X-Files fans who want to go into the theater knowing as little as possible about the return of Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) will be safe reading this transcript through. For others who'd love to have at least an inkling of what they're getting into before buying a ticket, writer/producer/director Chris Carter describes the story in the broadest possible manner by telling potential viewers to consider this film a stand-alone story that follows along with Scully's and Mulder's character arcs built up over the course of the TV series. In other words, you don't need to be up on every plotline from the TV series to understand what's happening in The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
Chris Carter and Writer Frank Spotnitz Press Conference:
Why was there such a long period of time between the first film – and 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 writers 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 [the movie] five years out. It's now six years since the show was on the air."
Why this particular story?
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."
Frank Spotnitz: "We actually came up with the X-File for this in 2003. We walked away for four years. When we came back… we actually lost our notes so we had to start over. Of course, we remembered a lot of it."
Chris Carter: "He lost them."
Frank Spotnitz: "'Someone' lost them. In the process of starting over, we found ourselves so interested in where Mulder and Scully were in their lives, and the nature of their relationship. We realized that in order to be true to the characters, that relationship could not have stood still. It had to have changed. We saw it much more emotionally than we did immediately after the show ended. I think it is an unexpectedly emotional film. That was just the story that came out of us, the story we really wanted to tell. The more you think about this movie, the more parallels you will see between what the bad guys are doing, and what Mulder and Scully are doing, and what Scully is doing with the boy [she's treating]. There are a lot of resonances that may not be obvious on a first viewing. It just felt emotionally right."
"It did occur to me many times that, because we did 202 episodes and because there are so many devoted fans, there are probably at least as many ideas about what this movie could and should have been. There's really nothing we can do about that. We are kind of victims of our own success in that way. But for us, it was never a question. That was what was in our hearts, and it has always served us well in the past."
Can you talk about returning to Canada to shoot and shooting in those weather conditions?
Chris Carter: "I was just telling Bob Strauss that my feet are still numb from the experience. 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."
Frank Spotnitz: "I just kept wondering, 'Who was dumb enough to write this in the snow?' It was extremely uncomfortable. I'm from Arizona, so I have no tolerance for the snow. I was bundled up like the Michelin man the entire time we were there. But it was important for us to go back to Vancouver. It felt like going home to us, because it was the city that really built our success, and we had to leave after five years. We all wanted to go back there. We wrote the script to work in and around Vancouver. Aside from the people and crew, who are phenomenal, there is just a quality about Vancouver, the light, the feel of the city that just adds atmosphere to the film. I think you really see that in the movie. The snow…it's forbidding. It's a hostile environment, without anything even happening. That environment is just not hospitable to human life. And things can be hidden in [the snow]."
