A rare interview with Corey Kaplan thanks to The X-Files Preservation Collection / The X-Files Museum! She was The X-Files’ production designer for the Los Angeles years (s6-9), an important member of the production team. I liked what she had to say about how productions today differs from how it was in the past. Some highlights:
It’s all about collaboration. With the dark look of the show, she had to work a lot with the Director of Photography Bill Roe. Unlike most production designers who are usually architects, her background was in art and photography. She lived the transition from shooting with film to shooting with high-definition digital cameras. With those, everything is very vivid, you see too much into the shadows. Between that and the overload of digital special effects, everything looks cartoonish now (like the Marvel shows).
Before TXF, she was doing art films and low budget horror comedy films, so she had some experience in filmmaking. When she got interviewed for TXF, she was doing a skateboard movie (“Brink!”), she brought the skateboard with her, and Carter’s office was filled with surfboards! Carter and company were all wearing casual clothes, sitting on the floor, eating snacks, they matched immediately. Kim Manners was the first person she met. Often mentions working with Bernadette (Bernie) Caulfield (s6-7 producer).
It was a tough job, 7 days a week for 4 years. Many relationships did not survive, including hers.
“The Beginning”: she remembers the script had Gibson swim in the nuclear reactor, shed his skin and become an alien [probably misremembers]. The metal armature of the nuclear power plant that they built for this first episode was huge, it was re-used throughout the 4 seasons (as Mulder’s basement [?], containment centre, control centre [possibly Mount Weather in “The Truth”?], …)
Carter asked her “what’s your dream job?”, she liked a mansion in Lake O(?), Carter wrote “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” around that, and they had to build that set in 8 days!
She had to cut short her Thanksgiving holidays after reading the script for “Agua Mala” and going back to work to build the sets for flooding.
Also mentions the cow coming through the roof in “The Rain King”, the Hopi ruins in “The Truth”.
She felt included and heard, unlike in modern shows, the art department was contributing actively, not executing orders. In production meetings with the 18 heads of department the assistant director would start with her. “Chris [Carter] writes for what you give him”, he’d tell them to scout LA and find interesting things to use in scripts. She remembers Kim Manners preparing and planning the day’s shots in detail, it’s not done that way anymore.
25 years ago today, The X-Files mythology essentially wrapped up with “Two Fathers” and “One Son”! A quarter of a century ago! What better way to celebrate than with a new interview with writer-producer and mythology second-in-command Frank Spotnitz, courtesy of The X-Files Diaries. “Incredibly ambitious episodes!” Here are the highlights [and my comments!]:
Why end the Syndicate storyline then? “When I look back on the evolution of TXF mythology and the storytelling, it was very elusive and teasing a lot, the first 4 seasons at least. Then the movie came along and we had to deliver more explicit pieces, that was sort of our mandate, the movie has to give to give you something you haven’t had in the TV show. So by the time we got to s6 we felt like we need to give more answers, we’ve teased people long enough.” We were “telling the audience it all does makes sense, this is what we’ve been hiding from you and here are the pieces all in one place, bringing that chapter to a close with the death of Jeffrey Spender and the Syndicate”. [The puzzle-like way the mythology of TXF was built and written is something that fascinates me endlessly.]
The flashbacks in the scripts: inspired by Godfather II. The scripts were late, not enough time for hair & makeup to do good work; all scenes were shot, the footage exists; but they were not happy with the wigs; but also the past/present narrative connections were not working. They were happier with the decision to substitute them with scenes where CSM is exposing everything to Fowley. [I agree, although I’d love to see those scenes!]
What was planned ahead? “I can’t entirely answer this question honesty because a lot of these things were in Chris’s head before I even came on the show” “when I came on, I don’t think anybody really understood the ‘mythology’, that we were actually building a coherent narrative” “the Black Oil, which was my thing, I didn’t understand how it connected, I didn’t even realize it was going to need to connect later on”. “Some of it was there from the very beginning, some of it had to be knit together, most of it we did understand going into the movie”. “Chris and I had talked in s4, maybe earlier, a lot of it didn’t make it into the show explicitly — it was sort of the petrochemical era of human civilization that brought the virus back”. [Amazing that Carter wasn’t sharing everything about the mythology not even with Spotnitz. The oil connection adds an ecological-historical reading to the mythology that I find very appealing, I wish they had developed that more.]
Diana Fowley: the writers wanted to play the ambiguity regarding Fowley’s allegiance, on who to trust, Mulder’s or Scully’s reading of Fowley? To the point where Mulder calls on Fowley’s bluff to see where her loyalties lie (end of One Son). But how the episode reads to the viewer is that she is an antagonist to M&S, not as ambiguous as intended. He would have liked to see more of Fowley. “That was explicitly one of the reasons why we wanted the Fowley character, it was a way to indirectly mine the sexual tension between M&S, by creating this new threat that you hadn’t really seen since s1, a rival for Scully”. [The inclusion of Fowley was very soap operatic from the beginning, but it worked rather well for what the show was doing by then.]
It was another time in terms of storytelling on TV: “We were so busy having to move the story and the plot along, you almost wish it had been 3 episodes and you had more time to slow down and look at the character dynamics and the emotional reality.” [3 episodes, I agree!]
On the MSR: “their work is what brought them together and is what kept them together, if they become lovers it threatens their ability to work together. This is one of those issues that I’m sure nobody anticipated at the beginning of the show, because you don’t know how long the show will go on you don’t realize it’s going to be 9 seasons+. By s6 and 7, you’ve got to go somewhere with this, you just cannot keep teasing the audience, you’ve got to honor the reality of these characters after all these years together.” [Similar thoughts to wrapping up the Syndicate plotline here, agreed. But extending the same thought further, it becomes less and less interesting the longer it goes on, like in s9 and beyond.]
On Mulder’s wedding ring (Unusual Suspects, Travelers): definitely not in the writers’ intention, was a DD thing: “we didn’t have the visual effects capability to erase the ring.” All the fan theories about Fowley being the ex-wife are good, but they were “not in the text”. [We’ll always have fan theories!]
On Krycek: “one of my regrets is we were going to do a Krycek episode, that would have been maybe a chance to explore the Marita-Krycek dynamic more fully”. Krycek as the ‘one son’? “Krycek not born to the throne, he’s working to earn his place”. [He doesn’t refer to a draft script for a Krycek episode, I wonder if he’s forgotten or if it really existed.]
On whether the CSM was Mulder’s father [at that point]: “that was an idea we had, an argument we had about whether he should be, we just agreed to not commit.” A revealing sentence about how Carter thinks: “Chris would often have ideas he wasn’t going to share until it was time, and we’d realize, oh you were thinking that?” Also, FS always assumed that Samantha is Bill Mulder’s.
On Jeffrey Spender: “Once he understood the moral dimension of what his father had done to his mother, it was a natural point for him to stand up to his father and redeem himself, and in redeeming himself he had doomed himself. There was no way he could stand up to the CSM and walk away. it felt like the inevitable Shakespearian conclusion.” [Again, great, but spread over more episodes would have been better.]
Cassandra’s “I’m going to pee the floor” was probably a Carter line; Mulder’s reply “don’t do that” was a Duchovny ad-lib.
M&S shower scene: stolen from James Bond “Dr No”. The partition between M&S was not scripted.
Ending: they were not allowed to shoot the Syndicate burning for fire safety issues, “it’s the largest wooden hangar in North America” [unfortunately just burned down in November 2023!]. When the show was ending in s9, if they had the money, he would have liked to redo some of the effects, like the morphing.
Next mythology was less about the grand conspiracy and was more focused on the characters, was that planned or not? “It just came about”. “We just trusted, as we often did, that we would find our way”. “We’ve never done the show with a map, with a plan, we always trust we’ll figure it out when we get there”. Fox was not happy to hear that from FS, when CC was absent, when they asked what s9 was going to be about. With all the changes, “it became very hard, even if we wanted to, to plan ahead the last 3 seasons”. [No change of method over the years, but it became more and more difficult to reconcile the cumulative storytelling of what was done already with what was going on behind the scenes.]
Darin Morgan appearances are rare and should be cherished! His X-Files and Millennium episodes are nearly universally adored. Here is a long interview with him from a couple of months ago by The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast. It’s hard to summarize what is an excellent interview, but I’ll try! [+ my own comments]
– “Blood“: brother Glen (GM) offered Darin (DM) a story idea. Somebody turned in a script that didn’t work, and DM had to produce a script quickly, he worked on it closely with GM.
– On working with Chris Carter: CC (and Howard Gordon) hadn’t read anything DM had written apart from Blood when they decided to hire him as a writer. DM was reluctant to join the show because it wasn’t comedy but he had no job. CC thought that GM supervised DM more than he actually did. CC liked DM’s scripts, they didn’t need rewriting, and that’s all he wanted from DM. DM has worked on shows where he suggested story ideas that were different from the show’s format and showrunners were not receptive; CC was not like that. [More good words about Carter, he’s hands off but that is also a good thing.]
– On the original run: “Humbug“: GM told DM to write a show about sideshow freaks and Jim Rose. When DM pitched it to CC, it was just the story with no humour, CC told DM to make the creature more mythic or something. When DM turned in the script, CC, to his credit, didn’t say no to it because it wasn’t the format of the show. After he won the Emmy for “Clyde Bruckman“, still nobody recognized him in the street, the only people he knew that were watching the show were his own parents, so success didn’t go to his head. He liked his idea for “War of the Coprophages” but the script didn’t come together like he wanted. He usually likes his stories to be about new characters, not Mulder & Scully; in “War”, the new characters are cartoonish and one-note and it has more M&S. When DM wrote it, he thought he had failed, in comparison to “Clyde Bruckman”, then he had to prove himself with “Jose Chung“, he put a lot of pressure on himself. [“War” a failure?! I wish the show had done more episodes of the same quality as that!] He only has watched one or two “Twin Peaks” episodes, doesn’t get why people say he took inspiration from it [re: “Jose Chung” potato pie scene].
– On S4: Frank Spotnitz’s story that DM didn’t turn in his script then they had to do “Memento Mori” is not true [beef!]. CC had left DM with an open invitation for doing an episode, but DM wouldn’t commit. Having a deadline is one of the reasons why he left the show, he just can’t deal with them.
– On writing for TXF: The story was structured around the scenes at the end of each act (commercials breaks). DM tried to avoid fade-out / fade-in happening in the same scene; but at times there was no other place to go to (like 3rd act of “Clyde Bruckman”). For the revival there was an additional act, more commercials: this reduced the number of scenes, made acts shorter, made it difficult to develop a rhythm. [I think that’s a very important point and a reason why many felt the revival was rushed and a lot of noise for nothing.] Showing “Forehead Sweat” to his father, he realized that he tends to come back from acts in a different setting or with an unrelated character, confusing the viewer.
– On directing: “I’m not a barker”! He cares about actor performance, guide them through what the show is like, pull them towards more comedy instead of drama. Directing is getting the performance, not just technical stuff.
– On editing in TXF: “Imagine you have to cut two minutes from your favourite episode.” They had to follow time strictly, exactly 44 min 12 secs (revival: 2 min less). “Jose Chung” was his only episode that had the right length, all his others were over by like 6 min. CC’s scripts are short, GM and DM’s are not. Scripts are written in such a way you can’t remove an entire scene, even if that scene is not great, so you have to cut lines or jokes here and there. He has dailies from his MM episodes, but not cut scenes.
– On his “Millennium” episodes: it was painful. He disagreed that the show was too bleak: the subject matter was dark, but in his episodes he had a record number of suicides and they were considered “comedic”. MM viewers were much less open to change than TXF viewers: the people least likely to like DM’s MM episodes were the people who watched MM. In S2 Fox wanted change to increase viewers; but the captive audience from S1 liked what they saw, the lost viewers won’t return, it was a no-win situation.
– On preparing the revival: CC took GM & DM to dinner, they were hoping to do 10-12 episodes, he wanted to bring as many of the old crew back. DM “was like yeah that could be fun let’s do some more”, he never thought that TXF’s time is past. [Funny, that feels completely different to how his last episode ends!] He liked to have the freedom to do whatever he wanted. Fox marketed the revival as a limited series and the audience was expecting a continuing story, he thinks the reaction would have been different if it had been marketed as new episodes in the same format as in the past. [Maybe?]
– On his revival episodes: Back in the 90s, he had a story idea: a ghost story, but you find out it was a ghost only at the end. He thought of writing a feature about that, time passed, then “The Sixth Sense” came out and he knew the twist while watching! In Frank Spotnitz’s “The Night Stalker” revival, he wrote the “Were-Monster” script, and the day he finished it the show was cancelled. For years he lived in fear somebody would do that “man biting monster” story. With the revival he thought here’s my chance to put the story out there. The first 2 days of shooting “Were-Monster” were the graveyard scene. Writing “Forehead Sweat” was difficult as ever, but shooting it was the most fun he has ever had in his career. Recurring actors: DM likes to have a stock company of actors, like the movies in the 1930s.
– On the audience reception of the revival: when they set out to do the revival, DM was glad he wouldn’t have to deal with viewer comments about TXF not being comedy, but it happened again! With “Humbug”, people liked that they did something different, but with “Were-Monster” people freaked out, weird. Is the audience really more sophisticated? In today’s shows, every episode follows the same format, tone, style, a single continuing story, no new character or location. TXF didn’t do that. [Not sure things are so monolithic.]
– A thought experiment: if your favourite episode had aired in the revival, would you like it as much? DM thinks not; and conversely, people would have hated “War” if it had aired in the revival. In the revival there was no worry to tarnish the reputation of the show, it had already been tarnished by the last seasons and the second movie. [I love this!] But he was wrong! By the time the revival aired, people saw the original run as perfect, even the movie was reevaluated upwards. The revival was the same as ever, with ups and downs. “DPO” he thought was not a good ep, now people love it. He’s worried that people will never be watching the revival in the future. “Forehead Sweat” is more relevant now than back when it aired, and unfortunately more so next year [2024 – ouch!]. [I understand his point, but I don’t entirely agree here. On the one hand he seems to agree there was a drop of quality towards the later seasons, on the other hand he thinks there were always ups and downs and the revival was no different. There’s a lot of nostalgia in fandom, but it’s not only that.]
Happy new year! Perhaps the last year without an X-Files reboot? We continue our catch-up of 30th anniversary interviews with an audio commentary of “5X04: Detour” with writer Frank Spotnitz thanks to The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast! Summary below:
With TXF, the writers-producers explicitly tried to make something that would last the pass of time [30 years later, congratulations!]; they had in mind Jaws (leave it to the imagination to fill the blanks); they were conscious to write strong women characters (like when Scully had to protect an impaired Mulder); the smart MSR was at the heart of the show
Shooting in the woods was a cost-saving measure, but weather made it costly (because of the rain, they had to build the camp fire scene in a set); How The Ghosts Stole Christmas was also a cost-saving ep but set building made it very expensive; Dod Kalm was successful in saving money
Behind the names: Marty and Michael were FS’s business partners; Louis was a cousin of FS; Michelle Fazekas was a 1013 assistant; West Virginia setting is where FS’s mother is from; Jeff Glaser was a Fox executive that gave them notes (“it’s only scary as it is believable”)
Leon County: a clue to Ponce de Leon
FS had done a lot of mytharc at that point, he wanted to do a stand-alone
Inspiration: things that scared FS when he was a kid, like a dog barking at something unknown at night; was fascinated with tree rings
Introductiory scenes: invest the viewer in secondary characters before something bad happens; also, FS had just become a parent a few years before
FBI team-building comedy scene was Carter’s idea
Brett Dowler had done a lot of 2nd unit directing, this was his first ep as director
Leonard Betts: Spotnitz-Gilligan-Shiban were in competitiong with Morgan-Wong on which ep would make it to Superbowl
FS was present in Vancouver for prepping and just the first day of shooting, then back to LA for scripts and post for other eps
1930s The Invisible Man on the TV: it was all about whether they could afford licensing costs
Ground the episodes in reality: Scully is like the smartest member of the audience, if you can erode her skepticism then the script works
During s2 they had to go to the library for research, by s5 they had internet
Civilization is encroahing on nature, that’s why creatures react
Mark Snow wrote so much music, more than the average TV show; editing was done without music, then they’d go to Mark’s home in Santa Monica to hear it with music
Beyond s6 they were wondering what can they say that is new? s8-9 had a different storytelling format, leaning more into The Twilight Zone influences
Director of photography Joel Ransom used a lot of steadicam; even in interiors scenes the light is not flat, half their faces are in shadow
FS developed a show with Adam Rapp (brother of actor Anthony Rapp) but that didn’t get made
Creature stealing stones: inspired by Planet of the Apes (humans steal clothes), one of FS’s favourites
They typically had 8 days main unit, at least 2 days 2nd unit (which here did things like POV shots of the forest); the record was Jose Chung’s, 20 days (!)
Every 12 pages of script there had to be a cliffhanger for the act break, that forced good discipline for script writing; FS still does it even if there’s no need for commercials breaks
Mulder’s line “I don’t wanna restle” was improvised; there was very little ad-libbing, actors were used to follow the script closely, a lot of pressure to make the air date; today, there are daily phone calls, actors feel more empowered and change lines, the culture of movie-making has moved to TV, sometimes it is for the better
Running out of bullets: FS compares it to Hitchcock’s “Notorious”, where Cary Grant and Claude Rains run out of champagne
Mulder’s disappearance: they trimmed individual frames to make it seem sudden
The monster was a mix of practical and early CG effects
FS wanted M&S alone scene like in Quagmire; they rarely did character continuity, like Scully reflecting on her cancer
Originally Scully was to sing Hank Williams’ “I’m so lonesome I could cry” but GA said she can’t sing, the only thing she can sing was “Jeremiah…”
They were stuck during script writing on how to get them out of that hole; the solution was team building
The timing was down to the second for the ad breaks, they were shaving frames off shots (!); editing was done in a trailer at the end of the Fox lot
FS thought DD mispronounced “conquistadors” but he was right
They were careful with whose POV they were showing, that final shot with the monster was not Scully’s
Ending: there’s still something left, in typical TXF fashion
An audio commentary of “1X23: The Erlenmeyer Flask” with Chris Carter, coming from The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast recorded for the 30th anniversary of The X-Files! In a rare treat, The Creator talks about one of the most important episodes of the series and is, well, depending on what you compare it to, tight-lipped or talkative! Highlights below!
opening sequence: shot in North Vancouver docks, used several times, have now been torn down [as I can sadly confirm]
last episode of the season and he was really tired, wrote this in his room at the Sutton Place Hotel in Vancouver [still exists!], put Stone’s “JFK” on and became the background while writing (could have influenced the idea to kill Deep Throat, “sometimes you have to kill your darlings”)
he sat a long while with the people that did the opening credits to fine-tune them
many name references: Roy Lacerio: CC played softball with; Danny Valladeo: was pitcher in CC’s high school baseball team [ha! so it’s confirmed he’s supposed to be named Valladeo!]; Berube: named after a fan who wrote a letter to CC about what she liked and didn’t like about the show; Ardis: name of street in Bellflower where his oldest friend grew up in; William Secare, Fort Marlene: surely there’s a story there but he doesn’t remember
they might have known that there was going to be s2 by this point, they were told they would have a short vacation
episode inspired by conversations with virologist Anne Simon about DNA and nucleotides, became science advisor to the show [see analysis of her book on the science of TXF], Carpenter was her married name; and with Bob Hardy (?), South California doctor who was working on the Human Genome Project
many takes to have monkey try to bite Scully
all scripted, no ad libs, fast production, no room to improvise
if you want to give someone a “tutorial” on what the mythology is about, you show them Pilot, Deep Throat, The Erlenmeyer Flask
he can remember the name of the actor of Crew Cut Man, Lindsey Ginter!
they managed to put so much in a single episode because they plotted out so intricately and elaborately
originally 7 days of shooting, then 8, then additionally 5-8 days of 2nd unit working concurrently, sometimes 3rd unit
detective scenes come from his love of “Sherlock Holmes”
excellent directing from RW Goodwin, director of photography John Bartley set the dark visual tone of the show
can remember every frame of “All The President’s Men” [I can believe that!]
actually shot at a real Pandora Street in Vancouver
he has Zeus Storage sign and alien fetus in his office
Spielberg had called “Close Encounters” speculative fiction; CC gave in to the characterization “science fiction” eventually [I guess CC’s strong dislike of the term science fiction came from its pulpy connotation while he was growing up in the 60s-70s?]
CC had in mind a high-tech facility, Alex Gansa suggested the look of a dark musty rusty warehouse
from the get go TXF was not just going to be an alien show, although the mythology was going to be about that
importance of science, developed a network of people they could call to get things right
was the last episode of the season so he got to be on set for the whole shooting
he wanted to direct an episode as soon as possible, but producing was very time consuming, so it ended up happening in s2
Deep Throat, Syndicate and everything else derived from the idea of the character of CSM
after shooting this, GA went on vacation and got married
GA was not an experienced driver, had difficulty with shooting
alien fetus design: props and art department took an idea and always made it better
he didn’t have Red Museum episode in mind yet, but it was derived from Deep Throat’s line
Deep Throat shooting scene: it was nearing dawn, cameras set up so that it would look night
removing Scully’s boyfriend [Ethan] made Scully’s relationship with Mulder so much more tense
