Chris Carter, X Files

29:59And you know what? It just comes down to that love. It took so long for it to be stated, acted upon. It was the secret sauce for the show, which is sexual tension from characters that you love and respect. He had tremendous amount of respect for her and she for him. And it was that that gave the show its gravity. Considering their FBI agents in the show, are there any requirements like does the government have to approve your shows? This is a really interesting thing. I write this pilot and I call up the FBI and ask them some questions. They're kind of reluctant to answer my question. Who are you?

30:43What are you doing? What's your name? Never heard of you. So they were reluctant to answer my questions originally. And then the show got picked up and all of a sudden we get a call from the FBI. And who were you? What are you doing? And I thought, oh, no, they're gonna shut us down. The FBI is actually... Could they have shut you down? Of course not. It was nerve -wracking because the FBI was not portrayed necessarily in a good light. But of course they didn't shut us down. And soon enough they became secret fans of the show. And by the time the first season aired, we got invited to Quantico and we got to...

31:28So cool. And actually that we're talking about what inspired the show and the idea and the FBI was, I love silence to the lambs. And Scully doesn't have red hair by mistake that was right from Jody Foster. So that was the FBI was, of course, front and center for me. Did you ever get to talk to them about what did they like, what they did? And they, but everything was off the record. And I got to meet with people who were going to the, the profiling, you know, just like clueless starling work and the behavior of profilers, I got to meet with them, hang out with them. We got to shoot in the firing range, you know, it was like, it was Disneyland.

32:08And that's the way it continued. I became friendly with FBI agents. I actually took a course at the FBI. So it was an immersion for me. We both benefited mutually because actually people became interested in the FBI. There's something called the scully effect. And women, predominantly, it changed the course of their lives and their careers. People became scientists, you know, STEM scientists. And even FBI agents because of Asian scully. And that's actually one of the things I'm most proud of is that it actually affected people's lives something other than just entertainment. She demonstrated a different course available.

32:53Yes, she did. Would the FBI ever say, hey, you got this wrong? This is how we would do it? Or would you ever contact them and say, hey, this is what's happening? Yeah. How would you guys handle this? It's more like that that we would say, what would you do if? What would you do if? Yeah. You know, the show, I always say, without scully, without the skeptic, the show wouldn't have made it. All the science fiction is based on real science. And we were rigorous about making the science It's absolutely real, and it came from a lot of research on our part. Before the internet, where we would actually go to scientists and say, what if this, this, and this, and the show is based on those two words, what if?

33:36What if this science could be proven to be this science fiction? So Scully is the anchor for the show, and Mulder is the person who is being pulled back from outer space. So many of the subjects covered in the show at the time seemed so way out and unbelievable and so many of them have come to pass in the world remarkably so. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, the first big one was clones. When they cloned that sheep, Dolly, you know, we were playing clones were science fiction, all of a sudden it wasn't the case anymore. And there are so many things like that in the show. In nanobots. Yes. The things that now that you read about in the paper now, you were talking about 30 years ago.

34:25Yeah, exactly. AI. Yeah. Although AI has been around a really long time. Yeah. Where would all of those potential future ideas come from to make it into the show, I meant to make it into the world? Yeah. You hire a group of people, really talent people, which is the secret to the success of the show. And secret to my success is based on the smart, talented, good work of a select group of people who had good ideas and who made the show what it is. And they, you know, the writers command it's not like they're just doing your concept. They are recreating, developing your concept. And it so happened that I either hired or was suggested that I hired just the right people to make it work.

35:25And would they do research as well? Yes. It's not just like made up fiction. No. It always seems like it's rooted in some... It is. Something. Yes. It's rooted in science or it's rooted in conspiracies. It's rooted in, you know, just like a satanic ritual abuse. I had a neighbor growing up who believed this young woman that she had been subjected by her family to satanic ritual abuse. Things like that, someone told me I had a dream. I saw a ghost. You know, a lot of it was pulled from to an air like that. Have you ever had a metaphysical experience in your life? Well, I'd like to say I haven't, But like anyone who's experienced Kismat, serendipity, coincidence, Deja Vu, I've had all those things and I have thoughts about that too.

36:19Yeah. It was a long time, or many episodes, before we ever saw an ET. Yeah. The law was laid down. I mean, that we are not going to see an alien for five years. Yeah. Of course, we saw an alien first episode of Season 2. Because clearly on the show, we get the impression they're aliens, but by not seeing them, there's always this doubt. Yes, exactly. And was the plan to keep that as long as possible? Yes, keep it as long as possible. And like all the rules, I laid down, everyone broke them. Free Lee. How did it change once you've seen Alien? Yeah. It's really a different show, no? It is. And I was given very good advice, and I've spoken about this since the beginning, that one of the reasons this show succeeded is a conversation I had with a man named Rick Carter, no relation, but 40 -year -old friendship, and now an Academy Award -winning production designer.

37:23But he has been Steven Spielberg, among other top directors, their production designer. And when I wrote the pilot, I gave it to him to read. He had just done 44 episodes of a Spielberg series called Amazing Stories. And they had worked, you know, 22 episodes in a season. And they were all different. So no standing sets. It's really hard to do what they had done. Then the show was canceled after the second season. And that was right when I gave him the X -Files pilot. And he read it and he said, I like this. He says, I'm going to give you some really good advice. He says, you're not going to have any time or any money.

38:07So put all the scary stuff in the shadows. Let us imagine the scary stuff. And you're going to get a lot of mileage and you're actually going to be able to produce the show. And that was such sage advice. It really saved us. Yeah. Because they're always stacked at odds against you. Because they know, you know, in their hearts you're going to fail. You know, most things fail. But that advice really set the path that we started on and the cinematography became dark, which is great for the feel and atmosphere of the show. We were in Vancouver, which has free atmosphere. Everything contributed to that cinematic experience that was scarier by what you imagine than by what you saw.

38:57Yeah, our imagination is much wilder than anything you can show on the screen. Yes. So if you imply it, everyone gets to make their own scary monster. Exactly. That's the secret to movie making right there. Yeah. Yeah.

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40:43How would you decide to add a new character over time? How would that happen? And how would you decide when a new character came, whether that character was going to stay, whether they were just on one episode? You've got to be bold to kill off a popular character is kind of shooting yourself on the foot. But we did that. We would put characters, everyone came to know and love And at the end of the first season, for example, there's a character named Deep Throat, and he dies at the end, and his last dying words are a trust -no -one. And it became a kind of, you know, that was the hook. What was his character?

41:18He was Deep Throat. He was a like Deep Throat again. In the Watergate story. In the Watergate story, all the prisoners, man, which continues to be a movie I watch every year. Yeah. What is remarkable about that movie to me is everyone knows the outcome of that movie. when you sit down to watch it. And yet it's still riveting. It's an intense experience. And I wanted to bring that experience to the show too. One of the stars gets pregnant in real life. And I imagine you weren't expecting that. Nope. And how do you deal with that? It's funny. It was really a fork in the road. I had a network executive say to me, you've got a fire.

42:04You have to replace her. We can't have a pregnant actress on the show who plays a chaste scientist. And you know, when the people spending the money are giving you the orders and that's the way it works, you have to take it seriously. Anyway, I told them I didn't want to get rid of her. I thought I'd make her disappear with a storyline. And sure enough, I was able to have Scully abducted. And we had to shoot around her pregnancy for a time. I remember I did a scene where she's at a super market checking out and something happens with the scanner or something there's something paranormal happens.

42:47And we just hid her behind all the stuff at the, you could only see her head exactly. Was that a common thing where things would happen in real life and it would impact what was possible to do? Yeah, and that's the big one is that was Kelly's abduction. It really changed the way the mythology would never planning on that originally. That just happened. We had to figure it out on the fly. Yeah. It's part of the mystery of doing what we do and of doing what you do is discovery and accident and revolutionary things on the show that change your mind. And that said, and this is another rabbit hole, when the show got to be like in season seven or so, and we had this mythology.

43:37The mythology was really the way to deal with Mulder and Scully's personal lives and their relationship and their relationship to Mulder's sister's abduction among other things, what Charlie believes or what she's seen. We did a movie in Year 5 of the show, and it just so happens that Scully is lying in the snow and ice when a UFO takes up and of course, she's turned away. She's Indisposed and she turns away and she never sees the spaceship. So it's stuff like that We played with but I was gonna say that in like season seven. I realized that that the stories almost start telling themselves. Because you've laid down so much foundation that the shape of the building is dedicated to what you have already laid out.

44:32Would you ever look back to old episodes to find loose threads that you could continue? Yes, and there were keepers of that faith. Frank Spott and it's came to work on me. We were in the same book club early on. He was writing for Entertainment Weekly. I hired him in season two of the show, and we became kind of keepers of the mythology, and we'd do roughly four mythology shows of season. So those would be personal shows based on their backstories and their relationships, and their relationship, but also on what the government knew and wasn't telling us about aliens and UFOs. Yeah. Did the scientist ever have a metaphysical experience during the course of the show?

45:19Oh, yeah. At one point, we switched it. So she became the believer and he became the skeptic. Very interesting. Yeah. And it was a big moment and a big direction change. Yeah. And how did it impact her to become a believer? What's that like when someone is a person of science and who gets shown something that they can't believe. What happens? In Islam, which like, you know, not believing your own eyes. Yeah. Yeah. So she didn't believe her own eyes. Or she questioned whether what she saw was actually what she saw. Jesus scientist at heart. Yeah. And we can go into what she saw and what it's all about.

46:03And actually, I'm going to jump forward with you here just a little bit. But the last two seasons of the show, we did I think six episodes and then ten episodes came back to do what they called season 11 and season 12. Even though during the first nine years of the show, we would typically do 22 to sometimes 25 episodes a season. There was a lot. Wow. Anyway, but we came back and we did these episodes and I was a big fan of the NowSkard. My struggled books. I love it. I know this book. There are a number of them and they are a detailed account of this guy now scards life. I just loved them. So I decided to do four episodes called My Struggle.

46:46It was Mulder Struggle, Scully Struggle, the cigarette smoking man, the evil villain's struggle. And then the struggle of Mulder and Scully's son, they actually have a baby together and and having to give the baby away to keep it safe. And that baby has grown to a young man and that reunion was long hoped for by X -Files fans. So I wanted to deal with that at the very end of the show. And so through those four episodes, which are continuing to be largely misunderstood, I developed possibly what is the biggest idea that the X -Files has ever posited, and I'll tell you that it's going to affect the X -Files is about to be rebooted.

47:37Really? Yes, by this guy Ryan Kubler, this, you know, very successful movie director has a movie in the theaters right now called Centers Big Hit. He's going to do it, he wants to do it with a diversity cast, but he's got something to deal with that he's not aware of yet. And that is that Scully's character will come to know shortly something that will not only change the course of her life, career, biology, but the course of all of our lives and for generations to come. So it's a big idea that I'd built in and I laid it out sparingly and kind of cryptically and vaguely, but at the very end, I lay in a clue that to this day, I think four years later, no one has figured out.

48:31And so I'm really looking forward to the revelation. So if there's a clue hanging out there, there's a clue hanging out there. That no one's picking up on. Yes. But that leads to a very big story coming. Very big. That's amazing. That's amazing. Do you think about this all the time? I'd think about it. Every time I read something, I think, that's interesting. It's everything, how it is. And your book spells it out. It's a nature of art and artists. And you've enclosed everywhere we look. All you do is open your eyes. Driving down the street, be a careful driver like I am. But look around. Just open your eyes to life in the world.

49:15And I walk outside every night. You make those stars. I make notes, I have to force myself to make notes because I always think I have a great memory. And it's not as good as I'd like it to be. I find if I don't write things down, it's gone. Yeah. Yeah. It's gone. Yeah. Sometimes I even write it down and then don't know what it means later. That's how long it is. Was it difficult to keep up with the number of stories he needed? You said 22 to 25 per season. Yeah. That's a tremendous amount of stories. How do you do that? Really, its only standing set is Mulder's office at the FBI. And so that means you are on the road creating everything.

49:57Everything's from scratch. Everyone was a little movie unto itself. So that was hard, and once again I hired just the right people, or those people came into my life. And directors were all important to our success. and there are four of them that, you know, I wouldn't say they're as responsible as anyone on the show for the success of the show. And that's not always the case with TV. It is not. Their guns for hire mostly. Would like director one work on this week and then director two work on the next week. And so director one would end up coming back for the fifth, something like that. Yes, it worked kind of like that where they hop.

50:39It took turns. They were hopped over each other. And shows being production all the time? Yes. You know, you never had enough scripts to begin. Yeah. I worked 11 and a half months a year. And if I wasn't writing those extra two weeks on vacation, I was already behind. There's a famous Rod Serling Quo where he says, if I drop my pencil on two weeks behind. How great was Rod Serling? You know, that's the TV we grew up on. Yeah. Genius. Yeah. Genius. Brilliant. Yeah. Does the government ever turn on the agents over the course of the series? Yes. And it's all part of the plan. I call them evil geniuses.

51:24Kurt Anderson wrote a book called Evil Geniuses came out a few years ago. It's excellent. And really for me, it says a lot about what I was trying to imagine and build into the show for decades. And Kurt Anderson makes a very factual case for this. Where we are today has been in progress for decades. And that this moment in time is the realization of a lot of really careful drawn out processes with a lot of people who don't necessarily want the best for all of us. Tell me more about that book. I didn't ever heard of it. It's wonderful book. Kurt Anderson, he was with Raiden Carter, the co -creator of Spy Magazine.

52:16I knew about him. He was very instrumental in my life as a young writer. He wrote a book called The Real Thing. And, you know, I think he had been a member of the Harvard Lampoon. He was very funny and a Serbic, and it was just what the kind of tone I wanted to develop in my own right. And so I read that book, I loved it, and I'm sure I pulled from it so highly unlikely, or I should say, it was completely out of the blue we want a Golden Globe Award. And I'm being interviewed at the ceremony after we won, and someone reporter said to me, compare the golden globes to the Emmys. I said, well, it's the same thing.

53:03You know, it's Hollywood, ballots, and etc., which I wasn't fudging, but it's the Hollywood foreign press who votes for the movies on the golden globes, and it's your peers who vote for the Emmys. So I was quoted somewhere, and I think in the New Yorker Kurt Andersen reigned me. He with this quote, he obviously, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about, blah, blah, blah. So I took it upon myself to call Kurt Anderson, the guy who, you know, I admired and now has taken me down. And I said to him, and I just want to talk to you about that piece. I said, because I've been a fan of yours for a long time, and I'm going to prove it to you.

53:51And I said to him on the phone, I said, horrid yellow grubs colonized my rice bowl, elders knowing smirks. That was the real thing, high coup in his book. And I had carried it with me, I remembered that high coup. And we ended up talking about having lunch. We never did it, but it was a real, memorable moment for me. What was the syndicate? The Cemnichid is the group of evil geniuses that the Ceggerus smoking man is one of the leaders, he was part of the hierarchy, who are keeping the secret and in lead. They work for the government or no? Yes, they do, but of course, there's something called above top secret, which is where they would be.

54:40They are in lead with the aliens and a colonist and about how what the aliens have plans for. And that figure, I was telling you about this big idea, half a year ago, that is part and parcel. Are the government being on everything in the stories? Is there anything that the government doesn't know about? Yes, yes. For example, the president wouldn't know about a lot of what the cigarette smoking man is doing. That is that above top secret, the idea that they still the government. It is still the government. It's not like some corporate hierarchy outside of the government. No, although we teased that, Glenn Morgan, one of the amazing people that can work on the show, he and his partner, James Wong, wrote some of the best episodes and of directing some of the best episodes.

55:29He actually played with this idea, which is really kind of ripped from the headlines, that we now not only fight wars with our military, We hire these corporate mercenaries and they go out and they do this work and they don't necessarily have to operate under the same rules and regulations that are military -ass to operate under. So they are a kind of renegade. NGOS. Yes, NGOS exactly. That works its way into real life too. It's amazing. Yeah, how important was it for each episode to stand on its own as opposed to being this gets you along in the story? So if we did 22 to 25 episodes a season and we only did four methodologies all the rest are standalone stories and we did what became Demy known as monster of the week episodes so you know most episodes stand on their own and who's Ted O'Malley?

56:31Taddo Malley is the stand -in for Alex Jones. Really? Yeah. Well, I mean, not in real life, but he's been... He's been on Alex Jones. He's been on Alex Jones. Yeah. Would you get ideas from listening to Alex's show? Oh, yeah. Of like what the... Yeah. In fact, after that season, I got a call from Alex Jones. He says, hey, you did a character like me. You want to get together? And I was busy. Oh, too bad. Probably because we're a really good story. I think you would have.

57:07MUSIC

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58:43The first three seasons success was really growing and you're on Friday nights and then all of a sudden the network decides to put you on Sunday nights. Yeah. Why does that happen? How do you feel about it? Yeah. What's going on? It's a good question and how I felt the matter was I felt I was against it. Yeah. I had made a joke. I said my autobiographies get to be called Friday's nine. So it's like, you know, I loved our time slot. It worked. It worked. It worked. It was the perfect show on the perfect night. That's not a night where a lot of people are watching TV. There aren't a lot of available creatures of habit.

59:23They are and they go everyone goes out on Friday night. So they didn't give us the most covered in timeslot to begin with, but I felt it was... It worked. It worked. Yeah. It was our timeslot. And when they came to me and said they wanted to put a send -i something, and that's where the Disney shows are. You know, it's Sunday night is like a big family night. And it's like, we're a cult show. I don't want to be a Sunday show. It just had a kind of cotton candy feel to me. But I listened to them and they're reasoning, which was not unpersuasive. and the show went to Sunday nights. And the great thing about that is a cult show grew into a big cult show.

1:00:06Really? So the audience followed? The audience followed? And we've got to do even more. New audience, right? Also one of those things where, they could have done either way. They could have done either way. Tell me about the international nature of the show. You did shows in different parts of the world. Yeah. Well, there's lots of stories about aliens in different parts of the world, the thing called the Tunguska incident, which was in Russia, a UFO incident. And so, of course, we went to Tunguska, Russia, in the show, and played that part of the mythology. So, UFOs, sightings, incidents, abductions have taken place around the world.

1:00:45and so it's still amazing to me that we have this international audience for the show. That someone, Camel Non -Johnny, the actor who he ended up working with, told me that he is like every Friday night he and his family watch it in Pakistan. You know, and it's like you hear that, it's like really? Yeah. You've got it in Pakistan, but you know, it had a global reach. It also speaks to the nature of when you're dealing with things that are otherworldly or metaphysical, that's not bound to our culture. That's a universal human interest. You're exactly right, and that was just luck. Although that ropersurvey, that psychologist friend gave me, Yes.

1:01:37Really spelled out in scientific terms. What percentage of the population actually believed in the phenomenon? Yeah, yeah. At one point we find out one of the main characters has cancer. Yeah. Where did the idea come from and why did you decide to go in that direction? It had to do with skullies, abduction, and what had been under her or what we didn't know quite yet what had been done to her and that alien intervention or exposure had possibly produced the cancer but also possibly cured the cancer. So it was really just taking something that had happened. This is where the story starts telling itself.

1:02:24And capitalizing on it. You said you have to have the fifth season you do a movie? Yes. Where does the idea come to do a movie? David de Coveney said, because there had been talked about doing a movie. The show... What can you do in a movie that you can't do on TV? Well, what you can do is you get, instead of a $3 million budget, you get a $75 million budget. So it's a bigger... Yeah. Bigger production. It's a big screen approach. And the show... And the story you tell has to have that kind of big screen scope. So it's got to do something that catapults the show into a new orbit. And that's the plan.

1:03:06But David had come to me and he says, look, there's talk about this movie, but if you are, you're not going to do it, tell me because I'm going to go off and do something else. So I thought it's a better idea to do the movie than it was and not do the movie. ended up. So the whole season 4, I have written the movie script. We are prepping the movie script through season 4 of the show. We're still in Vancouver and I have a second show on TV8. So we are prepping a movie and I have another show that has 22 episodes a year. It was, I still don't know how I survived. It was the hardest year of work in my life, especially the way I did the work.

1:03:55I'll tell you just quickly also, it's not micromanagement, it's obsession with the show and its success and the storytelling and everything about it because, you know, I was, I tried to involve myself in everything. And in the end, it was important to the show, but it was also not necessarily a healthy way to live your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was the black oil? That was my idea that we've got this product living beneath us that we use with abandon and it's ancient. And in that substance, which we think of as fuel, their lives, something that predates us. And I thought that was like the aliens themselves.

1:04:47Yeah. And just came to you? Yeah, the idea. Yeah, the great idea. I was mentioning that, a big idea that I was talking about, that I laid in through the last two seasons. Actually, part of that, I just had another conversation. It's an ongoing conversation with my brother. about existence. My brother who is a teacher's physics math is a big part of his life and we always have this conversation about are we creating math or are we discovering math? And I'm for me it's no brainer. For me too. No brainer. Very clear. Yeah. It's the universe. Yeah. And we are or just discover. Math is mapping something that we experience, but it isn't creating it.

1:05:41It's just a way to describe it. Exactly. Pat, math is some other, call it a higher power, call it God, call it whatever you want to call it. The universe, mother nature. An intelligence, an intelligence, that's the better way to put it, is out there it has created math. You could say that I just saw a play about rock -monor -nove. That rock -monor -nove was discovering that music. Yes. I just love that idea. Yes. That we are discoverers. Yes. We're not truly creators. Right. We're recognizing things around us. Yes. And I think the word I used in the book was either reproducing it or representing it.

1:06:33Yes. But it's... We are the filter then. Yeah. We can put a frame on it and share it and say, hey, look at this. Yes. But we're saying, hey, look at the rain. Yeah. We're not creating the rain. We're pointing to it. Right. Yeah. But my bigger idea, in part, and it's a part of where I was going with my mythology episodes, is that I want to take it a large step further. Yeah. I want to say that, you know, there's this music of the spheres, this idea that the planets are in alignment as such and it is a musical chord of sorts, that we are seeing a shape of our solar system that may actually predict the shapes of everything else in our universe.

1:07:22and I don't know that this is not untrue. Even though it's kind of unfounded, is that I wonder if everything, every potentiality, every possibility is out there, and it's we are simply living our lives based on our finding the best potential outcomes, expressions, et cetera, that the universe has some kind of beauty to it like that. that the aliens know. Beautiful. That's what the aliens know. They know those things, and that's why we can't seem to... We see them, but we can't... They know things that we don't know. They love the idea of the... The music of the spheres and the idea of harmony being the thing that...

1:08:12I don't know if locks it together is the right word. But you know, if you hear someone singing, and then someone comes in and... seeing a harmony note in their sharp or flat, when they lock in something happens. And they vibrate together. We could feel it in our bones. Right. I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about working with the network. Were they helpful? Did they get in the way? Yeah. What's good about having a partner like that and what's bad about it? The bad thing is early on, as I was saying, they anticipate your failure. So, they're very micro -managing hands -on. Nervousness can be undermining or not really.

1:08:52Not unintentional. Not intentional. They want it. Just doing their job. I mean, these people have jobs as, you know, their job is to, their executives to make executive decisions. Yeah. But luckily, we were with a, we were talking about Fox was a new network. We were breaking some new ground. We were doing okay, so they eventually came to the conclusion that we knew what we were doing. And so that developed through the first three seasons of the show. Season -free may be one of the best seasons of the show. And so everyone was writing high and you know, go get them. Did it take all the way to season three before they were trusting of you?

1:09:37would you say? No, I mean we had a lot of trust and a lot of good will and that's because there are a lot of really good people who work at the network and the studio who were part of the shepherding process. So we were really lucky in that sense. But we got to season three and we had momentum. And in season four, the team of Glen Morgan and James Wong came back. They had a show on that didn't go in the end. And they came back to the show. And they did an episode called Home. And this is maybe one of the most popular episodes ever on the show. And it's Scariest Hell. And - What's the subject matter?

1:10:28It's mutant kids who probably are having sex with their mother and we don't know that for sure. We can surmise it. And so it's getting killers in breeding and it's a great episode. I don't know how we got to pass the, what they call standard practices at the in -house sensors, But because they believed we knew what we were doing by season four, it's like, okay, you guys, you know better than we, you know what is drawing an audience. Yes. So the episode made it past all the checked points and it aired and the day after it aired, I got a phone call from the guy who hired me originally, Peter Roth, screaming at me, never again.

1:11:23And that episode will never air again. You've gone too far. And it started the process all over again. So now, suddenly, we were being watched carefully because we had upset somebody in New York. So a turning point in the show, we had to be much more careful about it. And the sensors that you can imagine, you know, were also given their orders to watch for our shenanigans. But you're also said it was the most popular episode of the show. Eventually it became the most obvious. Yeah. It was too scary for network television, it was what it was. And we had broken the rules. When you were doing it, did it feel intentional on your part or no?

1:12:12Did it just feel like it's just a good episode? They pitched it to me and it's kind of rough plot points. We did very detailed storyboards and we, I mean, extremely detailed and that came, almost like watching an episode just with, it's still like watching an episode. It's with three by five cards, but it's a, Mojake isn't it right? Drawings? No, they're, it's all hand letter written descriptions of scenes. I see and there were no visuals though. No visuals. No words. And they pitched it to me in very much rougher shape and form than we then I was used to. But by season four these guys had written some of the best episodes of the show.

1:13:01They knew what they were doing. I knew they knew what they were doing. So they pitched to me a rough idea and it was based on a documentary called My Brother's Keeper, which I liked. and so, you know, run with it. You know what you're doing. It makes my job easier than I can take care of other business. Anyway, the show, as I said, caused a lot of trouble. We did a second movie, and the second movie, they were going to give us a third of the budget of the first movie, and we were going to do what was, in essence, a standalone episode of the show in movie form and they would give us, you know, a small budget to do that.

1:13:46And so that sounded like an opportunity for me. It was 2008, the show had been out there for six years. Let's revive it and do something good. And they said, we want a PG -13 movie. I said, you know, there's no problem because network television basically is PG -13. It was a really hard and painful lesson to learn. Is that a PG rating is actually less permissive than network television standards. Wow. And so when I've turned in the first cut of the show to the studio, not dissimilar to the call that I'd gotten about never again, I got a very angry talking to by the studio executive saying, you've gone too far, this is too much.

1:14:40You've got to cut this back. This is not a PG -13. This is not a family movie. And I co -wrote and directed the movie. Yeah. And so it was a big surprise and kind of ugly. And so we had to go cut the movie. In your mind, those were all things that you could have done on the TV show without it being a problem? Probably pushing the limits in some ways, but it's a movie. And so, you know, you want a big screen experience. Yeah. So, you know, we trimmed the movie. And then, as predicted by this guy, this executive, we ran it in front of the centers, the people that rate movies, and they said, no, cut it back even farther.

1:15:22You've got to make this for a more limited audience. And it hurt the movie. For sure. And I can tell you today that I just got permission to do a director's cut on the movie. Yeah, that's great news. Big news, yeah. That's great news. What was the story of the first movie? The story of the first movie is a mythology episode about experiments being conducted, but that there also is a natural component to the abduction of people that involves a virus and it's communicated through beastings and it's a complicated episode that takes us to the Arctic where there's an underground base where abductees are being held in suspended animation and you know it's it's just playing with the mythology and the character's relationships.

1:16:21Was there anything on the show ever predictive of the pandemic? Yes, tell me about that. In the first reboot of the movie, only a few years ago, as she was the chief science adviser for the series originally, and she gave me a lot of science that the show ended up being based on. She's a barologist from the University of Maryland. She is the daughter of my wife's long time friends, So it was one of those things where the human genome project was taking shape. And I had met really interesting people, but she knew about it in depth and she knew the science. She had given me that episode idea for the science, for the final episode of the first season called the Irland Meyer Flask.

1:17:09And that will figure in this big idea that I keep teasing for the show and figures in there, but Anne came back to the show as our science advisor, chief science advisor, and she and another woman, a doctor from Canada, convinced me that we needed to do an episode of pandemic. And we did, we did a pandemic episode before the pandemic. Wow. Amazing. It is. It's like, you know, you say in your book, you know, some ideas are... It's time for it to happen. It's time for it to happen. Yeah. Was it common for science advisers to pitch you ideas on possible stories? No. Have that ever happened before?

1:17:56Yes. But no, we actually didn't take pitches from people. It was, I thought, a recipe for unhappiness. And so all the episode ideas were in -house. She would really comment on our science. She would help lead us in directions, but it wasn't an idea. It wasn't a pitch. It wasn't ever a pitch. Who else besides the science and FBI people would say when you would give them the examples and they would say, well, you could consider this. Were there any other people like in the orbit, either story people or comedians or anyone that would like a way to involve more ideas? We were rich with ideas. So I have to say no.

1:18:42I was part of a really great team. Yeah. And sometimes it didn't work. And they said they're a breakdowns. They're miscuses. But the group of writers that worked on the show, the group of producers that worked on the show, made it the show that it became. We grew up with the internet. Show started pre -internet. It started kind of with the internet. that we were both growing up together. Really? Because we would go into chat rooms, Glenn Morgan more so than I, and get the feedback if the show aired from nine to 10 at 10 o 'clock, he would hear feedback from fans. Describe the audience. You know, it's largely women.

1:19:34And I has a lot to do with the relationship, I think. But I was still reading, opening, you know, envelops with a family. And I opened one and it was a woman who gave me a critique of the show that I took to heart. What she liked about it. Yeah. What she didn't like about it. I love this. She convinced me. Yeah. We had something, but we had to focus on these things. It was kind of that that when did this come? when the trajectory came at the end of the first season. So she had watched 20 odd episodes, and I read it and I thought, she's right. It didn't leave me in a direction. It just told me what to focus on.

1:20:19Yeah. It almost was like she was commenting on the spirit of the show what made it an exciting show for her. And it's not that I had forgotten those things or that they were new to me, But it was just her encouragement that struck me. And so I named a character after her in the season finale. Great. That episode. If you watched the pilot, the first episode called Deep Throat and the Earl and Myr flask at the end, basically that is the foundation for the entire mythology of the show. The show was filmed in Vancouver for many years and then moved to LA. Yes. Why'd you move? The actors wanted to come home.

1:21:05It was like they had been on location for five years and they wanted to be with their friends. How did that impact the show, do you think? I thought it was a good thing. It's among the reasons the show was successful. Was it was made in Vancouver? It could double -form us. Anywhere in the US and the shows took place across the US. It had free atmosphere. Most of the year it had the Personnel who were Completely invested in the show from a PA to a grip to a Best boy Sound production sound mixer like a family family was in it and I tell people they say how did you do it? and why did you do it for so long?

1:21:58For me, I always give the same answer. It was that a spree decor. If you don't have that sense that everyone is working together, and as I say that in the back of my brain, it says, don't forget about this, is that along the way, saboteurs may be too strong a term, but there are people who don't necessarily have your best interest in art. Yeah, yeah, and that was the case there in Vancouver. No, it wasn't actually I don't want to be cryptic about it But it was cryptic's your game. I know it's my guess. That's what you do No, it was just the craziness of producing a TV show We're in the dramatic arts and I tell people this I was I was on the board of the local theater in Santa Barbara and I loved the artistic director and they decided to get rid of him because they had gotten complaints that he was too hard to work with.

1:22:58And I said, we work in the dramatic arts. You deal with dramatic people. These are people who live passionately and have passionate, temperamental, temperamental, and dangerous. Exactly. They express themselves, you know, they wanted somebody who was controllable. Well, I say the same thing about what I'm vaguely referring to is that it's the dramatic arts. You have dramatic people. People that can cause dramas and not necessarily ones that make the show any better. You said you left a clue at the end of the last episode that's leading towards something big coming in the future. Did you put that clue there knowing something was going to come in the future?

1:23:47Yes. How did you know that? I just thought the X -Files could go on forever. Yeah, and it will. Like in your mind, if this is an ongoing thing, regardless of whatever business situations or the story goes on. Yes, the story goes on in my mind and I hope in reality. With the decisions that you made that you thought were important that turned out to be in consequential and the opposite. Anythings that you thought didn't really matter that turned out to mean a whole lot. Terms of storylines and plots. I wanna say that there are episodes that came about that change the course of the show. And I'm gonna tell you that there are episodes but I have to tie them to individual writers like Vince Gilligan who went on to develop Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

1:24:43He had his own brand of X -File that really changed the course of the show. So that was a good hire. It was also somebody you just left alone. When did he come in? What season? He came in, I think, season, like maybe late season two. It was one of those lucky things. We're talking about keep your eyes open, keep your antenna. Yeah. Trained. The man who wrote and directed Risky Business, Paul Brickman, was a friend and years before the ex -miles, he told me about a writer who had written a movie and the movie was not a hit, but he said this guy, he's the real deal and his name is Vince Gilligan.

1:25:29And I remembered it. And so at some point, I realized through my agent who also represents that in Vince Gilligan and that he liked the show. He was a fan of the show. So, Vince came in and talked to us one day and we kind of convinced them to write an episode. That episode led to, I think, seven plus years on the show. Amazing. And changed the course of the show. But there were other people who similarly affected the course of the show. He would write episodes. And they were big kind of comedy episodes with Frank Spannett, who I already mentioned, and John Scheibin, those three would write episodes together that ended up creating a conquered territory on the show.

1:26:22Has the show got more popular? Was it easier to draft really talented writers? No. Tell me about that. It was a hard show to write. Yeah, and we blew through some Some notable writers, but then there are people who just dug in and gave it their all and I'm still friendly with these people they they made us a success What was the loan gunman? That came from the team of Morgan and Wong. They did an episode where they had I think maybe Glenn And maybe both of them had gone to the UFO convention and seeing these guys who had this kind of conspiracy. And I'm probably doing this a big disservice because it probably didn't happen exactly like this.

1:27:12Whatever it was they saw at that convention, they brought it forward with these guys, the lone gun, but had a tabloid called the lone gun and about the Kennedy assassinated. They became known as the lone gun men, but the paper was called the lone gun man. and anywhere they became very important to the shows in storytelling sense, because they were people out there on the fringes of the phenomena. Is it true there was an episode about a plane flying into the world trade center? Yes. How is that possible? It wasn't on the X -Files, it was on a spin -off called the Lone Gunman, but still how is that possible?

1:27:50It's too specific. We weren't the first people to actually suggest this. The actual, the World Transcendent was designed to take an airplane strike. Really, but a small airplane, not a jet liner. So it wasn't that it wasn't out there as a suggestion or thought or concern. So we just capitalized on that. What are some of the wildest plotlines you can remember that were actually based on stories that were true. It's hard to answer that. Giving an answer by telling you something that is somewhat embarrassing. You know, we're talking about a show that is over 30 years old. Yeah, and so hundreds of episodes.

1:28:39Yes, so it's a very possible 300. Yes, and so anyway, my wife and I decided a couple of summers ago to watch the show again from the beginning. and it was mind blowing. Great experience, great experience. Yeah. But I would be asked a number of times during each episode, how did you do that? And my answer, common answer was, I don't remember. Yeah. So a lot of you could be surprised by anything you saw on the show or no? Typically no, because I was involved in every episode So just some lesser or greater degree. So I lived and breathed the show. So no, they weren't surprising to me, but it was almost sometimes like watching the show for the first time.

1:29:29Yeah, it was wonderful. Probably in many ways it was like watching the show for the first time for real, because when you're so involved in making it, you can't really see it with eyes like an audience And you are pointing up something that was one of these lighting bulb moments. We did that first movie in season at the end of four, beginning of five, we made that movie. And I had for five years, roughly, before the movie premiered, been watching the show at home with my wife. And a couple times I went out to the in Vancouver on Friday nights, a bar started showing me. And people came to the bar.

1:30:16It was great. And I got to sit with them. That was really exciting. But generally, I watched the show in the editing room. So at the premiere of the first movie, I decided to go up to the balcony and watch the show from the balcony. One of the reasons I am doing what I'm doing today and chose my career is I went to see apocalypse now on one of its first nights and I loved it. I loved it and there's a scene where Frederick Forest is in the jungle and a tiger leaps out. It's one of big scare, big scare. And so when I saw the movie that night, I went home to San Clemente, whatever that is, 80 miles, and decided I wanted to go back the next night to see the movie again.

1:31:17So I drove to the center of Modone to see the movie again, but I knew the tiger was going to jump out. So where did I turn my perspective to the audience? I wanted to watch everyone jump, and in fact that's what everyone did. and I said, this is powerful. I want to do this. Wow. That in Bacchini experience, what the X -Files movie was similar to that, where I got to look down and see, are they laughing at the right point? Are they jumping at the right point? Are they scared? It was really satisfying. That's great. Would you call the X -Files sci -fi or no? Yes. And what? I resisted it. Yeah. You know, there's, Steenitz Beaver always said that Closin counters with speculative signs.

1:32:04So it's great. Yes, so I went with that. Yeah, that's what I said. That's great. Do you think of it as a political show? Yes. How has the world changed since the X -Files? That's a good question. I can tell you that the show ended in 2002. And that's very close to 2001, which is a very important And turning point in the history of, you know, planet Earth. Yeah. Everyone loved the conspiracy idea that there was a conspiracy and they, that the government was not acting in your best interest. And when 9 -11 happened overnight, the government was there to protect this. And we believed that the government was protecting us.

1:32:55We believed it or we wanted to believe it. We wanted to believe it because we don't anymore. We think that in fact that's changed and now it's called the Deep State or whatever it is. But it gave us a clear chance to believe. Would you connect the show ending at 9 -11 as somehow related? Yes. Wow. Is it possible the X -Files is actually nonfiction? Yes. It is possible and it has to do with science. Because they show us based on what if... Sometimes the what if becomes... If, yes, if, yes. It is exactly, yeah.

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