‘Difficult times,' ‘screaming matches,' and ‘abandonment': David Duchovny and Chris Carter rehash their drama on ‘The X-Files'
Duchovny began by saying that it's "obvious history" that his "entire career was made possible by The X-Files." The actor then delved into the troubles behind the scenes when he left after Season 7. (Mulder appeared in half of Season 8 and in the original series finale in Season 9).
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"Something lost in the times that we've done a reboot of the show, twice now, and even the second movie, goes back to me leaving the show," Duchovny declared. "We don't have to, like, hash it out, but I realized later that that was a difficult thing to do. You may have been as tired as I was, or as wanting to move on much as I was. I consider myself a team player, so I've always felt a bit of an abandonment, not by you, but of you, in that sense. I don't know if we're going for any resolution here or anything like that, this is not the VH1 version."
Carter confirmed that by Season 7, "We were all tired. We had made a big move from Vancouver to Los Angeles. We had done well over 100 episodes. There were legal, contractual things going on that were fraught, and you and I had a parting. We became — I don't want to say mortal enemies — but it was a difficult time." The showrunner recalled that Duchovny came to him after he'd worked out "legally with Fox that he would leave the show for a time." Carter considered those years that they were "at odds" to be a "forgettable part of the show" for him.Duchovny remembered a time when he was engaged in a "lawsuit with Fox [over compensation from reruns airing on FX] while working on the Fox lot, and actually had my security sweep my trailer for bugs. We were afraid that we were being bugged." When Carter ran into Duchovny around that time in Malibu, outside of the show, he hugged him out of "reflex," explaining, "I think it surprised both of us."
The artisans also talked about their "screaming matches" in Vancouver during Season 11, which Duchovny said was a misunderstanding regarding him wanting to catch an "early flight back home," and unintentionally making Carter think he was trying to "simplify his work" in directing the episode. "After 11 seasons, I'd just had it with you," Carter joked as the men laughed.
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Their time together wasn't all bad. "Watching you write, watching you shepherd the other writers on The X-Files, I re-learned a love for plot and for the smart machinery that keeps somebody guessing that goes to the highs and lows," Duchovny told his former boss. "Without that, I think I'd be making nonsensical movies that don't go anywhere. It's not about language, it's about the plot, at least in our business."
Said Carter, "When I did the pilot for The X-Files, I wrote a 17-page, single-spaced outline, so the story was very important. I didn't just wing it. When we started up the show, we hired writers, James Wong and Glen Morgan came on, and they had been working on Stephen J. Cannell shows, and they brought with them a bulletin board, and we put up 3x5 cards, and that became the way we plotted the episodes."
When Duchovny complimented Carter's "perfect" handwriting on those index cards, Carter added, "That was a Glen Morgan thing. He actually had beautiful penmanship, and so that became competitive — who could make the most beautiful cards? We've worked like that ever since, and I think Vince Gilligan still works that way on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul."
Duchovny calls the board method "smart," recalling, "We would work on some scripts and we would just take this card, and this scene could maybe go over here, or this scene goes over here, maybe it comes back, maybe it doesn't, and that all makes sense."
Fox/Liaison
The actor thanked the creator for allowing him to write and direct episodes of The X-Files back in the day, claiming, "I can't repay that thanks. It's really opened me up into another part of who I am." While TV stars of today are "gifted" a producer credit, Duchovny "never wanted to be" because he wanted to "earn it." Duchovny directed three episodes of the series: "The Unnatural" in Season 6, "Hollywood A.D." in Season 7, and "William" in Season 9.
"The great thing about The X-Files was that you were surrounded by people who wanted it to be good from the beginning, and that's not, in my experience, always the case. Some people just show up for work." When they shot in Vancouver from Seasons 1 through 5, the positivity was the reason Carter "got up every day to do the job."
News was also made on the Fail Better podcast, as Carter announced he'd just been given the "go-ahead" to do a director's cut of the second movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, from 2008. "I can't tell you how excited I am about this," he said. "Now I have the chance to make the scary movie that I always intended to make. It's really bringing to life something that, for me, was on the page and never got to the screen."
Duchovny is a four-time Emmy nominee for The X-Files (1997, 1998), The Larry Sanders Show (1997), and Life With Bonnie (2003). Carter received eight Emmy nominations overall for producing, writing, and directing The X-Files.
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