Chris Carter knows how to keep a secret.
The X-Files creator and his writing partner, Frank Spotnize, finished the script for The X-Files: I Want to Believe last November and raced into production over the winter. Along the way, Carter -- who produced and directed the film, opening Friday -- took extraordinary measures to maintain secrecy about his storyline, which catches up with Fox Mulder and Dana Scully six years after the iconic TV series' finale. All we know for sure at this point is Mulder and Scully are together again, searching for answers to a mystery that unfolds amid snowy terrain.
Wired.com got on the phone with Carter to find out about the surveillance cameras he installed on the movie set, his five-year hiatus from show business and the key to bringing stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back together. He also discusses the real-life scene straight out of the X-Files when six Secret Service agents marched into his office on the 20th Century Fox lot. Paranoia lives!
Wired.com: Keeping the story line for this movie under wraps is much harder now than it would have been eight or nine years ago when the X-Files TV series was on the air....
Chris Carter: Without a doubt. That's one reason we were determined to spoil the spoilers. It's a business now, not unlike the business paparazzi are involved [in]. They're cashing in on spilling plots, these websites that actually sell advertising. It capitalizes on and/or exploits something I consider to be of great value, and that's the element of surprise. If they are going to make book, as it were, on what I'm doing, then I'm going to take pleasure in trying to foil them every step of the way.
Wired.com: You've been very successful at keeping a lid on the leakers.
Carter: There've been a few peeps, but, yeah, we've managed to keep the story a secret. I think it will probably be spilled in the next 48 hours just because, if people jump the gun now, what's the punishment? But I'll still consider it a victory.
Wired.com: For a lot of fans, the plot is probably less important than the chance to see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson together again as Mulder and Scully.
Carter: Yes, that's true.
Wired.com: That kind of onscreen chemistry can be very fragile. Were you at all worried that on the first day of shooting, the vibe between Mulder and Scully we remember from the late '90s might not be there anymore?
Carter: No, I wasn't concerned about that at all. You could drive yourself crazy with all the things to worry about, but that was the least of my concerns.
Wired.com: So you trusted your stars to deliver the goods once the cameras starting rolling.
Carter: And they told me as much. It was their enthusiasm to do the movie, particularly David's, that excited me to revisit the X-Files, and I'm so glad I did now. It gave me a chance to look at this relationship, which has now lasted 16 years, in a whole new way.
Wired.com: Duchovny was basically nudging you to make a new X-Files movie?
Carter: When I gave him the script, he liked it very much but thankfully, he had very astute notes.
Wired.com: How did you approach Gillian?
Carter: She read the script while I sat in the other room talking to her partner. Then I took it back from her.
Wired.com: How did she react?
Carter: She liked it, but Gillian is very smart about her character. She had questions, which were more feelings at that point, that helped me to dig back in and refine and polish and rethink some areas.
Wired.com: Between the end of the TV series and the beginning of the movie project, you had a lot of time to decompress from show business. For one thing, you spent a year getting your pilot's license. What hooked you on flying?
Carter: New way of thinking. It's always good for me to force myself into a place where I'm uncomfortable, and I've never been comfortable flying. But I like the fact that, with flying, you have this methodical system with which you solve problems. I'd recommend it to anyone. It probably helped me be a better director and producer.
Wired.com: You also did some mountain climbing, right?
Carter: In Canada, I climbed some mountains with the Alpine Club of Canada, which taught me a lot about stamina. And again, I was approaching something where I was uncomfortable.
Wired.com: So you you weren't exactly chilling out during your hiatus.
Carter: Hardly.
Wired.com: When you ran X-Files ...
Carter: I was pretty much at my computer for about 10 years straight. I finally had a chance to get out and do things that were more physical. You know what else I did? I took three years of drum lessons. I have a kit set up right now. I love jazz and funk, because it's hard. If it's not hard, it's not worth doing.
Wired.com: Meanwhile, as you're doing the mountain climbing and flying and playing drums, you've got a lawsuit against Fox going on.
Carter: Yes. By the way, that's something of a misnomer. It was a lawsuit I had to file to preserve my right to continue to negotiate, but it never reached the pitch where everybody basically straps on their armor and each side is financing a war. It was a negotiation.
Wired.com: Once you decided to move forward with a new X-Files movie, things came together pretty quickly. Was there a sense of urgency in getting this made?
Carter: Frank and I wrote the script between April and August, which for us, was so luxurious.
Wired.com: Coming from TV ...
Carter: Yes. We continued to polish the script until November, literally minutes before the writers' strike happened
Wired.com: Why'd you go back to Vancouver, where most of the X-Files series was filmed, to make the movie?
Carter: We needed snow, so we needed to head north. We considered Alberta but chose to shoot about two hours north of Vancouver, and I'm glad we did.
Wired.com: I guess there's a certain atmosphere you can only get from that kind of fierce weather and rugged location, but I imagine it's also a huge hassle?
Carter: Snow can be unstable. If it starts to get warm, it melts. If it melts and you've got heavy equipment on it, it gets mired. Moving anything in the snow requires something other than wheels. You need snowmobiles to do the most simple thing like turn your cameras in the opposite direction. Communication is restricted. You often direct the actors by yelling at them across a distance -- not the way I prefer to direct. And you need to keep your wits about you when you're in the dead of night and it's the driving snow, the wind is blowing.
Wired.com: How did you prepare for all that?
Carter: We started shooting before Christmas, and then broke for two weeks. My wife and I went to a ski resort, but I didn't ski once. During the day, I would dress up in my various cold-weather wardrobes and walk around and get the feel for what was going to work in different environments and figure out how I was going to change from one pair of shoes to another. I now own, literally, eight pairs of different grades of snow boots. My experience with the Alpine Club of Canada was all-important. Little did I know I was training for this movie during the five years off.
Wired.com: X-Files, the series, captured a certain kind of paranoia floating around in the late '90s. Then everything changed, at least for a while, with 9/11. Does the shift in the national mood, post-9/11, inform the way you deal with paranoia in I Want to Believe?
Carter: No, we chose to not put this in a political context. The film doesn't depend on the current definition of paranoia, but we do stake the story to this place in time and make a passing, ambiguous reference to the zeitgeist.
Wired.com: Speaking of paranoia, if we can get back to the security precautions: You actually set up surveillance cameras to make sure crew members didn't try to leak the scripts?
Carter: Yep. That's outrageous. We trust everyone we work with, mostly because we've worked with them before, but we did that as almost a theatrical ... I thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could do a making-of that was about how we kept the script a secret? So we started to produce that. My suspicion was that we wouldn't be able to keep it a secret, that someone would blab, and then you could actually create a whodunit, a movie within the movie.
Wired.com: And you made sure everyone turned in their "sides" of the scripts at the end of the shooting day.
Carter: That was a huge hassle for everyone. All our assistants had to go through the collection and shredding process. Still, call sheets leaked. We had paparazzi the first night. Our cameraman one night is setting up a shot, he yells, "Photographer!" and everyone went tearing off after this guy.
Wired.com: Did you hire security consultants to figure all this stuff out?
Carter: We hired no security consultants. We are now the security experts. People can hire us (laughs).
Wired.com: It's not just you who worried about leaks. Fox is pretty aggressive too, right?
Carter: I learned how serious Fox was about security back in 2002. One day, six Secret Service agents came in to our offices and started interviewing us individually. Someone in our offices, at night,had called one of these spoiler sites and given out information on Minority Report, which was being made at Fox at the time. They were investigating the leak as a crime.
Wired.com: I'm going to assume Mulder and Scully are both still alive at the end of this movie?
Carter: They are.
Wired.com: So In the back of your mind, have you considered doing another sequel?
Carter: We wrote this movie imagining that it might be the last time we ever see Mulder and Scully, so we'd be happy if this were our swan song. We can't predict box office. If this movie does business, I'm sure that Fox would want to have a conversation with us.
Wired.com: And you'd be willing to take part in that conversation?
Carter: Sure!
Wired.com: If nobody spoils the plot twists and people go see The X Files: I Want to Believe this weekend having no idea what they're in for, what do you want the audience to experience?
Carter: I hope people feel we've deepened the relationship and that the mystery was satisfying ... and creepy.
Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox
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