Chris Carter and Writer Frank Spotnitz Press Conference:
Chris Carter: "I'll give you a brief idea of what it is like to work in the snow. One of the things you do on a movie set is you move all of your junk from one place to another. You are filming from one direction, so you have to move your junk over here, including the cameras. You roll it on wheels, or you drag it along. In the snow, it just doesn't work that way. In the snow, you've got to get snowmobiles and sleds and it's loud and smelly and time-consuming. Communication – you don't want to trample the beautiful snow, so the way you communicate with your actors is to yell in their direction, 'More of that! No, less!' Directing becomes by semaphore, and nothing prepares you for it until you do it."
With so much accumulated mythology and characters, how did you decide what to put into this movie and what not to try to shoehorn in?
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 earlier 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."
Were you surprised that both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson admit they found it hard to get back into their characters after all this time?
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?"
Did you do any test screenings of this movie? Was there any kind of reaction from the die-hard fans about some of the issues that were maybe left unresolved? Do you think it would open it up for another feature?
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 [people], 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."
There was this impression that, towards the end, The X-Files was playing it a little by ear. Do you think that's fair, looking back six years later? That you did those seasons really well?
Chris Carter: "Yeah, I think we are both 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's 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 [the new agents who replaced Mulder and Scully], we'd like to bring those characters back. I'm glad we went nine years."
Frank Spotnitz: "I would just add… for me, the last two years of the show were among the most fun and most satisfying years of the show. Obviously, we couldn't have planned for the show going nine years, or for David reducing his presence on the show. Obviously Doggett and Reyes were not part of the original design. That's not even an attempt at a secret. It was enormously challenging and satisfying to write for those characters. I understand why a number of fans just couldn't get emotionally invested without Mulder there. That makes total sense. The show was built around Mulder. There has been a bit of conventional wisdom about those last two years that really isn’t corresponding to reality, because the show's ratings actually grew when Robert Patrick came in."
