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Transcript of the DVD Audio Commentary by Chris Carter for 'The Post-Modern Prometheus'
[Transcribed by: Libby Edited by: Libby & X_Follower] Hi, I'm Chris Carter and I wrote and directed this episode called "The Post-Modern Prometheus", which is an homage to the Frankenstein story, to James Whale's Frankenstein episode, uch... movie in particular. The title of "Post-Modern Prometheus" comes from the other title of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which was "The Modern Prometheus" which referred to Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. [18-year-old Izzy Berkowitz and his friend Booger are having trouble starting their car. They eventually succeed and head off to a comic book convention.] I decided to shoot this episode in black-and-white because of the James Whale movies, because of the kind of fairy tale quality of the story, and because I wanted to do something we'd never done on The X Files before. It was interesting because there were so many things that I thought would be easier by shooting black-and-white, which ended up being a lot harder. The Director of Photography takes much more time to light each scene because he's really got to be considering his gray scale. The casting was interesting because originally I had written the show for Cher and for Roseanne Barr, both of whom had expressed interest in being in the series, and I was going to take and hog all the stars for myself in this single episode. It turned out that neither Cher nor Roseanne could change their schedule to accommodate us, or we could not accommodate them, and so we were forced to cast other actresses, and in this case Pattie Tierce who plays Shaineh Berkowitz for the Roseanne part, and we used a Cher look-alike, as you'll see later on, playing Cher. [Shaineh Berkowitz, Izzy's mother, is watching The Jerry Springer Show in her bedroom. Someone has secretly entered the house. Outside, the house is being covered with tenting.] I'd had this idea for the longest time to do something with termite-tenting a house. That something evil and dark and bad was going on. Every time you drove down the street you could imagine that something was happening in a termite-tented house. And this was a chance to finally use that idea, comically here, and it turns out that it actually worked well for the black-and-white, using this red and white termite-tenting really actually benefited the choice to shoot this without color. [Vapors begins to fill the house. Shaineh realizes that there's someone in the house. She becomes affected by the vapor. Her bedroom door is opened and she sees a monstrous face.] The teaser was shot in about a day and I had to rush through these final scenes. The Steady Camera work was done here by a second unit Steady Cam operator who was somewhat less experienced than I'd hoped. It took me a little bit longer and I think I'd directed only a few episodes of TV by this point and so I had the experience of having, that many television directors experience that I never thought I would experience, which is where the Line Producer was on the set looking at his watch, pointing to his watch, tapping his watch and telling me I had to hurry up. [Main titles] [Scully and Mulder are driving down a rural road. Scully reads out a letter to Mulder from Shaineh Berkowitz.] The leaves on the trees in the teaser are bright yellow in reality and I made them change the schedule for me to fit my shooting schedule because I knew those leaves would fall and I wanted the effect they would give in black-and-white. The sky here was an added sky. I wanted those Frankenstein-like skies that we're all so familiar with, if you watch the old Frankenstein movies, and that is a visual effect in the beginning. The entire episode was shot with wide-angle lenses. This forces the actors to basically act right into a camera, in fact there's a box they put around the lens, a matte box, and on that matte box they actually paste little pictures of the actor that the actor is acting with, or the character the actor is acting with, so they can remember who they're playing with, because mostly the actors instead of getting to look at another actor are looking right into a camera lens. [Mulder: Scully, do you think it's too soon to get my own 1-900 number? In the Berkowitz's house, Mulder and Scully talk with Shaineh.] There's a shot in this sequence... I don't think Gillian Anderson has ever looked more beautiful on The X-Files, it's where she turns to camera and she will look at a picture that's on a shelf, and I just remember seeing her on the monitor and thinking how beautiful she looked, and then it's really remained in my mind as the, for me, beauty shot that captures her, in black-and-white in this case, as well as any shot I think in the history of the show. [Shaineh tells them about her unexplained pregnancies, the first producing Izzy, and her current pregnancy which should be impossible as she had a tubal ligation two years previously. The three then move into the kitchen where Shaineh tells them that the intruder or intruders had used the skillet and eaten almost a whole jar of peanut butter.] I remember this scene, I became extremely confused about camera access and eyelines. With that wide-angle lens you are forced into a blocking like I was here, which is having your actors all hemmed in, in the set, and trying to create the proper eyelines. I gave myself a problem I didn't quite know how to solve and you can't really tell here in the way it's cut, but it was really a mess. [Then they go into Izzy's room. There is clutter everywhere, posters on the walls. Scully picks up a comic book, The Great Mutato, created by Izzy, and the image on the front cover is similar to Shaineh's description of the intruder she saw.] The artwork for the comic book that became the kind of first piece of evidence in this episode was done by Greg Loewen and I kept on him to keep coming up with better, better, better and better artwork, and finally he came up with this beautiful, simple drawing of the monster, Mutato. I had actually come up with the name Mutato and then did not realize until actually having seen, subsequent to that, a Simpsons comic book that Matt Groening had already come up with a character named Mutato, and I think that he was called "Mutayto" there, so I had to call the Simpsons and ask if I could borrow the name for my purposes, and they were generous enough to do that. [Izzy enters the house. When Mulder and Scully question him, he says that he's seen the Great Mutato as have a lot of people in the area.] The character of Izzy is played by a non-actor who was this really smart-ass kid who I found literally on the street one day. I was going down for a swim at lunchtime and I saw this kid sitting on the back of a truck with what looked like a Hollywood movie crew, and I went over to him and I started talking to him - it just struck me that he was exactly what I was looking for. Come to find out, you know, he was the son of a guy who actually worked in Hollywood who was somewhat suspicious of me and for why I was asking for his kid to be in an episode of The X-Files - I don't think he believed that I actually worked on The X-Files. But he finally consented and allowed his son to come up to Vancouver and shoot this episode, which was a rather interesting experience in itself because the actor, Stewart, was very undisciplined both as an actor and as a person, and he was very, very funny, very quick, and something like... he was like a rap singer and he kept everybody laughing throughout the shoot. [Later, Mulder and Scully are in the forest where they meet up with Izzy and a couple of his friends. The boys have laid a trap to lure the monster – a peanut butter sandwich.] His friends are also non-actors. One was a snake wrangler on The X-Files movie, and I'd been around this kid for a couple of weeks on The X-Files set during the shooting of the film, and I was trying to figure out some way I might use him in the show. So all these pieces kind of came together from little ideas that I'd kept in the back of my mind, actors, set pieces, little elements that I eventually sort of cobbled together into this crazy episode. [Unbeknownst to Mulder and Scully, Izzy is recording their conversation. They then hear a strange sound.] The kid who plays Goat Boy was a busboy at the local coffee shop where I would go in the morning in Vancouver, and I really didn't know him but one day I just asked him if he'd like to be in an episode of The X-Files and he was leaving town and I think he was most interested in the money he was going to get for the experience. [They see a strange figure in the distance. They all run towards it. Scully pauses and picks up the sandwich which has two bites taken out of it.] There were things that I didn't know how beautiful they would come out. This shot, running in the woods at night, I had no idea how beautiful it would look in black-and-white. [The figure has disappeared into the woods.] Joel Ransom just did such an incredible job, particularly because he had never shot black-and-white on this kind of schedule before and he was really, I think, winging it and making it up as we went, but I think it is just a testament to his incredible talent and eye and imagination that he was able to give us something, you know, as stunning as this episode. [They meet The Old Man standing on a nearby hill. He has a pig on a leash. He tells them he is the owner of the land they are on. When Scully tells him they are chasing what was said to be a monster, he says that wasn't a monster, but he will show them the monster they're looking for. Mulder and Scully visit Dr. Pollidori.] John O'Hurley had been in to read several times for us and we just couldn't find a right part for him. He wasn't what I would call an X-Files actor but he was the absolute perfect casting choice for this part. [Dr. Pollidori talks about his work in genetic manipulation.] I can't think of anyone else who would have worked. He came in, he knew exactly what the part needed, he took very little directing, and he was a pleasure to work with. [Dr. Pollidori says his work will make him famous. Mulder asks what the homeotic hox gene is. Pollidori suggests he ask Scully, as she is a scientist and Scully says she thinks it has something to do with growth and development.] The original idea for this episode came from Anne Simon who was the science researcher, science advisor on The X-Files, and it came sort of to me as I was led by her to Bloomington, Indiana, where I visited the university there and a friend of hers who was doing experiments on flies. He was able to take the genes that produced the eye of a fly and manipulate it so it would create or it would manufacture a leg. He was creating little monsters, in other words, and I thought this was so interesting and so much like Dr. Frankenstein that this was the sort of moment I realized I could finally do a Frankenstein story, which is something I had wanted to do for so long on The X-Files. [Dr. Pollidori explains his work and shows them a photograph of one result – proboscopedia – a fly with legs growing out of its mouth. Mulder asks Pollidori why he would do that and Pollidori replies, "Because I can."] I loved the shooting with a wide-angle lens and it's a lens that we use all the time on The X-Files but not incessantly like I used it here, but it gives you all kinds of opportunities to stuff the lens low into people's faces and to give you big dramatic, but in this case cartoony angles. [Mulder and Scully talk and Scully says that designer mutations like these are virtually impossible on humans and no scientist would ever dare to perform this kind of experiment on a human.] This is the one scene where I felt that I had not said something which I think is interesting to the episode and rather horrifying, is that we actually share the same genes with in this case the Drosophila fly, but the common housefly has the same genetic information in it as we have in us, and I think that that is something that I meant to communicate in the episode but never actually got perfectly communicated, and I wish Mulder could have communicated it right here because it's a rather horrifying idea. [Pollidori's wife, Elizabeth, is packing a suitcase for her husband's trip to the University of Ingolstadt. The house is over-decorated with flowers and wall decorations and ribbons.] The set decorators had a field day on this episode. I told them that they could not get too far out, particularly with the house of the doctor and his wife which was already a kind of crazy house. It was used to sell Christmas ornaments, and so when I walked in and I saw tables full of Christmas ornaments and I said 'we can use all this stuff and let's just put it up around the house'. And we did, and they did, and it ended up creating a wonderful visual clutter that in black-and-white captured exactly the flavor I had hoped for, so it was just a fortunate choice of locations in this case. All the set decoration was actually right on hand. [Mrs. Pollidori tries to talk to her husband again about having children, but he doesn't want any. He says, "What do you want – a baby or a Nobel Prize?" She watches through the bedroom window as he drives away, then falls on the bed, weeping. Outside, termite-tenting falls down over the window. Next day, Mulder goes into a diner.] Set dec. folks, Shirley Inget and her crew, had as much fun with the diner as with Dr. Pollidori's house. They had taken mostly postcards and just created the same kind of visual chaos that they had done in the doctor's house and in keeping with the sort of cartoony theme of the show. The casting for this scene was right along those lines too. They could not have been more cartoon characters, and I think when I was marching this group of the extras into The X-Files offices during those days, people thought I was out of my mind. Coreen Mayers brought to me wonderful Vancouver actors, the waitress and the girl who plays the Chicken Girl, Dana Grahame, she brought me these actresses who were just great and I think they had never been given such crazy parts, I know they hadn't, and I really thought about after working with them that I would like to try to figure out how to do a TV show using these characters in various leading roles because I liked working with them so much. [Scully enters the diner and walks up to Mulder. She shows him the local newspaper, which has reprinted their conversation in the woods, in which Scully was less than flattering about the townsfolk. Later, in the Berkowitz house, Shaineh confronts Izzy about recording the conversation.] The wide-angle lens also, along with the kind of leitmotif of this episode, give you a chance to funny staging and so it's kind of unreal or surreal or you want to keep... the staging should be in keeping with the tone of the show which is what you'll see here, or what you see here, was characters bending into frame, things you wouldn't do on a normal X-Files episode where we try to be as naturalistic as possible because the show really isn't scary if it seems unreal, if it seems unbelievable, people have to move very naturally. In this case, everyone could see it's a fairy tale and you could move people in a different manner, lock your scenes in a different manner, move your camera in a different way. [Izzy hands the tape recorder to Mulder who switches it on. Part of their conversation is heard. Mulder rewinds the tape and an earlier recording is from the night Shaineh was impregnated. There is the sound of Cher's song but also the moaning sounds from the monster. Mulder recognizes the voice they heard in the woods and Izzy says it's the Great Mutato. Inside the Pollidori house. It's full of the same vapors as before and the Great Mutato is dancing through the house while Cher's music plays.] Chris Owen, who played the monster, I think he was very nervous about actually dancing in this scene (chuckles). We played the Cher song here and he sang over it, and as for how nervous he was, he really only needed to do it two or three times. He was great from the beginning. [Outside the Berkowitz house, a man is sweeping up leaves.] The leaves here are... I thought they were so beautiful that I'd decided to make a bit out of them. You'll notice in the scene where Mulder and Scully leave Shaineh Berkowitz's house that there is a man raking the leaves behind them as they stop and talk and he looks at them, and you'll also notice that man, as the camera turns around, will be on the lawn behind them as well, which is a little bit of visual trick and joke and wink, and I don't know if anyone ever caught it, but it was fun to do things like that. A town where everyone looks the same. [Mulder and Scully discuss the case. Mulder refers to Victor Frankenstein and compares him to a genetic engineer whose power is only as limited as is his imagination. Scully is alarmed that he would reduce Pollidori to the literary stereotype of a mad scientist. Later, as they drive away. Mulder notices something and drives back to the Pollidori house which is covered by the termite-tenting. They get out of the car and run into the house.] This scene was done with doubles. David and Gillian were always running for first unit to second unit, and we'd work them constantly. Rarely did they have a day off, rarely did they have a few hours off, and so scenes where you didn't need to feature the actors' faces on camera, you could stage using doubles, in this case Mitch Pileggi's wife, Arlene Warren, and David's stunt double, who actually learned how to walk like David during the course of the show and run like him too. They are the two people who get out of the car here and then you magically cut to David Duchovny coming in the house, no one the wiser. [The Cher song is still playing as Scully and Mulder, guns drawn, walk through the house. The house is still full of vapor. Both of them eventually succumb and fall to the floor, unconscious. The Old Man seen earlier, who is now wearing a gas mask, looks down at them.] The idea for the smoke in the house came from something someone had told me about a kind of cake you can drop into a frying pan and create a knockout cloud in a house, and when I went to research this idea I couldn't find anyone who actually knew of such a substance or such a practice, and so I was forced to make up something which was the idea that there was some kind of livestock knockout gas that would work in such a way. It really is sort of uncommon on The X-Files to have something that is actually not pulled from real-life. [Mulder and Scully regain consciousness and look up at Dr. Pollidori. Mrs Pollidori describes the monster while Mulder and Scully, both tired and groggy, listen. Also listening are a newspaper reporter and a sheriff. Mulder asks Pollidori if there's anything he'd like to say.] This scene is basically expository. We learn so much, David and Gillian wanted to play it as still somewhat drugged which is not the way I had imagined it, and disheveled is not the way I had imagined it either, but so many things happen in this little scene where Dr. Pollidori's wife learns she may have been impregnated. Mulder finds the so-called smoking gun and we get our first hint of the reporter who will be so important to the episode later on - Chicken Girl, as we called her. [Mulder finds an empty jar of peanut butter in a garbage can.] The monster, of course, likes peanut butter. [In Mutato's room, in the storm cellar under the farmhouse, he is watching the movie "Mask" on television.] I wanted to make sure that we didn't get to see the monster too well before we would really reveal him, so this is our first hint of the Great Mutato. [The Old Man enters, carrying a peanut butter sandwich.] The basement here was completely built and dressed on set, on stage and the idea to use the movie "Mask" really came as a result of my interest in Cher which came mostly through an entire summer of listening to her music - I just became fixated on several different songs that she had, contemporary songs, that led me to a lot of her older music and Sonny and Cher music. And I think it was those songs really that were the ultimate inspiration for this episode, and the music that would be so important to the end of the show and to the monster. [The Old Man's farmhouse. Dr. Pollidori enters. He attacks and kills his father.] The scene where Dr. Pollidori comes in and he threatens his father was staged in a little tiny farmhouse room but I think I had four different cameras on this scene: one under the table, one in a room off to the side of the kitchen which is where this is staged, we had a lighting effect, it was a very complicated scene and I used every bit of film that I shot in it. [In the diner. Now the reaction of the customers and staff to Mulder is hostile.] The character who plays the Big Man in the diner, who will trip Mulder as Mulder's popularity takes a sudden turn in the town, was a man named C. Ernst Harth who was a former professional wrestler. He's a gentle giant and he was one of the people who I keyed on in this episode and who I asked to do some really physical work which ended up in him blowing out a knee in a later scene when the barn catches on fire. [Customers just stare at Mulder. The food the waitress puts down in front of him is inedible. The waitress then pours coffee in his lap.] David Duchovny had ad-libbed the line where, when the waitress pours the coffee on his lap. He said, I think he said: 'great, now my crotch will be up all night,' and it was a good line. It didn't make the picture but it was very funny. [Outside the diner, a group of people run past. Mulder follows them and finds a large crowd outside the post office.] Moving all these extras like this in a limited amount of time, getting them to move en masse in one direction, turned out to be a big, big deal because what happens with extras when they know they have a chance to be on camera is they know where the camera is and they will stop and play to the camera and so you get a lot of extras who start milling around where the camera is instead of moving to their marks. It's really more like a round-up than it is like directing when you've got to get a lot of people who are not featured actors to behave not like featured actors. [The post man pulls Izzy out of the post office. Izzy is wearing a rubber Mutato mask.] I had originally asked Mark Messier, the professional hockey player, if he would play the postman in this case because he is a Canadian and he was in town, but he couldn't make it so we were forced to make another choice which was easy because I had somebody who was funny and fitted right in with the scene. The bit where the actor, Stewart Gale, presses his mouth up to the glass here was actually his idea. I saw him standing around clowning and doing this, and I decided to use it in the picture and it was perfect for the character. [Scully walks up to Mulder and explains that the residue in the frying pan was of a substance used by farmers to anesthetize herds of animals. The Old Man's kitchen. Mutato enters and finds his father dead on the floor. He carries the body to the barn.] I remember the weather was extremely cold while we were shooting this. It was September, October, but there had been a real cold snap and this farmhouse here was unheated, and every day we would just be bundled up with gloves on and I remember this scene was so touching to shoot. It was just very cold and bleak and it felt like death, and Chris Owen was so touching in the part and even without this beautiful music, the beautiful score generally by Mark Snow, it was just a very, very touching scene and sequence where he carries his dead father into the barn past all the farm animals and starts to dig his grave. [Mutato digs in the dirt floor, sobbing while he does so.] You can see this steam coming out of Chris' mouth, that's the real thing, it was just a nearly freezing, if not freezing weather. Clear as can be, but damp, damp, cold earth. It played perfectly for the scene. We added the steam coming out of the second mouth, of course Chris only has one mouth, so he was unable to do that effect himself. [Mulder and Scully drive up to the farmhouse and enter the barn.] I decided to shoot this handheld because it was a perfect point of view of what would be Chicken Girl. The animals all performed beautifully here. None of them directed, of course, we were just lucky to catch them on camera. It was interesting shooting with animals, I had never done it before, but getting them to be where you wanted them to be at any one point was almost impossible, and when we had to make them eventually run en masse out of this barn when it was set afire, was even more chaotic, it was really just close your eyes and hope for the best. [There's a noise and Mulder and Scully raise a challenge, guns drawn.] Throwing chickens out of the hay loft there, you just hoped the animals stay where they're supposed to, land where they're supposed to. [The chicken lady comes to the edge of the hay loft.] Before she did this part, Dana Grahame had never performed like a chicken before (laughs), because no one had ever asked her, so I had to demonstrate for her how a chicken moves its neck and she became an expert at it overnight. Her hairstyle was done beautifully, they actually brought in a chicken, a black-and-white chicken, a hen, for them to model her hairstyle after. [There's a noise outside and Mulder and Scully leave the barn to investigate.] The rain here is real. It's one of the beauties of shooting in Vancouver is that you get a lot of free atmosphere. [People carrying burning torches march towards the farm buildings. They are led by Dr. Pollidori.] This scene is right out of the James Whale "Frankenstein" where the angry crowd comes looking for the monster. Even some of the words come right from that original Frankenstein, the book Frankenstein - the words that Dr. Pollidori speaks here. [Dr. Pollidori: He is not a man, he is a monster! Crowd: Yeah! Dr. Pollidori: The fiend must be found. And then we'll let justice take its course. Crowd: Yeah! Dr. Pollidori: Search every crevice, every ravine. You get him alive if you can, but you get him! Crowd: Yeah!] You can see the rain just sheeting off the top of the barn, that's all real atmosphere. [The crowd enters the barn.] This is probably one of our most finest moments, X-Files moments. We had all these extras running around a barn full of hay, and a barn that was just ready to go up in flames any moment (chuckles) if someone happened to touch one of these torches to a piece of wood because it was just this old, dilapidated barn, and that it didn't burn down, really burn down, is amazing but that we actually were able to make it seem as if the barn does burn here is a trick that is pulled off by Dave Gauthier, our special effects man, using giant propane tanks and all kinds of different jets coming out of here and there. The facade on the barn, as you'll see later, was re-created so what we're actually seeming to burn is only a facade of a barn. [Scully has seen a figure at the door to the storm cellar. Mulder and Scully go into Mutato's room in the cellar and see all the Cher memorabilia. They hear a noise and discover Mutato hiding in a corner.] You'll see that the visual quote here, when Mulder comes out from beside the bed and Scully finds him in the doctor's house, is just like this scene where they now come upon Mutato in his own bedroom. [Scully speaks gently to Mutato.] The beautiful make-up here is done by Toby Lindala who was nominated for an Emmy, as were many other people in this episode, seven Emmy nominations. [The barn is now on fire.] Trying to create chaos, you need to actually have chaos to make it look like chaos, and that's what we had here. People were injured coming out of this barn, running with chickens and pigs and goats. A horse trampled somebody. It was a crazy night, but everyone was so game and everyone was so ready to give their all for this episode, it was one of those little miraculous X-Files moments where all sort of the gods were looking down on us, shining down on us, and made it all come together. [The Chicken Girl has seen Mulder and Scully and Mutato at the door to the storm cellar. The crowd rushes to the storm cellar, where Mulder and Scully and Mutato back into a corner. Windows into the cellar are smashed.] This scene, the basement here is all done on stage. Those windows being smashed in are being done by actors standing above the set. [Pollidori leads a group towards Mutato. The crowd yells for Mutato to show his face.] And this is really one of the, I think, more touching scenes that we've ever done on The X-Files, where Chris Owen as Mutato explains himself and the misdeeds of his creator, Dr. Pollidori here, who is actually his brother. And we learn where Stewart Berkowitz came from, where the Chicken Girl came from, and the Horse Boy and the Goat Boy, that these were all mistakes by Dr. Pollidori's father in trying to create a mate, a friend for his adopted son. [Mutato talks to the crowd.] You'll notice that the mouth, the second mouth on the mask created by Toby Lindala here, actually moves. It is articulated as well, it's an animatronic mouth, and I thought that I never shot that quite right to get the full effect of that, even though I tried, but with the black-and-white and the shadows, you really had to look closely to see that the second mouth on the second part of his fly face actually moves. [Mutato says that his father loved him despite his deformities but that he grew lonely because he couldn't show his face outside the farm. His father tried to create a mate for him.] This is a long single take. Chris Owen doing this three or four times beautifully each time. I was really just choosing the best out of really four beautiful shots and performances. [Now Shaineh is beginning to realize where Izzy came from. Mulder and Scully also start realizing the similarity in looks between the animals there and some of the people.] The beautiful production design was by Graeme Murray and his art director, Greg Loewen, and they won the Emmy, one of seven nominations, one of 16 nominations we got for the season, they were the only winners out of the group but I really think that for my money that this was probably one of the most beautiful episodes of television created that year. So much special effort went into it, things you just don't normally see on an episodic television show. [Mutato asks if Pollidori can create a mate for him, if so then he will take the blame as a murderer.] You'll see that the eye on the mask here moves as well. It's a beautiful touch. [Dr. Pollidori: I don't know how to recreate you. You were a mistake.] To Chris Owen, many, many hours sitting in a make-up chair, I think five hours to have this make-up applied. He was happy not to have to play this character again. [Mutato says that what he and his father did was wrong, but Shaineh gained a loving son, and Mutato learned through the homes he visited of the world and a mother's love that he'll never know.] The story jumps forward rather quickly here when we see that the tables are turned, that the monster is spared and that the evil doctor is taken off by the authorities. But the story's not over, of course. Agent Mulder is not satisfied. He calls for the writer here, something I can appreciate. The story shouldn't end this way. [Scully: There's not going to be any bride, Mulder. Not in this story. Mulder: Where is the writer?] And here is the writer. [Mulder: I want to speak to the writer.] Izzy Berkowitz. [Start of Cher singing "Walking in Memphis". Several cars are driving down the road.] This scene was very difficult to shoot, believe it or not. The cars had to go under a camera in perfect coordination and distance and order, and every take you do, you have to reassemble the cars at one end and ask them to drive under, and ask these, basically these extras to drive at the same speed, at the same distance apart, and something that looks so easy actually became so difficult. [Mulder and Scully are in their car, Mutato sitting in the back.] This is what we call a poor man's process, was shot on stage, it's a driving thing which is fine. Something we don't like to do a lot but because this was a fairy tale I didn't need to be realistic. [Mulder, Scully, Mutato and a number of the townsfolk are inside a nightclub.] We rented out an entire concert hall in Vancouver, a place that had been abandoned, and dressed it and put up, Graeme Murray and his crew put up sequins and sparklers, and we'd put up lights and disco balls, and I wanted as much atmosphere and glitter and gloss as possible for my money, mostly it's done on a shoestring. I have Tracey Bell who is a celebratory impersonator playing Cher. She actually does a wonderful Cher and in this case she doesn't get to actually show off all of her talents because she has to turn away from camera just at the right moments. [The Jerry Springer Show. Elizabeth Pollidori and Shaineh Berkowitz with their two-faced babies. Shaineh: What's not to love?] Jerry Springer makes a cameo on the show. It wouldn't be complete without Jerry Springer. [Cher invites Mutato to dance. Then Mulder invites Scully to dance.] We've got a slow motion here at the end. And I had everyone in the background or many people in the background had cameras with flashes and I wanted those flashes going off and I wanted to give a kind of fairy tale ending, which ends in the comic book again. [End credits] This episode was nominated for seven Emmys. I was nominated for a directing Emmy, and one of the judges who was sitting in the room when the final judging was being done, came up to me after we had actually lost that Emmy, and said that he loved the episode and he said he knew it wasn't going to win though, when after the episode was aired, two older judges who were sitting in the front of the room turned around and asked the rest of the judges: 'What was that guy smoking?' (laughs). He said he knew then and I know now why this episode didn't win an Emmy. While we've gotten so much Emmy attention, I think that it is so offbeat, so much of the time that really people sometimes just don't know what to make of it. The End |