Obsessing on all things The X-Files and Ten Thirteen online since 2005
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 The X-Files mythology episode by episode analysis |
 Thematic articles on X-Files and everything 1013 |
 The archival database project |
The X-Files Revival 2016Introduction: Revival |
The X-Files Revival 2018Introduction: From Season 10 to Season 11 |
+ Perihelion (novel, 2024)
+ IDW comics (S10, S11, more, 2013-2018)
Eighteen years ago (!), in the middle of the summer, a little winter-set thriller was released against the latest Christopher Nolan pompous blockbuster. Incredibly, the story repeated again this year — instead of waiting for a more fitting time like winter, the new cut of IWTB was released in the middle of the summer. When in 2008 the release date was dictated by a writers’ strike that left little else for Fox to release that summer, what can be the motivation for this release?
A few (belated) words on the Director’s Cut of “The X-Files: I Want To Believe”, “Vrach Frankenshteyn” (what a mouthful!).
Carter has tried to promote it extensively — I covered here no less than 30 interviews with him — but all in all there is little to say. The changes are, paradoxically, few and many at the same time. Overall, they do little to change my rather lukewarm appreciation of the film.
Eighteen years of fan analysis and time passing have been kind to the movie. There are a number of things that can be said in the movie’s favour that might not have been obvious at first viewing. The movie’s script is dense with interconnections between its various storylines: the “don’t give up” motto echoes through Scully and the boy she wants to save, through Mulder and pursuing the case, through the “evil” lovers wanting to save one another just as Scully holds on to Mulder even as darkness have a way of finding them. The viewer is challenged upon to think of the concept of Christian forgiveness when faced with a pedophile priest, who is used as a conduit to stop further crimes. There are plenty of narrative coincidences — like Scully finding out about the two-headed dog experiments by searching for an unrelated procedure, or Scully finding the compound via the numbers of the scripture Father Joe quoted — become examples of meaningful synchronicity when viewed from a mystic or religious angle. The first half of the movie is a remake of “Beyond the Sea” with religious elements while the second half is the Frankenstein part with more horror. It is first a questioning of whether morals mean something taking place in a frigid climate, before a figurative descent to Hell full of dirt and blood, and an optimistic ending that takes place in a sunlit spring day with snow melting. The story is about alien abductions performing experiments on women, but of a different sort than the show’s mythology. Some who are more attuned to this movie than me have been quite perceptive about all this.
It must be said, the quality of the photography in undeniable: this was shot on film and you can tell. The cold blue colours in the snow scenes, the warm oranges of the domestic scenes, the grain in the horror scenes. Revisiting this after being saturated with the badly lit digital scenes of most of current productions is a bowl of fresh air.
And then there are all the issues — a slow and unengaging beginning and an anti-climactic ending, unmemorable villains, forced character decisions, some odd choices a bit all over. Despite the above, my feelings haven’t changed much.
So what does the new Director’s Cut do to enhance the experience?
Overall, it is the same movie. There is no new dialogue whatsoever. We learn nothing new about the “bad guys” of the film, who remain unnamed (!) (apart from fleeting glimpses at some paperwork). There is no new scene and much of what is “new” was actually already there in the original Extended Cut/Director’s Cut from the DVD/BluRay release. How could it be any different? The script didn’t have any extra material, and the shooting was holden to the script; even the novelization, based on the script, had nothing extra. Any changes are due to editing — and to what was cut.
Some tighter editing, especially during the first third, helps the movie get along. This is welcome, although despite these efforts the first half is still a slog to this viewer! Some attempts at making the pacing faster make no narrative sense, like the cross-cutting between Scully talking with Christian’s parents and the police questioning the bad guy.
In filmmaking, the editing of image and soundtrack are conceived as parts of a whole: as a result of the changes in the editing, in several places Mark Snow’s music has been changed for a better fit. The orchestral/electronic mix has been substituted with music from the revival series, with its fast rhythmic percussions and tense moments. It does the job of creating an atmosphere typical of a thriller, although I quite liked Snow’s score.
Some superfluous and fancy bits are cut (the dated George W Bush joke, Agent Drummer flirting with Mulder; but I will miss that shot of Mulder digging in a pile of sunflower seeds). Some baggage from the series is cut out, making this more stand-alone and approachable for new fans (exposition to Father Joe about who Mulder is, references to William and Samantha), although in the process we lose the parallels to our agents’ past lives that inform their emotional state. In particular, the references to William are gone, but the line to Scully “If you were a mother you’d understand” is kept, which is like going half-way there in doing the removing, oddly. A mixed bag.
Some scenes are moved around in an effort to make some of the narrative connections I mentioned earlier. The scene of Scully performing the surgery on Christian is now bookended by scenes of the abducted woman witnessing the horrific surgery performed by the Frankenstein-like doctor. We understand the parallel of using science for good or of using science to inflict pain, with both stemming from wanting our loved ones to survive. Unfortunately, Carter has substituted one of Mark Snow’s best tracks, “The Surgery”, with Clannad’s theme for “Harry’s Game”, which is a beautiful song in of itself but I don’t see what it is doing there. The only way I can justify this decision is that Snow’s track was too ethereal, warm and hopeful; the new edit juxtaposes both surgeries and the horrific elements make Snow’s track out of place — but the new track is not a much better fit.
The main selling point for this new cut has been to make it the scary film that was always intended. Compared to the original theatrical cut, the whole climax of the film on the “Frankenstein” compound runs longer, allowing us to see more of what is being done. But as far as I can tell, it differs little or not at all from the original director’s cut. See this comparison.
The main difference in runtime is actually what has been cut from the scenes where Mulder and Scully are together. The new cut makes away with the romance entirely, even mentions to a “home” are removed, to the point where one might think they are not living together and indeed are not together whatsoever (things were rather unclear back then, even reviews of the original cut thought that Scully just visited Mulder’s home; imagine now!). As a person who is attracted to this show for its stories and how these characters relate to them, rather than the romance, I am a bit conflicted. I do welcome the removal of some lines that are completely uncharacteristic of The X-Files (like the scratchy beard tease) and I can even live without the final kiss, although I don’t quite see why it should be removed. However, several scenes no longer work because the Mulder-Scully bits have been trimmed. There are some hard cuts from one scene to the next that don’t feel natural, like when Scully is thinking in bed. The whole Mulder-Scully argument about getting involved in the case feels even more rushed and forced and at the same time not quite there because it is not the focus of the film. In my review of the original, I had conceded that I had so many issues with the “monster of the week” plot that the best part of the movie was how it explored the Mulder-Scully relationship, how the plot was more a background. The new cut wants to return to an early seasons dynamic where the focus is back on the investigation. But what is lost is the emotional connection to these characters. All the scenes in this movie were conceived and shot in a certain way: the original intent still half-remains in what is left and the attempt to remove the relationship is only half-achieved. They would have to have done extensive reshootings to make this fit. The movie is less strong because of it.
Most of the work that went into this new cut, in terms of time spent to do it, is actually nearly unnoticeable of you are not intimately familiar with the original. Carter and his editors have gone back to the original footage and re-examined it in-depth. Many scenes are the same but some shots are different: a different take of the same shot, the same shot but from a different point of view, a reaction shot instead of the shot of who is doing the talking… For Carter, who complained that post-production was done under a big time pressure, this was done to make the best edit out of the material available. It took a lot of dedication; but for these changes I can’t tell what is best. Some more dedicated fans have already done a detailed comparison.
All in all, one is left to wonder: who is this for? It’s far from deserving some of the vitriol it’s getting. With fewer connections to the show’s larger storylines, tighter editing, less romance and more violence (but no more than the original director’s cut!), Carter is marketing this is a film for old fans to revisit or, especially, for new fans to discover. However, even with these changes, I cannot imagine that anyone that would want their friends to discover The X-Files would recommend this over so many other options. What’s more, who would know about this if not the fans? In the USA, it is on Hulu under a separate entry; but in the rest of the world it is on Disney+ under the extras to the original cut, making it extremely unlikely for anyone but hardcore fans to see; and unless you are a fan of physical media the original director’s cut, which is arguably the superior of the three cuts, is nowhere to be seen. So why release it now? This cut feels more of a pet project of Carter’s, asserting the intellectual ownership of the brand just as the huge corporation actually owning it is about to give it away to newer hands. If it could eventually lead to more X-Files being made by him, all the good for him!
Now I wonder if there is out there the possibility for an even heavier cut. I imagine a cut that tries to keep it as close as possible to the length of a double episode of the series, complete with opening titles and a cliffhanger in the middle. Or, why not go all the way with this surgery? Away with the sick boy and psychic priest storyline and those silly end credits: if you are going to put Frankenstein in the title, focus on that. Mulder and Scully come to investigate disappearances and the findings of body parts, even tighter pacing, some plot relevant dialogue repurposed as voice-overs over phone calls, most of it takes place in the still-unnamed-bad-guys’ compound, Mulder and Scully wonder about the darkness in the world, end. It would lack all the depth of the original, but it might be an entertaining 45 minutes.
Happy 33rd anniversary, The X-Files! Ripe age for dying and being resurrected, if you’re into that kind of thing.
On this day in 1993, the 1X79: Pilot episode aired. The rest is history.
Another Carter interview in a long list of interviews for the new Director’s Cut of IWTB: this one on the ex-X-Files Diaries / Seriously Obsessed, plus some “Queens For A Day” news.
Two things are new and important here.
First: he justifies cutting down on the Mulder-Scully romance from the second movie as keeping things in store for his post-season 11 continuation that he has in mind. There was a word for this type of MSR enjoyer in the old fandom: fini-shipper, a desire to not have the romance take any place on-screen until the very end of the show. Obviously, Carter cannot think of any other way to portray his lead couple than to postpone gratification until they are well in their sixties. Implicitly, that would mean that his envisioned finale would end with Mulder and Scully together.
Second: he has a story to tell as a post-season 11 continuation that he would prefer to do as a series or movie, but when really pushed on this, for the first time he does not close the door entirely to telling it in another format, such as a novel. I really wonder whether Disney will give him the opportunity to make this project a reality and we are I think several years away from when Carter would give up hope on producing this as a live project, but at least we can live with the hope that we will get to know what it is about at some point in the more remote future. Now, I would also love to be able to read Carter and Spotnitz’s story treatment for a mythology-focused third movie that never materialized after IWTB, thank you!
The movie’s promotion is happening on its Instagram account.
It will be making its premiere on September 25 at the Edmonton Film Festival, followed by a showing on September 27 at the Calgary International Film Festival.
We now have the first stills from the movie, which all feature the lead Erin Boyes, who plays the modern-day conservative talk show host who is catapulted back in time in the life of her own mother.
Some additional information from the above interview:
No less than twenty more Chris Carter interviews, out promoting his new director’s cut of “I Want To Believe” + one interview from someone I had not seen interviewed before: special effects David Gauthier at the very end! Obviously there is a lot of repetition across these interviews and with the interviews from earlier this month. I have tried to quote the new bits for each. I will comment on the new cut itself at a later date.
What transpires from all of this is the following:
On IWTB: Although the Mulder-Scully relationship is his idea of an ideal relationship, one of his main motivations with the new version was to cut scenes that featured the relationship. He really feels he was forced to do this by movie executives who did not understand the show. [This could be the one thing that he regrets about in making TXF, which he mentioned at one point in the past. I’m glad he got it out of his chest and could “correct” it. Whether that makes for a better film…this is debatable.]
On his future idea for a final movie or a season 12: The word “immortality” comes up again and again, as does the question about what happened before the Big Bang. The aliens, the CSM and Scully could be immortal. Searching for immortality as an obsession of our times among the powerful is something he comments on. This is what he set up during the 4 Struggle episodes. [This does tie in with my own wild ideas about alien DNA providing insight to the fabric of time and space! Imagine that, a joke from a Darin Morgan episode (Clyde Bruckman) becoming canon. Is this an exciting development for the mythology? I don’t see how the Struggles were subtly setting this up, although we do know for a long while that (self-)healing is an alien power, and obviously William is shown surviving at the very end (is that the big hint?). As a culmination of the mythology I’m not sure it brings much more than what has been said already: whether it’s alien colonization or human conspiracy, what it has always been about is the manipulation of our genome to gain power and long-term control over humanity, and we have seen this already. This is another variant of this, with the nice addition of commenting on the current transhumanist obsession of our techbros overlords. I mean, the man can have interesting ideas (that have some trouble translating to a structured narrative end-product) but there’s so much “stuff” being made today, who am I to say no to it and why not giving him the chance to do this at this point?]
A couple more important items: He is working on something with Glen Morgan [tell us more!]. ‘Millennium’ and ‘The Lone Gunmen’ are not available anywhere because of the cost to license their music. [We knew about MM, this is new for TLG, and nobody asked about ‘Harsh Realm’ unfortunately. The new cut of IWTB was also costly because of new songs to license, so this is a trend.].
Here are the interviews, with many thanks to Adam Silva:
“I always felt that they forced me to shoehorn that Mulder-Scully relationship in there and that it took away from the scares. When we did the series, the relationship is something we always touched on in passing; it was part of the storytelling, but it wasn’t the object of the storytelling. I was always unhappy with the way that I was forced to do that.”
Have you ever felt tempted to collate the mythology episodes into one long story? “Yeah, it is of interest to me. We went to great pains to make all those puzzle pieces fit. It would be a thrill to put those puzzle pieces together.”
https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/chris-carter-x-files-directors-cut-ryan-coogler
+ full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER_s17h0HdE
Any message to fans upset you’ve robbed them of some Mulder-Scully Romance moments? “Frank Spotnitz told me people are gonna miss that last kiss. But are they? It’s a touching moment without the kiss. For me, it’s one of the most touching moments in the series. Scully, the emotion she’s experiencing there—she breaks down in a way, and it’s actually better for me without the kiss, as symbolic as it is, of their love for one another.”
“They should know this is more keeping in my vision. This is a re-exploration of something…I put my heart and soul into it.”
https://www.howtogeek.com/the-x-files-i-want-to-believe-chris-carter-hulu-streaming-august-2026/
If you were still writing episodes of The X-Files, is there a topic you would love to cover? “It’s funny, someone asked me about immortality today, and what I think about immortality. I said I love the idea of living forever. I said I’m not one of those people out there trying every wellness trick to try to live forever, although I try to live a healthy life. But I’m curious. Biblically, people lived for hundreds of years, so there are things in front of us which suggest a kind of relative immortality, and I’m fascinated by that idea. Are aliens immortal? If we were able to access alien technology and science, could we become immortal? All those things are of interest to me. If and when I bring my X-Files back to the screen, not Ryan Coogler’s X-Files, but if I ever bring mine, I actually, set up in the last two reboots, that very idea.”
https://www.goldderby.com/tv/2026/chris-carter-the-x-files-directors-cut-ryan-coogler/
Carter notices a current connection between the film and what’s happening in society: “It’s funny that the story now actually has relevance as people are talking about looksmaxxing or bodymaxing. There are tech bros who want to live forever. Is a head transplant a way to live forever? If you could do it with a monkey, as we are suggesting, you could do it with a human being. It has relevance in science in a way it didn’t in 2008.”
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/x-files-creator-chris-carter-i-want-to-believe-vrach-frankenshteyn/
“The first movie, 1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future, made money, but the producers weren’t necessarily fans of the show. So they wanted us to hit the relationship between Mulder and Scully really hard. I felt like the relationship took away from the horror of the story.”
“Even after people running 20th Century Fox movies said we should do a director’s cut, I never thought it was going to happen. I just assumed they’d come up with a reason we couldn’t do it. But it was full-speed ahead from the moment we showed them the trailer we cut.”
https://gizmodo.com/chris-carter-on-how-the-real-world-has-caught-up-with-the-x-files-2000797394
“What I think was unappreciated when the movie came out was the Frankenstein element, which is only kind of alluded to at the end of the movie when Mulder’s putting a newspaper clipping on the wall. So I added “Vrach Frankenshteyn” to the beginning so that when—if you recall, the search party is following Father Joe out onto the ice and snow and he finds that arm, it suggests a Frankenstein story rather than a kind of a weird and disconnected clue. And it draws the audience into the Frankenstein story.”
“We made the movie for the big screen; I think the production values are big-screen values. Also, what dates this movie is that we shot it with film cameras, not digital video cameras. So it’s old school in that sense, and I think the values are filmic.”
“That relationship of Mulder and Scully is still my idealized relationship for a man and a woman, of mutual respect, of agreeing to disagree [on] faith and science, and of the intersection of those two things. That they can be something that you agree to disagree on and still maintain your relationship. I wish people could agree to disagree more in life because we have more disagreement than we have agreement in our lives and certainly our political lives right now.”
https://www.cbr.com/chris-carter-xfiles-interview-directors-cut-want-to-believe/
“That’s what we originally intended to do, a monster of the week story, a standalone. The budget was a third of the first X-Files movie budget. We had a limited amount of time to make it. We were making it in a place that was so hard to make a movie in, which was cold and snowy and icy and hard.”
Stand-alone: is that why you also cut mentions of Mulder’s sister and William? “Yes.”
On censorship and 2X13: Irresistible: “There was an episode I did called “Irresistible,” and it was about a man that I originally referred to as a necrophiliac. And when I turned that script in to the people at Standards and Practices, the network sensors, they said, “You can’t do a story about a necrophiliac.” When you’re working in television, the deadlines are fast and furious. And this is the script that I had and it would begin shooting day after tomorrow. And I had nothing to replace it with. And you’re on a conveyor belt, and you’ve got to be feeding the monster, it’s food. And so they basically handed the script back to me and said, “Can’t do this.” So it’s like I had to think about what I was going to do. Do I come up with a new story, try to write a script in two days? Not possible. So, I thought about it, and then I thought, “OK, I think I know what to do.” I referred to the necrophiliac as a death fetishist, and I handed the script back to them. They said, “OK, great. You can do it.” So sometimes, it’s as simple as a tweak, a point of view.”
“There’s a huge hardcore fanbase out there, and bless their hearts, they’ve adopted Mulder and Scully. I think it’s really those two characters are the secret to our success. Their relationship wasn’t just romantic. It’s respectful. It is combative. It is, for me, my perfect idea of a romance, of a relationship, of a friendship, of a mutually respectful relationship. And I think that’s simply the reason that people are still drawn to the show.”
“I was just visiting one of those people the other day, David Nutter, who came and directed some of our very best episodes. I’m working on something right now with Glen Morgan, who he and his partner, James Wong, wrote some of our best episodes and then directed some of them too. I’m still working with these people.”
“I never got to release the movie that we, Frank Spotnitz and I, originally imagined. That was back in 2008. But I got the idea to do a director’s cut only last year.”
“I worked with two different editors, people I respect and I’ve worked with before who weren’t involved with it all originally. I asked them to watch the movie and help me to refine the cut and make it the scary movie that I originally intended to make. It was heroic on their part. The movie was originally edited by an Academy Award winner, and so coming in and basically re-editing his vision took some courage.” “That said, I think the editors alone, just in the way they re-approached the movie, really helped it. I gave them the reins early on, and then when they gave those cuts back to me, that’s when I started to work on it. They added material, they took out material, they restructured material.”
“Scully being a scientist and Mulder being a believer in the paranormal, and that they agree to disagree wonderfully—it’s part of the nature of their relationship. I think it’s their mutual respect for one another. That, for me, is the ideal man-woman relationship. It feels inevitable. It feels destined. I have that relationship with my wife.”
“I really think of science as a search for God, and there are so many big questions that are unanswered, and we are trying to find the answers to those things. And will those answered questions bring us closer to an idea or a how it how it all began? What came before the Big Bang?”
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/chris-carter-interview-2026
Scully’s Catholic faith is important to her. And I believe that you are a person of faith as well; is that true? “I am a person of challenged faith. I grew up in a religious environment. I have two uncles who are Protestant ministers. Catholicism is of interest to me — I had never been to Mass, and I live near a Catholic church, so I went to Mass the other day, and I found it fascinating.”
“Scully is working at a Catholic hospital, and they’re telling her to let this boy go, and she won’t let the boy go. So she follows her faith in science, and she follows her faith in God to save this young boy’s life. And she goes back to Father Joe. She wants to know about his faith, and how he can have this faith when he has betrayed it. For me, there are wonderful layers in this movie, and I think some of them went unappreciated when it came out in 2008.”
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQoMFWmaddM
What truth do you still think is out there that we haven’t had the answer to yet? “I’ll go for the big one, which is what was there before the Big Bang? That’s the question of the ages. If and when that is solved, it will take everything that’s wrong with planet Earth right now and turn it possibly upside down and solve so many problems when we realize why we are here, what we are doing, and what we are missing.”
“I wasn’t the biggest science fiction fan as a kid. My brother was the big science fiction fan and he became a scientist. I became a writer, and I think my interest is in telling stories. There’s something I’ll tell you that I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody, but one of the most inspirational movies for me starred Christopher Plummer, and it’s about Jack the Ripper, and it’s called “Murder by Decree”. And in that movie we have some of the same dynamics of The X-Files. And it is really Sherlock and Watson, I think that has gone largely unappreciated.”
What would a Chris Carter X-Files episode look like today? “I think it would be about, and I intend if we come back ever, to explore immortality. I think it’s something that everyone has imagined. There’s some people pursuing it vigorously right now through science. Everyone wants to know what it would be like to live forever, and I think everyone imagines it at some point or another in their life.”
About The Post-Modern Prometheus: “I got to explore it visually in a way we wouldn’t typically explore an X-File because it was in very big close-ups, and the actors are staring essentially right into the camera, just beside the camera, the camera was right in the actors’ faces through the shooting of it. So for me, it was another challenge in directing.
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/chris-carter-x-files-i-want-to-believe-directors-cut-1236836849/
+ podcast: https://omny.fm/shows/strictly-business-1/daily-variety-how-chris-carter-got-his-second-shot-at-the-x-files-i-want-to-believe-film
“Queens For a Day”: it revolves around “a very flawed person who has to go back in time and live her life through in someone else’s shoes”.
https://www.polygon.com/x-files-creator-chris-carter-5-fan-questions/
Is the Smoking Man still alive? “Good question. Yeah, he seems immortal, doesn’t he? He survives everything and anything.”
Is Scully immortal? “It’s a good question. If Mulder and Scully ever reunite for season 12, I have something to say about that.”
Would season 12 have been the final season? “I don’t know. It’s funny, I always likened us to Lewis and Clark. We knew where we were going, we just didn’t know how we’re going to get there.”
He has more stories to tell with Mulder and Scully: “For me, it’s not over.”
Rumors persisted that the movie was rushed into production to avoid an upcoming writers’ strike, which Carter denied. He said they didn’t know there was going to be a writers’ strike and were already in shooting when the strike happened. “Because we were already in production, we were given the ability to work and not have to man the picket lines,” said Carter.
He remembered that he and co-writer and producer Frank Spotnitz were in London on the promotional tour for “I Want to Believe” when they got a call from a Fox executive, telling Carter and Spotnitz that Fox wasn’t going to advertise the film. “They were simply going to rely on word of mouth from fans,” Carter said.
[About Millennium and The Lone Gunmen being unavailable on home video or streaming] Carter said that both are filled with “music that needs to be licensed that is very expensive.” “It’s really not any about anything other than the cost,” said Carter.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1i9madmNYg
[David Gauthier was the on-set practical special effects coordinator for the 5 Vancouver seasons and IWTB. The French diver infected by the black oil in ‘Piper Maru’ was named after him!]
On the new cut: “With the the lower rating we had on for the release of the film, he [Carter] wasn’t able to show all the great special effects makeup work that Bill Terezakis came up with.”
The abduction of the second victim: “Chris and I discussed how how he wanted him [the villain] to get into the car to grab her. What he wanted to do was just punch the window, so there’s a shot from inside the car with her face in the car when the villain uses his fists and punches out the window.” “It’s tempered glass, and I had to use tiny explosives to break the glass as his hand approached the glass, so it never really contacts the glass. The glass is broken just as his fist comes to it, and it looks like he’s broken it, but he hasn’t really broken it. That’s movie magic.”
Pushing Mulder’s car off the side of the road: “We wanted to get a shot of David in the car with the with the the pushing of the vehicle with him so we built a a mechanical rig to have the car tilt up while the while the snow plow was pushing it.”
Mulder emerging from the crashed car: “when Mulder escapes from the car that was buried in the snow, I was down there underneath in the car with him and helping him, pushing him out of the window so he could make his way out through the snow.” “Once we got him [David] into position, he had no footholds to push himself through the snow.” “At one point, which you don’t hear, he says, ‘Dave, that’s enough, that’s enough!'”
On IWTB: “The graphic nature of what was taking place in the show highlighted what the interaction of Scully and Mulder was at the time, when they were facing sort of the breakup of their team. I thought when Chris was able to really show the violence and the ugliness of what was taking place by the bad people, the love between Mulder and Scully was highlighted, and to me it made a completeness of to what The X-Files was all about.”
Creating 3X15: Piper Maru: “I took Chris over from the studio across the road to see a manufacturing of the newt suit, which was by Phil Newton, North Vancouver native, and he enjoyed it so much that he put that into a script, one of our lore scripts where the black oil enters the people through a newt suit. And Chris happened to use my name as this newt suit driver at the time.”
Six more Chris Carter interviews! As he is out promoting his new Director’s Cut of IWTB, out on 14/August. Obviously there is significant overlap with the two in-depth interviews I covered already (Hey Danny and Conspiracy). Here I only cover the new elements.
Main new points: the new Director’s Cut is actually shorter than the theatrical run; among the cuts are the Mulder-Scully romantic and emotional bits, which were rather forced on Carter; we get a pitch for his next movie “Queens For A Day”; and he thinks Scully at least and eventually Mulder will appear in the Ryan Coogler TXF project.
It sounds to me that this new Director’s Cut is all about the Monster-of-the-Week, detached from any other ‘superfluous’ elements that might link it to the larger story of the show, like the Mulder-Scully relationship: it is a version of the movie made to attract new viewers. In the interviews below we learn some specific cuts that were made; but apart from the obvious ones, Carter has tightened the whole movie to make it run shorter and has added new music. It’s the latter I am more interested in, to get a new sense of the flow and ‘feel’ of the movie and understand if it works better for me.
[Context from Tony: Tony was sent a copy of the Director’s Cut that he saw in preparation for the interview. As a consequence, the interview was embargoed until today 12/August. Disney also specified not to discuss the new Coogler project with Carter. This embargo fits with reviews of the new cut, which have now started to come out.]
[The reported budgets were 65 million dollars for FTF and 35 million dollars for IWTB; a third of FTF would be about 22 M$; could it be that the 35 M$ figure included both production and marketing?]
[This is as straightforward as Carter will ever get: he is uncomfortable with the Mulder-Scully romance, and moves towards that direction are forced on him. He has spoken in the past about not wanting to “domesticate” M&S, and these cuts must be to avoid these things. This is certainly going to be extremely unpopular among a big part of the remaining fandom. As for myself, I did think some bed jokes were cringe; however, they were together, it’s pointless to make their relationship even more ambiguous, this even makes the movie incomprehensible as there already were viewers who thought that M&S were not living together.]
“Queens For A Day”: “It is a horror fable.” “It’s about someone who time travels and goes back and has to walk in someone else’s shoes.” [This sounds straight out of “The Twilight Zone”! It can be fun.]
He has never thought about doing the same Director’s Cut approach for FTF — if so, he would bring in Rob Bowman, Dan Sackheim and Frank Spotnitz.
[Interview by Millennium fan Troy Foreman.]
https://thepcprinciple.com/interview-chris-carter
(Short 2 min interview)
Carter’s favourite episode: “5X06: The Post-Modern Prometheus” [More Frankenstein!]
About continuing the story beyond season 11: “There’s a point at which you need to deliver on a promise. And I wanted to deliver more than the promise. I wanted to give them what they least expected. I know that sounds somewhat confusing, but I had a bigger plan and it all made sense. It will make sense, and so hang with me.” [“Deliver on a promise”: this is 2002 all over again. And 2008. And 2016. And 2018. See earlier interviews on theorizing on all of this.]
“The thing that was unexpected, but now highly anticipated, is the Ryan Coogler reboot. I don’t want to do anything to compete with that. I don’t want to do anything to get in the way of that. I don’t want to play off of that. I want to continue to tell and finish the story arc that I have in mind. That said, I’m anxiously awaiting his version. My name is on it as executive producer, but I have done exactly nothing. I am, like everyone else out there, excited about what it may be.”
He cut the romance, but he also cut some of the gore. “There actually was a lot more of that. I cut it down a little bit because there’s a point at which it gets overplayed, and I didn’t want that. A little went a long way for me.”
“It’s always Scully’s movie. The X-Files wouldn’t have succeeded without Scully. If it were just Mulder poking around in the dark, it would have been only so interesting. Scully, with her science background and her belief that science can explain everything, that is the beating heart of the show. Mulder just takes her on the wildest ride that she never imagined, and us as well. So it’s Scully’s movie until it’s Mulder’s movie.”
“Queens For A Day”: it’s “about a very flawed person who has to go back and live life in someone else’s shoes. If that sounds a little like A Christmas Carol, it’s not by mistake.”
“At least Gillian, I think, is going to appear in the Coogler version. And I’m assuming David will too, so you will see Mulder and Scully there.”
[As suspected, this explains why Gillian has been saying so many positive things about Coogler. Carter drops this bombshell in the middle of a random interview. Does he not realize he is messing with Disney’s marketing, who have wanted to keep this a secret? Or does he fully realize, and cares little about whatever version of TXF is not his own? In any case, this is going to be interesting!]
Does Coogler’s project make his continuation more complicated? “I don’t know. When I see it, I’ll know, and so will the Fox executives. They’ll have a sense if these things are going to be in competition or if they are going to be complementary.”
“I would love to do either another reboot, or another movie. My ideas going forward are big ideas. Whether they’re a TV series or a movie, I don’t know, but I have big plans.”
[Very clearly, with this Director’s Cut and the press around it, Carter is attempting to draw attention back to him and his future for the show, he is trying to tell to Disney not to forget him, and that when this ‘craze’ with Coogler’s side project will pass, he will still be there to offer his original take. Let’s see if Disney will listen, and if Anderson will be willing. These are big ifs.]
More Chris Carter! Another fresh interview with The Creator, this time from the Danish Conspiracy podcast Sammensværgelsen. There is some significant overlap with the immediately preceding interview that I covered a few days ago, but there is also more detail here. Carter talks about the new Director’s Cut of the second movie, his ideas for a “My Struggle 5”, Coogler’s new project, and his next movie “Queens For A Day”.
As always, I’ve tried to transcribe “the actual quotes” that are interesting [and my comments are in brackets].
[The movie with the simple name “The X-Files I Want To Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn” is coming out August 14 — barely in 4 days!]
[This is quite as I initially expected: changes sprinkled throughout related to pacing and censorship, aimed at giving the whole movie a better flow and a feel that is closer to a horror film. No big changes to the structure of the movie, no new scenes, perhaps little to no new dialogue. The differences will be too many to be able to make a summary of the comparisons, and a detailed comparison will be more of an academic exercise to illustrate film theory. The experience of watching the new cut might be marginally better for someone who has already seen it, it will probably won’t change your opinion on it. The new cut might be the cut that you might recommend to someone who will see the movie for the first time, from now on.]
[It’s impossible not to be excited or at least curious for what this payoff is. Even after all we went through with the 4 Struggles, I want to know what he has in mind! See the previous interview for some more theorizing.]
In terms of timing, now there is the Director’s Cut, and the Coogler reboot comes first. “You don’t want to start competing with yourself.”
[That is true, but it’s also true that one project will feed off each other if they are successful, so you have to strike when the iron is hot. What happens if Coogler’s pilot is picked up for a series? What happens if it runs for several seasons? What happens if Mulder and/or Scully appear in it, as Gillian Anderson is teasing? Duchovny and Anderson are names that can pull enormous attention, but none of them are getting any younger, and Carter either.]
“Always give the fans what they want, and not what they want, not what they’re expecting. That’s a very important thing, when you give people what they want it’s kind of hollow in a way. It’s better to give them what they want but not in the way they might have imagined.”
[This directly echoes something he said in his previous interview regarding the revival. Add unexpected plot complications to increase engagement with the story.]
When he is asked of more TXF comics coming: “Amazing!” “The show has a life of its own.”
On such side-products: “They always pay me the courtesy of running things past me.” [Interesting that he says that it’s a “courtesy”: it probably means that Disney/Fox is not legally obliged to do anything, but they still keep Carter in the loop for all things TXF.]
He doesn’t know more about the comics. “I’m not a comic book guy, but I try to keep the soul of the show in mind.” “Mulder and Scully are The X-Files and it always has to involve them.” [I also see this as a hint that Carter is unlikely to put his future series finale idea in comic book format or even novel format: he will always try for a live action project.]
He’s only had had one phone conversation with Ryan Coogler. “I haven’t read the script.” “I’m just like the fans, I’m waiting to see what he comes up with.” [He truly is much less involved with this project than what people might believe. Coogler’s project is a completely separate project.]
He only heard things indirectly from being in Vancouver. [Possibly the production of Coogler’s pilot and Carter’s new movie overlapped.]
“I was told they were using 8 cameras”, this is new for TXF. [TXF typically used only one camera at a time, with at most two being on set at any point in time. What this means for Coogler’s pilot is hard to tell.]
[This is Carter’s next movie, written by his wife Dori. See Eat The Corn article from May. Here we get the first hints as to the content of it!]
“It is a horror movie of sorts but in a completely different way.”
When he found Dori’s script from some 30 years ago, he suggested her to rewrite it with a real-life person in mind as the lead, a talk show hostess.
It has some of the same cast and a lot of the same crew as TXF. He specifically mentions people from the revival: producer Grace Gilroy, production designer Mark Freeborn, director of photography Craig Wrobleski, and people in props and casting.
He hopes it gets released before the US midterm elections in November because it has a political message.
