Archived from the Eat The Corn Facebook page.
Apr 06, 2023 19:54
New Chris Carter interview, courtesy of the Conspiracy podcast @[195561691234370:274:Sammensværgelsen – en dansk X-Files podcast]!
As usual, summary below [and my comments]:
- Was the original plan to stop #TheXFiles after 5 seasons and do a movie franchise after? “No”. [Ha! Persistent rumour has been shot down. So this information, as old as the internet, must only refer to the objective of making enough episodes to go to syndication, not anything related to the mythology or long-term planning.]
- CC reminisces about making the first movie (25 years ago!). They didn’t try to bring Armin Mueller-Stahl (Strughold) back after the film in season 6 because he lives in Europe; CC did think of him for season 11 (hence the role of Mr Y was created).
- CC recently wrote something with Terry O’Quinn (Peter Watts in Millennium, among others) in mind for a role, but he’s busy. [CC seems to have plenty of projects, but nothing has materialized yet.]
- The mix of episodic-serialized was conceived from the beginning before the pilot was made.
- CC is still very proud of “Duane Barry”, the first episode he directed. He used David Nutter’s method of using drawings for planning the blocking of scenes.
- CC’s “Syzygy” was “directly inspired” by Darin Morgan’s “Humbug”. [Obvious, but finally, a direct confirmation!]
- He no longer remembers the plans he and Spotnitz had for films after season 9 regarding the 2012 and the alien invasion. [So much information about all this is now water under the bridge…]
- Again, CC reiterates that he never imagined that “My Struggle IV” would be the finale of the show.
- CC let the cat out of the bag with that interview about the Ryan Coogler remount of TXF, Fox TV actually wants to make a big announcement about it. [So Disney is very much serious about this project. I expect we’ll know more not too long from now.]
- Fox/Disney entirely owns TXF, so they can do whatever they like, they just have been kind enough to be collaborative with CC in their decisions up to now. [Contrary to what I thought, CC/Ten Thirteen doesn’t co-own the brand! Perhaps CC’s involvement is good news in this case.]
- CC cancelled the “Albuquerque” TXF animated project because he couldn’t imagine it without Mulder and Scully. [But wouldn’t Coogler’s re-whatever be without M&S too? Or is Coogler planning to recast M&S?]
- CC and Glen Morgan discussed at length making a prequel around the Cigarette-Smoking Man shortly after season 11, Morgan pitched it, but couldn’t convince Fox about it. [I can’t imagine what this would look like! Unreliable narrator like in “Musings”? Mythology-only with historical persons cameos like Dark Skies? Sound like a mythology fan’s wet dream, but I can’t imagine it being more than a limited series.]
- CC and Glen Morgan discussed at length doing a reboot of #Millennium, but “we put that on the back burner, it’s closed right now”. [Impressive, but disappointing, and he didn’t expand on why they abandoned it. Interesting that Carter & Morgan worked together on all these potential projects! I’m curious if a MM reboot could have worked — Carter has used the word ‘reboot’ for the TXF revival as well, so they might have had a MM revival in mind with Lance Henriksen, now 82, as old as Patrick Stewart in Star Trek Picard. Possible, but also an extremely uphill battle.]
https://sammensvaergelsen.libsyn.com/website/interview-chris-carter-2
Apr 13, 2023 10:11
[FRENCH] Podcast sur le film #TheXFiles, sorti il y a quand même 25 ans ! A l’époque, l’excitation était à son comble. Habitant en Europe, le film était sorti des mois après les Etats-Unis, et j’avais été spoilé sur une grande partie des révélations mythologiques en lisant des magazines.
https://podcast.ausha.co/le-coin-pop/the-x-files-fight-the-future-le-premier-film
May 05, 2023 20:23
Coverage of a January interview with Chris Carter (catching up on my backlog) from @[100064600333206:2048:The X-Cast\: An X-Files Podcast]!
A summary and highlights below [with my comments]:
About #TheXFiles:
- DD & GA’s casting process with Randy Stone: they were both CC’s first choices. On the casting sheets, CC wrote for DD “yes”, for GA “test”. CC stuck to his guns to cast GA, there was a second actress that the network wanted. [We will probably never know who that was!]
- Their chemistry was obvious already from shooting that first scene in the basement office.
- Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish both got their roles thanks to their previous work, they didn’t actually read for their parts. Fire in the Sky was a precursor to TXF and CC cast RP because of it.
- On the pilot: there are tweaks he could make to it; a comedic bit that he could have left in (during the driving scene, Mulder makes a joke about a bagel), but he wanted the show to be dramatic before comedic; he didn’t know if the bloody nose effect would work.
- Gender-consistent choice would have been for man to be skeptic, woman to be intuitive, M&S made the pilot distinctive.
- TXF’s serialized quality was a precursor to today’s shows. The first movie resulted in season 8’s serialized approach, the show took a “right turn”. [Linking FTF to s8 is an odd connection, given how much later s8 happened and the circumstances around DD’s partial presence. Note the use of “right turn”, the same expression CC used for describing the revival mythology compared to what came before, for him it looks like this can mean something new in style or in content.]
- Advice to aspiring show-runners: stick to your guns. So many people gave notes, and that impacted the quality and compromised the excellence of what CC set out to do. Of all the people who gave CC notes, now there are only two in business. [I love a show-runner with a vision. But doesn’t CC sound a bit vindictive here?]
- TXF/Picket Fences cross-over was cancelled by the network to avoid a cross-pollination of audience.
- Challenging times: shooting End Game, Paper Clip, FTF, that year of TXF s5 + FTF + MM s2 (and 20+ episode seasons) was the hardest year of his life. [I can believe that!]
- Again, he stresses that he didn’t do this show alone and that it was a team effort. Throughout, there are nods to Dan Sackheim, Bob Goodwin, David Nutter, Peter Wunstorf (MM pilot director of photography), Kim Manners, Rob Bowman, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, the women who worked on the show. [I have criticized CC myself on certain storytelling choices, but I will never criticize how strong he was as an overall show-runner, pushing and motivating everyone around him.]
About the revival:
- My Struggle I & II appear to have pleased the “Q-Anon crowd”, and he doesn’t know what to think about that. [As Darin Morgan astutely commented in his episode, conspiracies no longer mean what they meant in the 1990s in general culture. Difficult to do TXF’s mythology today in the same way as back then.]
- While shooting was going on for My Struggle IV, he was still undecided about the ending. Gillian Anderson made some comments online about this being the end for her. So he had to make some dramatic choices for the ending. [Again, this doesn’t align that well with the chronology of events, unless Carter didn’t believe Anderson meant it until the 11th hour.]
About #Millennium:
- David Fincher sought Carter out, they had lunch and discussed the project of doing the greatest serial killer series, which turned out to be #mindhunter, which Carter finds excellent [it is!], CC feels Millennium was an inspiration.
- The Millennium pilot was the result of TXF: “Irresistible”, there was an appetite for telling stories about things that were not supernatural.
- CC feels sorry that MM went off the air, he inadvertently pulled the plug on it, whereas Fox would have gone forward with a 4th season and maybe more. Given that CC was going to launch Harsh Realm, he wouldn’t have had time to spend on MM, and that was a premature decision. CC advised Jon Bokenkamp, the creator of #TheBlacklist, on its pilot an on how to spend your energy; years later, Bokenkamp was hesitating to pull the plug on the series and CC told him it would be a mistake: you never know where your next hit will be, you’d better stay with the winner until the bitter end. [This is an interesting confession from CC. The mind races with what could have been: MM seasons 4 and 5? On the other hand, this approach of sticking with what works no matter what is a two-edged swords, it explains CC’s unwillingness to ever, ever end TXF despite the writing being on the wall.]
- More MM/TXF crossovers would have happened if MM had continued. [And I would hope better too!]
- Recently, he saw Ryan Murphy’s Jeffrey #dahmer series and liked it, and this inspired him to talk to “somebody” about a MM reboot. [I am both excited and afraid. Amazing how the greenlight for many projects seems to be dependent on the mood of TV executives and what’s trendy these days.]
About the legacy of the show:
- The TXF novel that is currently being worked on follows on chronologically from the events of My Struggle IV. [All previous tie-in novels have essentially been stand-alone investigations and I can’t imagine a novel continuing the story in a substantial way, it will feel weird if it does. Until it’s retconned by something else in the future, like with the comics?]
- He thinks that Joe Harris did an excellent job with the comics, but doesn’t remember much about the MM comics. [Nice! But again, too bad that the revival de-canonized them and that the revival forced Harris’ Season 11 being cut short from the initial plans.]
- If anybody watches 30 years from now, it will be because of Mulder and Scully and their relationship.
- There are no plans for the show’s 30th anniversary this year. [So nothing from Fox/Disney, only fan-organized events.]
https://pod.link/1157097612/episode/534ef2668ededfe3790cfc22a5ef805d
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