Dec-11-2008
Sci Fi Wire
Duchovny Still Believes In X-Files
Staci Layne Wilson

[Original article here]

The X-Files: I Want To Believe didn’t do blockbuster box office, but star David Duchovny still wants to revisit the role of former FBI agent Fox Mulder, whom he refers to as “mine.” He adds that he wants to believe that The X-Files could live on in a spinoff TV series.

The movie–the second based on the long-running Fox TV series–is out now on DVD, and it is hoped it finds the audience that eluded it in movie theaters over the summer.

That includes Duchovny himself, who confessed that he never saw the film on a big screen. “It’s not a special-effects movie,” he says. “It kind of was coming out in a time when you expected it to be–in the summer. To me, it was more a fall movie.”

Duchovny adds: “It’s a beautiful-looking movie. The location, the glow of the snow and the eeriness of that part of it, I think that looks great on the big screen. Everything looks better on the big screen, but I think that, yeah, it’s less of a popcorn movie than it is a fall movie, … for lack of a better term.”

Duchovny, who is undeniably an SF icon, says that he’s not looking for any more fantastical roles. “I don’t feel a need to score in any sci-fi movie or television show for the rest of my life,” he says. “I think that we can check that one off for me. But I don’t choose genres. I choose characters, so I would never rule out a science fiction movie just because it was the genre. If it had a character or a story that I thought was really interesting, I would do it.”

As for The X-Files, Duchovny says, “I never thought of The X-Files as science fiction. I always thought of it as playing this character in this world. The world was recognizable to me. It wasn’t The Jetsons. It was present time. You couldn’t fly. You couldn’t transport our bodies over a teleport and all that stuff, so it was the real world, and it didn’t feel like sci-fi to me.” Following is an edited version of the rest of SCI FI Wire’s interview with Duchovny.

Do you suppose that the Fox Mulder character could somehow endure along the lines of a Sherlock Holmes or a James Bond? Do you think that other actors could play him, and how would you like to see him go in the future?

Duchovny: I’m sure that someone else could play him, but I’d like to play him for a little while longer. I certainly think it’s a pretty good idea to try to make another X-Files-oriented show on television. I wouldn’t be an actor in it, but I’ve always thought it was a great plan. But I would like to continue on as a movie serial. As far as what actors … I’m not ready to go out to pasture just yet.

What is it about Mulder that keeps you coming back?

Duchovny: He’s mine. I feel protective of him and of it and of all of us. It was the first real, real success of my career and will always be a cornerstone of my life in many ways, the creative endeavor it is. I feel protective of the character and of the show in many ways, and I’m proud of it. I think that it can expand and grow, and .. I find that we have bonds.

I guess Indiana Jones gets aged, but it remains the same movie even though he’s aging. Bond doesn’t age, and I find that a little less interesting, at least for me. I’m not just saying this because I would like to keep doing it, but I always talk to [X-Files creator] Chris [Carter] about how fascinating today it would be to take this guy from his early 30s and let’s take him into his mid-50s, late 50s. Maybe nobody wants to see 60-year-old Fox Mulder, but we can grow him. We can take him through life’s hardships and changes. It doesn’t have to be this cartoon where nothing changes. You can actually form the flow of this movie and the expanse of this show to embrace actual passage of time and what that does to a person and relationships. To me, that’s interesting as an actor and as a person. As an intellectually based character, you don’t give a damn what he looks like.

Since The X-Files: I Want to Believe may not have been the huge blockbuster that everyone was hoping for, we’d like to know: What is your own measure of success for the movie?

Duchovny: I guess it’s always the first time I see the movie. What’s my feeling when I come out? I always felt like the subject matter of this particular movie was limiting. It was dark, and it wasn’t going. I mean, it could always bust out and become something huge, but as you recall, Batman was just suffocating everything at the time. Even so, it was also a $29.9 million movie competing during the summer. It had some stuff going against it in terms of me thinking it was going to break out. I didn’t think that it actually would. It was very dark. The subject matter was limiting in that way. Even though I would hope any movie I do would do the best business it can, that was never going to be a measure of this particular film.

I’ve only seen it one time, and I was sitting in Chris’ editing room. I watched it on a little screen. I guess I missed the chance to see it on the big screen, and that’s too bad, but when I left that initial screening at Chris’ house, the film was pretty much almost done except for some special effects. I just felt like it was really strong and kind of a strangely moving piece of work. Still dark, and still, I thought, limited, but the way that the movie performed did not surprise me so much, and I think that if we do get a chance to do another one … what I always really liked about the show was that it had a dark vision, but at the heart of it being driven by Mulder was this real optimism or wonder or sense of belief, and then it would kind of open out. Most of the best shows that we did would open out into real wonder at the end, if only because you didn’t have an answer, which was the mystery of it, but the wonder.

Mulder’s quest, to me, is a very positive one. If we get a chance to do another one, I think because in this movie Mulder kept getting reinvigorated, Mulder was in a down place for much of this film; he wasn’t driving the way he drives, the way he drove everything before that. In a way, the nature of how we had to get back into the show, which was to take the guy out of his job, also deprived the movie of some optimism and wonder and enlightenment that occurs when you’ve got this unhinged guy trying to prove wonderful crazy things.

Oct-22-2008
MTV
Permanent Link to ‘X-Files’ Producer/Director Frank Spotnitz Makes The Mythology Matter In New Wildstorm Comic Series
Kiel Phegley

[Original article here]

X-Files comic books — in the ’90s, four color tales of Agents Scully and Mulder heated up the comics charts and nabbed scores of cash on the back issue market before the comics industry and publisher, Topps, took a turn for the worse…along with the whole “X-Files” franchise (check out Kurt Loder’s visit to the “X-Files” set here). Now in November, DC’s Wildstorm imprint looks to reignite the series’ comic popularity with a miniseries featuring something the ’90s comics never had: a direct tie to the show’s overarching mythos.

“They are connected with a part of the mythology that we introduced but did very little with at the beginning of season five,” said writer Frank Spotnitz, a longtime scribe for the series and co-writer of July’s “I Want To Believe” film. “We introduced this corporation Roush and so that was part of the mythology that we could have gone a lot deeper with but never got the chance. So the next two books connect with Roush. And I’m going to take a little break from writing comics after this and get back to my screenwriting career, but at some point I hope to get back to write more and do more with the mythology.”

But while Spotnitz’s direct exploration of the show’s most successful period will only last a few months, the series will continue for five issues after that, presenting new stories of Scully and Mulder in classic form mixing it up with FBI Deputy Director Skinner, conspiracy nuts The Lone Gunman and the villainous Cigarette Smoking Man, all of whom appear in upcoming issues.

“It’s just fun to play with again,” he explained. “This is kind of an interesting thing about the comic books – in my imagination anyway – [it’s] that they’re sort of ‘out of time.’ The situation is the situation that we found between seasons two and five of the series. And yet, they’re wearing clothes and using technology that is contemporary of today. It’s not like they’re period pieces. It’s sort of like they’re unstuck from time. I look at them as if that situation in ‘The X-Files’ were still going on today; a sort of parallel universe to the one that we have in the movie.”

With that last movie underperforming at the box office this summer, long time X-Philes will be glad to know that the creator’s plans for future comics series will continue to play in the show’s glory years with new stories focusing on various mythological elements not fully developed in the show. And if Spotnitz has his way, those tales will be penned by both past “X-Files” writers as well as some of his big name comic writing pals, including Brad Meltzer and Brian K Vaughan.

“We have some writers from the TV series who have expressed interest like John Shiban and David Amann, but they all have busy television careers. But in the meantime I’d love to see some other established comic book writers try their hand at the ‘X-Files.’ And that’s what’s great about comic book series is you’re a lot freer to explore and experiment and do things that are out there.”

And if readers get behind the expanded in-continuity comics treatment “X-Files” is getting, Spotnitz doesn’t rule out more series based on his friend Chris Carter’s universe of TV series. “I think it’s a great idea; I still love all those titles. Every single show we did with Chris at 1013 I have great affection for. Especially ‘Harsh Realm’ and ‘Lone Gunman’ I think ended before their time. And I have to tell you, everywhere I go people are always asking me if there’s going to be a ‘Millennium’ movie or something, so I suspect there’s a hardcore audience out there that’s still wanting it.”

Sep-28-2008
Exclusive Interview With Millennium Co-Executive Producer Frank Spotnitz
Zone Horror

[Original article here]

On October the 4th cult television series Millenniun comes to Zone Horror. This terrifying drama series horror in its purest form with a leading man that really knows how to make the skin on your neck crawl, Lance Henriksen. Here we speak exclusively to Executive Producer Frank Spotnitz about his involvement with a series that changed TV drama forever.

Zone Horror: Is it true you began your working life as a journalist?

Frank Spotnitz: Yes. I was editor of my college paper at UCLA, then went to work for United Press International, first in Indiana, then in New York City. I later wrote for the Associated Press in Paris and freelanced for a number of magazines, including Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.

ZH: How did you get into television work?

FS: I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist anymore! I moved back to Los Angeles from Paris so I could study screenwriting at the American Film Institute. The X-Files was my first job in Hollywood.

ZH: When did you first meet Chris Carter?

FS: By chance. I met Chris in a book group shortly after I moved back to L.A. This was years before he created The X-Files.

ZH: How did you become involved with Millennium and can your recall your reaction when you first heard the basic outline for the series?

FS: I was very flattered that Chris asked me to work on Millennium as well as The X-Files – flattered and, in short order, exhausted! It was very tough doing double duty on the first season of Millennium and the fourth season of The X-Files. I remember that I only vaguely understood what Millennium was going to be about before Chris let me read the pilot script. I read it on the laptop computer in his office right after he finished it. I was, quite simply, blown away. I still think that pilot is among the very best things he’s ever written.

ZH: Is it true Lance was the first choice for Frank Black? If not who else was considered? (Personally I can’t think of anyone else who could bring his quiet intensity to the role)

FS: Yes, Lance was Chris’ first choice. There were other actors considered for the role, but I don’t want to risk making them uncomfortable by giving their names.

ZH: What was it like to work with Lance Henriksen and Megan Gallagher, two very different actors?

FS: It was great, although I have to say I didn’t really work “with” them very much. On Millennium, nearly all of my work was done in Los Angeles — breaking stories, writing scripts, editing episodes and so on. Occasionally, I’d fly up to Vancouver to help prep an episode, but usually I’d only see Lance and Megan when they were in Los Angeles (or during crew parties!).

ZH: The two leads brought so much depth to their respected roles, which other actors that appeared on the show stand out for you?

FS: Terry O’Quinn was, of course, amazing, just as he now is on Lost. I also thought Birttany Tiplady was an astonishing little actress, Sarah-Jane Redmond was fantastic, as always, and Klea Scott is one of my all-time favourite actors, period. There were too many wonderful guest stars for me to mention.

ZH: As Millennium was based totally in the real world how did you approach writing your episodes, as they were far different to what you were creating for The X-Files?

FS: It was very easy for me to get in touch with my fears on Millennium, because the things that scare me most are things that can happen in the real world. The challenge for me was finding interesting ways to involve Frank’s family in the stories. And I was also always looking for ways to find hope amid all the darkness. The things I would say The X-Files and Millennium had in common were our focus on tight plotting, and wanting to find interesting reasons for why the bad guys were doing what they were doing.

ZH: Why do you think the series has continued to generate interest and debate with the viewing public?

FS: I think it’s because it was very intense and uncompromising. That turned off some viewers, but the people who liked the show, really liked it. I remember the earliest meetings with the network concerned how dark the show was. They kept asking us to lighten up, to find more humour. But Chris had a vision for the series, and it was pretty intense. I also think the show touched on something fundamental about life – the split between the darkness of Frank’s work, and the lightness of his family and home life. Frank struggled to protect his family from the darkness – of the killers he hunted, and inside himself. That’s a very powerful idea to me, and I think it resonates with a lot of other people, too.

ZH: I know some critics disliked the show for its violent content but do you agree it needed to show the horrors of real life in such a graphic manner?

FS: I think there’s an even greater danger when you sanitize violence, or make it less disturbing in some way. I think the most responsible way to depict violence is to make it horrific, because that’s what it is in real life.

ZH: Do you have a favourite episode of Millennium?

FS: The Pilot episode and Lamentation. Among the ones I wrote, Sacrament.

ZH: There’s a legion of fans waiting the return of Frank Black, is there any chance?

FS: I’d say a small chance, getting smaller every year. We’d still love to revisit the character, but at this point I think someone would have to light a pretty big fire under the Fox executives to make it happen.

ZH: Congratulations on The X-Files – I Want To Believe, an intelligent and refreshing break from predictable CGI drenched blockbusters. Can we expect more?

FS: It’s too soon to say.

ZH: What other projects are you working on at the moment?

FS: I have a couple things in the works I’m very excited about, but the deals aren’t done, so I can’t announce them yet. Soon, hopefully!

ZH: Frank Spotnitz, thank you very much.

Sep-04-2008
Chris Carter hospitalized
Los Angeles Times Hero Complex
Geoff Boucher

[Original article here]

I just saw that Chris Carter,the mastermind behind “The X-Files,” is reportedly getting medical care for exhaustion and “an acute sleep disorder.” Whitney Pastorek at EW.com has this brief item:

Chris Carter, writer, producer, and director of “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” was hospitalized on Tuesday due to “physical exhaustion and an acute sleeping disorder,” a source close to Carter tells EW.com. The source says the hospitalization stems from Carter “working on multiple films back to back over a two year period” — the recently released “X-Files” sequel and “Fencewalker,” a covert project he is rumored to have begun shooting earlier this year. He is expected to recover quickly.

This news follows the announcement last week by David Duchovny’s attorney, Stanton Stein, that the “X-Files” and “Californication” star is in rehab to deal with his sex addiction. Roger Friedman at FOX is reporting that Duchovny was in a program to deal with his pornography addiction and went public with it because a fellow patient took that tidbit to the tabloids, which were about to pop the story. Friedman has been wildly wrong before so I would take that with a grain of salt.

 It was a grim summer for the X-folks. “X-Files: I Want to Believe,” was an afterthought even among sci-fi and genre fans because of the massive competition in the sector this summer. The $30 million film pulled in about $21 million in the U.S. (and about $57 million worldwide), far below expectations. I think it will do quite well as a DVD (people are accustomed, after all, to watching Mulder and Scully on the small screen), but I can’t imagine we’ll ever see another “X-Files” project at theaters.

I interviewed Duchovny over coffee a few months ago for a feature on the film and he was great, very droll but bright and engaging. I wish him well with his efforts to keep his marriage and family intact. I’m sure he loathes that this happening in a public space now. It’s hard to tell if there is some Hollywood code-talk at work, meanwhile, in the announcement about Carter’s medical treatment. I hope things go well for him. I absolutely adored the early seasons of “The X-Files,” and Carter has always seemed like a cerebral innovator as a storyteller.

Sep-??-2008
Access Hollywood
Celebrities Uncensored: David Duchovny & Gillian Anderson

[Original article here]
[Youtube version here]

http://widget.accesshollywood.com/singleclip/singleclip_v1.swf?CXNID=1000004.10035NXC&WID=482a0d55893fbe3f&clipID=277667

Jul-31-2008
Spotnitz on ‘X-Files’: ‘If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully…’
Los Angeles Times Hero Complex
Geoff Boucher – Gina McIntyre

[Original article here]

I haven’t made it yet to see “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” (I’ll blame those five days gobbled up at Comic-Con) and I think a lot of other longtime X-fans fell into that category on the movie’s first weekend of release. Maybe it’s the passage of time or this summer’s glut of must-see genre fare, but I just haven’t felt a great sense of urgency to get out to see the movie.

Gina McIntyre, one of my colleagues here at The Times, had a chance to sit down recently with Frank Spotnitz, the producer of the film and longtime creative presence in the franchise’s history, and here is her Q&A with him, appearing for the first time anywhere. Reading it does make me want to see the movie — not unlike reading a letter from an old friend — but it’s still a surprisingly faint urge.

You’ve said that the movie is a standalone story that doesn’t require people to be all that familiar with the show. Was there a sense that the mythology became too complicated to update or were you looking to create something outside of those narrative constraints?

If we’re lucky enough to be able to do more movies, at some point, we will be revisiting that mythology. In the show, we said that Mulder believes the aliens are coming in December 2012, so that’s a date we’d certainly hit if we’re fortunate enough to keep making these. But for this movie, from the very beginning, when it was first discussed six years ago, we wanted to do a standalone. We had to do a mythology movie last time. We were in the midst of the TV series, and the studio wanted a big event movie that would clearly be something you couldn’t get at home for free. This time around, we didn’t feel any of those constraints. We felt we could really do what the show did most of the time, which was deliver a scary supernatural mystery.

You’re keeping the film’s plot secret, but can you give any sort of broadstrokes description of the story?

It’s real time, six years from where we last saw Mulder and Scully. It’s a scary, creepy intimate story, a mystery obviously. It’s really more about them and their relationship than the show usually was. When you’re doing a TV show, you’ve got to do so many episodes that unless you want to risk becoming a soap opera, you really can’t spend that much capital on their personal lives week in and week out. The audience would get compassion fatigue after a while. So, we were very stingy about that in the TV series.

What’s the nature of their relationship in the film?

It’s obviously one of the big questions fans want to know — are they together? Have they been seeing each other these past six years? If they are together, what’s the nature of their relationship? Is it romantic or not? That’s one of the big cards that we’ve been trying to keep hidden until the movie comes out. But we didn’t want to take for granted that there would be any more movies after this. This could be it. If this is the last time we see Mulder and Scully, we didn’t want to leave anything on the table.

Since the last movie was released and the series ended, there’d been talk of doing another film, so you must have had ideas in mind. Is this film based on one of those ideas or did the story emerge more recently?

We spent weeks in 2003 working on this. It actually was quite difficult to come up with something that was sufficiently different from anything we’d done on television. We came up with something that’s not 100% unlike anything we’d ever done before, but we felt it was different enough to justify making a movie about. We pitched the story back then to the studio. Deal-making started and then there was the threat of a lawsuit that stopped everything dead cold for four years. The issue got resolved in 2007, and suddenly we were back at work and we’d lost all our cards [plotting out the story] from 2003. At first it felt like a disaster, but it ended up being a real blessing because we had to start from scratch on Mulder and Scully and on the personal part of the story. In those four years, we had changed. We realized Mulder and Scully would have changed. We found we had a lot of stuff to say that was completely new and unlike anything we’d done before.

Have the intervening years affected the ways in which you and Chris Carter collaborate?

I’d say what was really different was the pressure was very different. There’s a certain amount of pressure you put on yourself all the time, the pressure to do good work. But it wasn’t like doing a TV show, where it’s not just this script, it’s the five others that you have to be working on at the same time. We sat for days at Pete’s coffee in Brentwood before we even started to work on the story again, talking about life and ideas. Then we spent weeks and weeks in his office in Santa Monica outlining the movie before we started writing. The writing we didn’t do together — Chris would write and send me his files from Santa Barbara, and I’d go over them and send them back. It reminded me of going back to my earliest days when I was new to television working with Chris on a story.

Can you describe the atmosphere on set?

It was a really nice atmosphere on set because everybody wanted to be there. David and Gillian wanted to be there, they focused so hard, especially on their scenes together. We had a great guest cast that were so much fun. We were laughing all the time. The hard part was being in the snow because we were in Pemberton, north of Vancouver, subfreezing temperatures, 14 hours a day for three weeks, often through the night and that was challenging.

Chris and I developed a great affection for a place called the Mount Currie Coffee Company. They make something there called a Canadiano, which is an Americano with maple syrup in it. After about a week, they ran out of maple syrup because they were not used to selling so many Canadianos. So we bought our own maple syrup and we stuck it under the counter and if you had the password, then they would bring out the maple syrup for you. The password was Peter Nincompoop.

Why did you decide to keep the film’s plot so tightly under wraps?

We realized early on that we were in an extremely unique position because it would have been six years since people had seen these characters and there was going to be many, many questions people would be asking about what Mulder’s been doing, what Scully’s been doing, the nature of the relationship. It seemed a shame to spoil everybody’s fun by telling all that before the movie has opened. There’s nothing like the experience of sitting in a theater and watching a story for the first time. It is not the same if you know in advance what’s going to happen. And everybody knows that. I have to say the attitude of the fans out there has been entirely supportive.

Having said that, it has been extremely challenging trying to keep it secret. We realized pretty early on that we actually had to engage in disinformation. What happened was we put out enough disinformation that even if something genuine did leak, no one would know the difference between what was fake and what was real so everything became suspect. We didn’t do that to mess with the fans. The one risk we had in the disinformation we put out was you don’t want to put out a false story that people get so excited about they’re disappointed when that’s not what the movie’s about.

How do you plan to appeal to new audiences who didn’t watch the series?

I don’t know. We’re certainly trying, and we’ve certainly written the movie to work for people who have never seen the show before. I still believe in these characters and their appeal and the power of this fictional world that Chris created, so I do think it’s a natural for audiences of any age, not just people who were born before 1980 or however old you would have had to have been to watch it when it first came on television.

The interesting thing is that “The X-Files” is its own little sub-genre. It’s such a specific thing the way these two characters go about investigating things. It’s not just the relationship between Mulder and Scully personally, but the fact that one is a believer and one is a skeptic and they’re such super-smart people. These stories can’t help but be smart and work on that level. I continue to find it fascinating and just hope other people do too.