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THE CAST
and crew of the upcoming The X-Files: I Want to
Believe were just a few weeks into filming in
Vancouver when Frank Spotnitz, the cowriter and
coproducer with creator-director Chris Carter, called
star David Duchovny over to a laptop
computer to watch a fan-made video on YouTube. It was a
montage of scenes from the old X-Files show set to Sarah
McLachlan’s forlorn “When She Loved Me.”
“It was
intensely romantic and it almost brought tears to my
eyes,” Duchovny recalled. “It really did. And it
reminded me that we have at the core of The X-Files this
very powerful relationship. We have to honor that and
not shy away from the sentimentality of the fans or of
the relationship itself. When we were doing the show,
Gillian [Anderson]
and I had got tired of it. And we wanted to be ourselves
outside of it. I remember struggling. But now I think,
‘God, what a great love affair.’”
Those
are healing words for the intensely devoted fans of the
television series that became a pop-culture phenomenon
in the 1990s and made Duchovny’s Fox Mulder and
Anderson’s Dana Scully a sort of Tracy and Hepburn,
albeit with alien autopsies. The show debuted in 1992,
peaked with audiences in its fifth season but ran out of
gas in 2002. On July 25, the flashlights come out again
and FBI agents Mulder and Scully will restart their
spooky romantic tango.
The plot
of the film has been intensely guarded and, sitting in a
coffee shop in Santa Monica, Duchovny carefully
sidestepped questions about the story cooked up by
Carter and Spotnitz. “You can ask, but my job is to not
answer,” said the lean 47-year-old who this year picked
up a Golden Globe for his work in Californication on
Showtime.
Duchovny
did confirm that I Want to Believe will be in the
tradition of the “stand-alone” episodes of the old
series, meaning it’s not part of the long, complicated
story arc concerning a shadow government and alien life;
this will be more of a “horror and suspense movie, the
creepy stuff as procedural,” that finds the agents more
on Scooby-Doo duty rather than in Oliver Stone mode.
A good
portion of the movie was filmed in Whistler, the alpine
skiing hub in Canada’s Coast Mountains, and the intense
snow on screen is both majestic and unsettling as the
agents chase their mystery.
“It’s
not a James Bond film,” Duchovny said with a wry smile.
“We’re not chasing a guy on a snowboard. Not that that
wouldn’t have been cool. But it’s not that. I’m lobbying
already to make the next one in Hawaii. It’s not going
so well. But the snow looks amazing. The flashlights in
the snow look great.”
The
franchise hit the silver screen in 1998 with The
X-Files: Fight the Future, and a sequel was expected
in 2001 but legal quarrels between Carter and 20th
Century Fox delayed the process, and then script and
scheduling issues hampered the process further. The film
will acknowledge the time passage and even have a bit of
fun with it, such as a scene early on in which Mulder
and Scully, in a corridor at FBI headquarters, both
glance purposely at the portrait of President Bush on
the wall; the Clinton photographs from the 1990s are
long gone.
“It’s
not like other science-fiction shows where time is
frozen or you’re in an unfamiliar world,” he said.
“You’ve got to make these actual people who have aged
and changed. For me, I thought I could kind of slip back
into the character pretty easily, but early on in
filming I found myself wondering whether I had done
enough work. It was more of a challenge than I
expected.”
What
helped? “Working with Gillian again and that rhythm
between us, that was probably the easiest thing and very
helpful for me. It was key for me to get back to Mulder
and nice we didn’t have to kind of play it up, or
emphasize it or exaggerate it. I really didn’t do any
research, per se. I have seen the show over the past six
years. Usually when I can’t sleep and I turn on the TV
and it’s there. I do watch it for a few minutes and it’s
nice now. It’s like home movies. But with autopsies.”
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