for it personally, but you get a lot on the screen without having to pay for it otherwise.
Crave Online: With so much mythology and so many characters over the years, how did you decide what to put in this movie?
Chris Carter: We wanted to make this as pure a movie as we could, about Mulder and Scully. They are the essence of The X-Files. I spoke about how struck we were with their relationship and their emotional story and returning to the show after such a long absence. The more characters you bring in from the past, the more explaining you have to do, and the more it gets wrapped up in the mythology of the show. In this movie, we wanted to keep it as simple as we possibly could. There were many other characters we talked about that we would have loved to bring back in this movie. Ultimately, there was only room for one. But it’s not a sign of any lack of enthusiasm or affection for the others.
Crave Online: How much input did David and Gillian have in coming up with the backstory for the last six years of Scully and Mulder's life?
Chris Carter: We told them what we were going to do. They agreed that that was the right thing to do after 16 years of this relationship. It felt like it would have been dishonest, if they are going to be together, not to show them together. So we told them about that, and they knew it was coming when they read the script.
Crave Online: Were you surprised they seemed to have a hard time getting back into character?
Chris Carter: You can imagine it was hard five and a half years later. They’ve been playing so many different characters. You see Gillian in Bleak House, for example. You think about how different that character is. You see David in Californication, how different that character is. They had not been Mulder and Scully for a while. So putting those clothes back on, and feeling the fit of those shoes, the uniform, if you will, I think naturally is going to take some effort. It was not dissimilar for Frank and myself, writing this script. That first scene, where Scully comes to Mulder in his office, that was the hardest scene in the movie, I think, because what do you say after six years? How do you have these characters have a conversation that is true to the story but is also the first time we have seen them in a room together after such an absence?
Crave Online: Did you do any test audiences with the movie? Could you even?
Chris Carter: We only showed it to family and friends. We did not do any market testing. Fox was adamant, as were we, about keeping the movie a secret. Also, I think you can really drive yourself crazy by showing it to a select group of die-hard fans. If you show it to 30, you are going to get 30 different impressions of what you didn’t do, or what you did do, or what you should have done more of. So we really went with our gut. That’s the way we always have worked on the show. Are there questions unanswered? There are so many questions, you couldn’t answer them all. It probably would have been a different kind of movie if we had tried to answer them all. Certainly, if we are successful here, I’m sure Fox will want to talk to us about another movie, but we did this movie as if it were the last time we were going to see Mulder and Scully because we just don’t know.
Crave Online: How do you look back on the later years of The X-Files?
Chris Carter: I think we are proud of the work we did, that we went nine seasons. Let me tell you, after five years of a show, it gets hard. Any show gets hard but that where the going gets tough and the tough get going. Some of the best storytelling came in the last four years of the show, I would say. We hit our stride. We had to deal with some changes when David left the show. We loved those characters, we’d like to bring those characters back. I’m glad we went nine years. One of my favorite writers is Robert Graves. He talks about an energy that creates something, that impulse of lightning, that creative spark. Everyone loves that part of it. They love that thing that results, which is more creativity. Then there’s something he calls maintenance energy, which is where you have to actually then take something and maintain it, and feed it, and care for it, and nurture it, and freshen it. That energy is one of the toughest things to find. If you can find it and work through it, I think that’s where the real hidden treasures lie.
Crave Online: You talk about bringing those characters back, did you always have Billy Connolly in mind for the new character here?
Chris Carter: Yes, I had Billy Connolly in mind when I wrote it. We didn’t know if we would get Billy Connolly. I almost didn’t get to meet him because of a problem with transportation. But, planes, trains, and automobiles, I actually got to sit in front of him, telling him what a big fan I was of his, and I thought he could do anything. He was honored, I think, and flattered. He took the script, which I wasn’t giving out to people, and I gave it to him without all the forms we usually make people sign. He took it with him to New York, read it on the plane, and wrote me the nicest note which I will have framed on my wall: “When do we start?” It was that simple.
Crave Online: You still leave this movie with questions. Is that just the nature of The X-files?
Chris Carter: You have these catch-phrases that you associate with The X-Files. “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything.” “Believe the Lie” was one of them. In this case, there are two things: we never establish whether he was a real psychic or if he was just doing this to exonerate himself, if you will. So you have to take that on faith. There is a moment at the end of the movie, where Scully is looking down at the boy, and we wanted you to take that on faith as well.
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