'Improbable' commentary by Chris Carter

Transcript of the DVD Audio Commentary by Chris Carter for 'Improbable'

[Transcribed by: Libby
Edited by: X_Follower]

This is Chris Carter, writer and director of this episode, 'Improbable'.

This whole idea for this episode is about numbers and that significance of numbers in our lives starts here on the card table where the players are being dealt a hand each which is a sort of... the idea is that we're all dealt hands, genetic hands, and maybe even numerological hands that give us basically the tools with which we deal and/or use for our lives. So the idea is that there is free will and there is fate, and fate is somewhat determined by our genetics, but how much it is determined by our genetics is the question. So, this is the idea that begins the episode and sort of informs the whole story.

You have a character, Wayne, here who is dealt the bad hand, not just at the table, but in life. And he acts on his bad impulses. Is it fate that Wayne is about, the character, this is what I was interested in exploring here. As we'll see with the introduction in a moment of a character who throws all of this into question – God – we're going to see what his place is in all of this, or at least explore what Burt Reynolds, playing God here, has to do with the character Wayne.

[Wayne walks to the bar.
God: Bartender? Seven and seven, pack of Morleys.
Wayne sits down and speaks to the bartender.
Wayne: Seven and seven, pack of Morleys.
God: We have a winner!]

The idea is that God knows all the numbers. They're his numbers and he has laid them down and he is in charge of the big game, the big gaming casino, if you will. And that he's trying to speak to Wayne here. The idea is that God has some, or less or more, influence over our lives, but what he tries to show us is the numbers, he tries to show us the game – if you look at life as a game, as a game to be won or lost.

[God: You can think. Cards can't. They just lie there. You gotta make them work for you.]

All he wants is for mankind to play his game, to win his game, to understand his game, to be good at his game, which is what he's trying to communicate to Mad Wayne in this sequence. But Wayne – he's too dense or too unaccepting to recognize that God is trying to show him the numbers, he's trying to show him the path to goodness here. Obviously, he's done this before with Wayne, he has appeared in his life and tried to convince him of the beauty of the numbers, but Wayne refuses to see this and acts on his bad impulses.

[God: She comes here every Friday, loses her paycheck, cries all weekend.]

Of course, luck plays a part in life too, and God looks over the hapless soon-to-become-victim and talks about her lack of luck, about her numbers not coming up for whatever reason, one of the mysteries of life. And God tries to impress Wayne with his own ability to get up and make another decision. But Wayne acts on the impulses, the character, and the evil that is within him. Much to God's dismay. God is playing a game of solitaire here, as you'll see. God always wins, of course, because God knows the secrets to all the games.

[Wayne follows the victim.]

There were so many opportunities for me during the course of The X-Files to work with terrific actors. This was a chance for me to work with a star who came, as they say, his bags packed, ready to roll. God here is Burt Reynolds, is disappointed he can't communicate to Mad Wayne. Mad Wayne just ignores his advice which is that he's got to try to better his hand, he's got to try to figure out the game, and Mad Wayne goes right true to form, true to character, Mad Wayne goes and murders the girl, disappointing God who turns over the death card, the ace of spades.

[Main Titles]

So this episode is really, for me, it's a chance to sort of put together things that I never would get to put together otherwise in the show, but I was reading some Stephen Hawking, I was reading about theoretical physics, quantum physics, things that are very hard to put into a story, into story-telling, but I took the opportunity, and this could have been a real bad idea, which is to actually put God into the episode, but I didn't know how else to do this the way I wanted to do it, which is I wanted to deal with some of the ideas that I was reading about, which is the idea that the world is probabilistic, that it can be statistically determined what is going to happen in the world if you go about the proper equation. We'll see that "The Truth Is Out There" was replaced by "Dio Ti Ama", which is "God love you", as we'll see Burt Reynolds loves the sinner as well as the saint. This episode is about the patterns, also pattern recognition, about the things that we don't see in life, because we either don't open our eyes to them or we don't have the perspective, the ability to see through the trees, if you will, to the beauty of the patterns and the numbers in life.

[Reyes moving down the corridor in the FBI, reading a newspaper, people moving out of her way. Going into an elevator, other people join her.]

I thought that overhead shot was a nice God's point of view shot. Seeing how there are patterns unrecognized to us otherwise, as they were in the elevator there.

Using Monica Reyes for this episode was interesting playing off Scully because she is a person who is open to anything. That was the character that we created when we brought her into the show. She was tolerant of crazy things and more akin to Mulder in that way than to Scully.

The idea that if God has all these, uh, if everything is numerical and God has an equation that it can be figured out, but numerology, which is a kind of kooky science, is the mystery, what is in fact left out of the probability, it's what physicists would call the uncertainty or the unknown characteristics, what it is that only God knows.

[Scully: I presume you mean the so-called unified theory, what physicists often refer to as the theory of everything.]

Scully of course is a doubter here, she talks about the inability to know everything, that it's probably impossible to know everything, which is a big debate within the scientific world between material scientists or solid-state scientists, physicists, and quantum physicists, one deals in theoretical, the other one deals in the practical, the real world. My brother gave me a lot of help on this episode. He is a scientist, a professor and a scientist at MIT and so I took all these things that I was reading, which I think I understand and then they disappear from me, and I posed a bunch of questions to him about the existence of God, about theoretically what scientists think about the existence of God and quantum physicists think about the existence of God, and his answers were very interesting. Basically, everything goes back to Einstein who said nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but quantum physicists say there are things that can travel faster than the speed of light, probabilistically there are, and this is sort of where God comes into the picture. It's all very complicated and it's wonderful because it is really dealing on the far edges of knowledge and of understanding and of mathematics, but it really is the most rational approach that I can see to trying to get to the heart of existence, of why we're here, what we're doing here and what it's all about and so this episode, I guess, is in that way, it's a very broad and I guess deep, or the intention was to try and make it a very broad and deep episode, but trying to make it humorous and entertaining and keep a bit of a mystery afoot.

[Reyes and Scully look at photos of the victims.]

The three victims prior to Amy Sheridan Aufsbergher there, were the names of all girls that I went to elementary school with and so I try to make sure that I immortalized as many of my old friends as possible on The X-Files as dead people.

Scully here will barely tolerate the idea which is being put forward by Annabeth, which is the numerological idea, a connection she is making. She is actually formulating a sort of kooky equation based on numerology, that these characters are linked through some kind of connection which are the dates involved. Then Scully, being a good forensic scientist, looks at the picture and in fact makes a connection herself.

The numerology in this episode is all accurate. All the names were, the middle names, made the numbers and the letters, if you will, add up to the actual numbers that are in the numerology itself. So if the numerologists were actually able to come in and do the karmic numbers in this case, they would all be accurate.

[Scully: There's a pattern in the bruising.]

The piece of evidence here is connected directly to the ring that we will see momentarily being worn by the villain, Mad Wayne, and it too has significance, everything has numerological significance or numerical significance, including the forensic evidence and the ring that Mad Wayne wears which is symbolic of the devil. I guess the devil, this is, you know, it's kind of left kind of vague, is the person who tries to trip you, to prevent you from playing the game well. He doesn't appear in the episode, I guess he's symbolized by the person Mad Wayne, who cannot see that God is trying to help him to play the game. Mad Wayne does not see the beauty in life, Mad Wayne only sees the darkness and the ugliness.

[God is doing card tricks across the road from Wayne's apartment block.]

You'll see here that the windows are numerical, that they actually figure into the story, the number of windows, the window rail opens and closes. And Burt Reynolds, playing God, is trying to show Wayne the beauty and he loves the beauty himself. He loves the music, he loves his creation, he loves watching Man experience it and he feels the pulse and the rhythm. And that's something that came to me – I was taking piano lessons and I had a teacher who said to me that her God is the rhythm, that she feels that that's the thing that is her religion, it's the rhythm. And it makes sense to you on some sort of gut level, is that everything is rhythmic, that there's a time and that time is counted and time and space can be considered as part of a rhythm.

The triplets in this sequence, one of them works with us on The X- Files, Sandra Tripicchio, and those are her two sisters, she's a triplet, and so we got to include her in the episode too. So here you get the numerological aspect of the story in both music and in cards, the game, the numbers, the threes in this case. Putting together the sequence with these series of threes was fun and kind of nerve-wracking, running from one thing to another, getting that baby carriage to shoo the birds and leaving three birds, that was just a stroke of luck. It was actually strange to see how few people actually can do things rhythmically. The shaking of the baby rattle, trying to do that rhythmically, the sweeping of the broom, no one could stay in time to this music which we played over and over and over, which was very funny.

[Wayne at God's card table. Three cards.
God: Now, two clowns and a man with a crown.
God turns over the cards – two jokers and a king.
God: Want to try your luck, sailor?
God turns the card face down and moves them around.
God: King runs, but he can't hide. How can you lose? Kids' stuff.]

Here's God trying to show Wayne once again that it's a game, it's how you play the game that makes you successful in life. If he can figure out God's game, if the physicists can figure out God's game, we could understand the universe. Wayne's problem is, of course, much smaller than that, he's trying to figure out how to just see the beauty, just to be successful in life.

[Wayne: You got something to say to me, you say it.]

Of course, he doesn't want to listen to what God has to say, and he's going to turn the table over once again. This was filmed on the back lot at Universal where we got to take an entire street and turn it into a part of Little Italy. And Corey Kaplan, the production designer and her art directors, did such an amazing job with a little time and, you know, too little money and as you'll see later on, they were able to turn this into a beautiful festival.

[Reyes visits the numerologist, Vicki Burdick played by Ellen Greene.]

Vicki Burdick is someone I went to high school with. So of course she must die, all out of fondness. I'd seen Ellen Greene in "The Little Shop of Horrors" both in New York and Los Angeles and had never had a chance to work with her, so it was really fun. We spent a long day doing this scene and she was really a trooper because it actually took some time and effort but she was very open to the direction I gave her. This was also a very difficult scene, there was a lot of information to remember, we spent a long time shooting this little sequence here. This is an amazing set, beautifully decorated by Tim Stepeck who was the set decorator, he did a really beautiful job. This was full of books, very interesting. Of course, I shot it very tight, you get to see very little of that, but you'll see it later on.

[Reyes hands a folder to the numerologist.]

These are actually gruesome photographs that for sort of a cartoony episode – it's sort of very bloody.

[Reyes' phone rings. It's Doggett. Their conversation is shown by a split screen.]

This split screen idea was, I think, something that added to the kind of cartoonish aspect of the episode and which was by design and I thought it was a nice way to jump the story forward because it was sort of an out-of-the-ordinary way of telling an X-File.

[Reyes enters a room in the FBI and is greeted with applause from a crowd of other agents.]

Monica being congratulated on her ability to figure out this crime. Of course she is here with a lot of people who don't understand quite how she did it but they're happy, they're congratulating her and she'll end up basically shooting herself in the foot by telling them it's all in the numerology.

The idea with John Kapelos' character here, Agent Fordyce, is that he is intolerant, unacceptable, he won't open his eyes to possibility, to probability. He is one of the reasons that we don't see the numbers, he is the deterrent, the impediment to understanding. His approach is what disallows us from seeing the beauty of the numbers. This is a very hard part and he came in and nailed it, but it wasn't a breeze. This is very hard, he had to do this time and again because it was so fast, so much information said without inflection. I wouldn't let him use his hands, he was the only man for the job, did a beautiful job, but we really put him to the test with so much to spill in so little time. This sequence is shot with wide angle lens as is most of the episode, and so the actors are acting right into the matte box most of the time.

[The numerologist phones Reyes.]

The story jumps here as Act 1 comes to an end with the shadow of guess who, Mad Wayne, coming in and in fact proving Annabeth's wacky theory out, that there is a connection between these otherwise unconnected people in times and dates.

[Numerologist's body bag being unzipped.]

The camera inside the body bag here. Another gruesome element to this otherwise kind of light-hearted episode. Here you get to see this beautiful set a lot better. I totally screwed up this shooting by putting the camera so close to people like this, you create kind of odd eyelines and when you have three people in this scene, being Robert, Annabeth and John, I ended up putting the camera in the wrong place. We had a stand-in script supervisor who didn't catch it, or didn't understand how I was going to cut it, so we ended up having to go back and shoot one of Robert Patrick's close-ups over again, because I'd put the camera in completely the wrong place.

Here John Kapelos once again having to spill out, speak all this verbiage that I had given to him. I wanted him to be the kind of plodding bureaucrat who is unable to tolerate, who is unable to appreciate the sort of imaginative ideas of Annabeth Gish, of Monica Reyes here. And he's the kind of stick-in-the-mud character. Agent Doggett, as always, has to walk the line between the two worlds and here he ends up trying to support Monica but he will end up questioning her himself. There's a lot of double-speak in this scene which is meant to be confusing as is the sort of science that forms this whole idea of this episode. But I think it's charming, it's in character for the Monica Reyes sort of arc and in character for Agent Doggett even though it's a very offbeat episode.

[Reyes: A calculation of numbers that rule their lives in 13 different categories.
Doggett: But a calculation based on what?
Reyes: On names and birth dates.
Doggett: Because my name is John J. Doggett and I was born April 4th, 1960, I got some kind of magic number?
Reyes: Six.]

People are people, Monica Reyes says here, which kind of explains away the elements that can't be explained. People don't act probably, they don't act in a scientific way. If characters can be reduced to an equation, they are the least probable of all scientific equations, the least predictable.

[Reyes goes over to the window and slides it open.]

Once again, the number of the windows and moving on here to dominoes as the next game that Mad Wayne is asked to appreciate by God. God trying to teach him a lesson as he does to us all with the beauty of numbers and of the world. Trying to exert influence over Mad Wayne, trying to show him the way, the path, which he never seems to take.

[Wayne and God sat at a table outside.]

John Doggett coming by, and looking into the eyes of the killer. Being given this opportunity, walks right past, does not see the patterns because they're subtle and they're mysterious. Half this scene is shot during the day and half of it as the sun is going down. We were sort of in a canyon of buildings here and so we had to light Burt Reynolds basically dark to match the Mad Wayne side of the scene. It's very unnoticeable but as we were doing it, you run around like crazy, trying to shoot with the available light and sun. Sometimes you can't do it.

Ray McKinnon, who plays Mad Wayne, was great through the whole shoot. Actually, during the course of the episode, was both nominated and won an Academy Award for a short film he directed, so there was some excitement there. It was really weird to be directing this guy when he was up on the stage receiving an Academy Award during the course of the shooting.

[Scully in the autopsy room.]

This is, for me, the last autopsy scene I would ever shoot with Scully in the FBI, which was kind of sad. Using once again interesting camera angles, numbers, elements. You'll see the number of tools on the table is significant as is another piece of evidence here. You'll see the curls on her forehead form the important number 666. There's another 6s which match back to the dominoes. So everything is interconnected. Scully finds her tape has stopped at 666. It's all too improbable. So the whole episode is a conceit, this idea that numerology is an important part of our life and plays a part, but it really is just used here to illustrate the idea of patterns, patterns of behavior, of the ways in which numbers rule both the universe and our lives and our ability to solve things, to solve our mysteries of life, to solve these cases, which will lead them, as we'll see as the act comes to a close here, they are both [Scully and Reyes] believers of the numerological episode.

The use of the games and the numbers in the episode came as a result of my sort of interest in poker. I was reading... there was a story in Harpers that ended up being turned into a book, about a man who entered the World Series in poker and I'm so fascinated by the poker players and their ability to count cards, to basically predict the future, which is what makes it a successful poker player. It sort of led me to this episode and the use of games, and the idea that good poker players are doing kind of what good scientists are doing which is they're trying to figure out how to win the game, how to figure out what God had in mind, how to figure out how he organized the universe, so there is, I think, a connection between something as simple as a game, between what scientists do every day.

By looking carefully at the material now, Agent Doggett is making a connection, something bothers him, something he can't see, he's trying to find connections. He's looking deeper, he's doing what successful people do in life which is to question, which is to look past the surface, to look past their own dogma or orthodoxy. And John Kapelos' character here won't hear it. He doesn't want to see the signs, the evidence that is being left, that God is leaving for us to see, to figure out. Maybe it's as plain as day. Maybe that's the ultimate truth is that the plain is very simple and we don't see it as simple as it is. All we know is we've got a dead girl here. We've gor to figure out who killed her.

[Scully and Reyes leave the numerologist's office.]

This is all shot on a stage, beautifully designed set by Corey Kaplan and her team, as always. The elevators here are all make-believe or, I should say, there're all created by us, which will connect down to a lobby in a hotel, a rather sleazy hotel in downtown Los Angeles where we had to brave our own Mad Waynes during the course of shooting. Shooting in an elevator is always interesting, especially when you have three people stacked in the camera. The practical location here, which is the hotel, connects to the stage location which is where the scene began. It's a little movie magic. This hotel location here, this lobby, was actually coincidentally used in one of the episodes of a show that was very inspirational to me, The Night Stalker. I happened to be watching an episode from the 1970s, and saw that very location used in one of the two 2-hour movies that were written by Richard Matheson and starred Darren McGavin who later worked on The X-Files.

We are now in an underground garage in downtown Los Angeles where we spent several days shooting, staging the scenes that are going to come. You shoot these scenes very quickly and you have very little time before to assemble them and put them into some kind of, hopefully as close as you can to your imagined finished product. And it always helps me if I'm able to give the editor as much information as possible during the course of shooting about how I imagine the pieces assembled. I worked with Scott Wallace who did a great job I think on this episode, putting together what I had imagined, but the time crunch, as it always is in television, is great so simple pieces like this are very easy to imagine but when the scenes start to get more elaborate and more broad or more sort of whimsical, as you'll see here in a moment when they find Burt Reynolds in the car, they become a little more hard for the editor to see what I actually had in mind. And I remember this being a sort of confusing series because I had shot it out of order and had not... and shot it wide angle in some cases and longer lens in other cases. It didn't make perfect sense to him, maybe it didn't even make perfect sense to me as I was shooting, but I remember this being a particularly difficult sequence to edit.

Burt Reynolds worked long hours through these scenes. He had a lot to do and he spent most of the time down on the set with the crew. He was just so accommodating, worked very, very hard. He had to do kind of crazy things here – through the episode he has to sing, he has to dance. He wanted to practice all this, he wanted to be good at them. He wanted to know what I wanted. He wanted to be ready to perform, so he took his work seriously and as you'll see here coming up, had a chance to do some very sort of un-Burt-Reynolds-like things. He had come to me early on and said 'I was thinking about playing the character like this.' We talked about it for a while and I said, 'I think, you've just got to be Burt Reynolds, just be yourself, just bring that Burt Reynolds charm to the character.' And that's really what he did. He's such a charming man and a charming actor and a good comedian. He has this look, this mischievous look in his eye and he got to wear some crazy wardrobe here too – I couldn't decide what I wanted him to wear early on and I sort of decided on really tacky, floral – who knows what God would wear – but some tacky, floral clothes seemed to be the right thing. I think God has a sort of an appreciation of beauty, the appreciation being what Man has done with the elements that he has provided for them.

[Scully: What time is your friend coming?
God looks at his arm – no watch.
God: Soon.]

Of course God doesn't need a watch, he knows the time always. And that's really one of my ideas too is that his creation is basically continued by mankind. Mankind takes the elements that were given to him by God and continues to create almost past God's vision of creation, and so I think God would appreciate this wardrobe because it is so crazy and unexpected, even he might not have created it. God of course loves music, talks about how much he loves music here, he loves digital music because it's making use of another of his beautiful creations which is mathematics and I think that it speaks to what I like about the episode which is the musical component which is happy music, happy bright music. And this music I found by Karl Zero. The checkers was the final game here in the series of games and God gets to play.

[Scully: How did we get ourselves into this?]

And using the red and the black, you see here that the checkers are more than just a game that God can win every time, but God is trying to provide an element, a clue, as he does for us, to try to help Scully and Reyes win the game, which is to catch Mad Wayne.

[Reyes and Scully play checkers, while God dances.]

Burt Reynolds was such a trooper here, because I had to say to him, this is some of my better direction, I said, 'You ought to shake your ass right in front of the camera,' and he did it, and he was so funny every time he did it, he was just really... Gillian's reaction to it, which made it even more precious, and it's one of my favorite shots in this show.

[Reyes and Scully at the checker board. Reyes suddenly turns it around.]

This is an idea of Scully recognizing the red and the black and they had to do it without over-explaining it. The idea that she sees... or that Annabeth sees the connection between the hair colors, the kind of victims he chooses and makes a connection. God was able to, through the game of checkers, communicate to them something that will make them successful. And here the entire episode is going to be summed up in the points of view of Monica Reyes and Agent Scully. The idea that there is a beauty to the pattern and Scully saying that people don't act on that, they act on free will. And the idea that God involves himself in your fate through either direct or indirect methods. I had written this line that said: God does not play dice with the universe – which is actually a paraphrase, it's not the exact quote that Einstein used. I had written it, but for some reason I had left the line undone, and Gillian seized on it immediately and actually bettered the line by saying: nor does he play checkers, or something like that. Anyway, the line was not right in the script and Gillian made it right as she has been so good at doing throughout the course of the show. She's terrific with script and story and I know she's off to, as we speak or as I speak, to write and direct her own feature film which I'm sure she'll do terrific on. This whole sequence is a bit of a... sort of philosophical, talky, preachy, hopefully entertaining little piece about really what the episode is all about, which is that God is so appreciative when someone starts to understand as Agent Reyes is doing here, his game, understand the beauty of his creation, even though Scully is trying to refute it. The idea here, too, is the idea between the old physics and the new physics, the idea that God does not play dice with the universe. There are two schools of thought: the idea that there are forces outside of the forces of science, the laws of science, and this Einsteinian idea that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. The new physics say in fact there may be things that travel faster than the speed of light and if that is the case, that is the unknown variant and could be perhaps what God is, that which cannot be explained by current science.

The garage, if you can see in some of the wide shots, is filled with classic cars and that's just also a crazy element that I wanted for the episode, things that didn't quite make sense, sort of visual joke, kind of fit with, I don't know, kind of fit with the San Genaro festival, with the Little Italy, with the characters on the street, the sort of improbable elements of the entire episode and story. When you get a lot of classic cars, the only thing you never imagine, or I didn't imagine, was that they smoke a lot and so here are all these cars with these old fashioned exhaust systems, and they're pulling them down into a parking garage and the garage immediately fills up with a sort of do-it-yourself smog. So, we tried not to move too many of the cars around too often. And, lo and behold, with what they've determined through the gentle coaxing of God, in fact they found Mad Wayne. Now what God does, he's going to sit back and watch what action they take. He's done his job and now it's up to Scully and Reyes.

[Wayne grabs Reyes.]

This stunt you're about to see we had to do a number of times, mostly because I couldn't figure out how to shoot it, and I needed to do it with both the actors and the stunt people and part of it seemed too violent, part of it seemed unbelievable, that you couldn't hear Reyes, there were just elements that didn't work as I was trying to put it together. The door opened, the knock-down, the emergence of Agent Doggett who wasn't on the set for half of this scene, who only appeared in a later... I think it was actually another day, so it was a series of things that either didn't quite work right or I didn't plan them properly, but this little sequence has, you know, it's got a ton of little, tiny pieces, some of them using the actors. I think Robert Patrick wasn't there for some of the shots where you're following him – if you look closely you'll see it is a stand-in. Of course, when they go to ask Wayne what drove him, he dies unable to give them the answer, so as is in life the mystery remains.

How did Agent Doggett find them? Of course he looked at the clues, he looked at the numbers and as improbable as that was, it led him to them in the garage and he's able to save their lives. God of course has disappeared, he's done his job, they've been successful by winning the game.

I think the music is one of the elements that really makes this episode sweet and special and it was a man named Karl Zero who I had a chance to meet later on, who's a personality and a journalist in France who loves these songs, these classic, old songs and has redone them. And they were so sweet, it's what I imagine God, if he could choose music to listen to, he might listen to this because it represents the kind of happiness of the human spirit, the beauty and the lightness that I guess he hopes, in my mind, that we all appreciate in his creation.

The idea for this episode, it came out of... it was kind of a big idea and I had been thinking about September 11th which had just happened a few months prior, and the idea that all these people died and many of them were believers in God and so were their families, and what that tested – the idea that God interferes in our lives or he listens to us and he acts and pulls the strings and I think that it tested a lot of people's faith in a very horrible way, that so many people could be so affected, innocent people, by this one act and it made it hard for people to believe that God was someone who was listening to us and/or helping us. And my idea was that it's up to us, it's up to our free will, our ability to sort of, I guess, glorify God through the appreciation of his creation, of the numbers, of the ways in which we see and understand his creation through science, through art, and that as long as you are joyous and appreciate beauty that you can have this relationship with God which is sort of a big idea that led to this festival, the San Genaro festival here on the street at the end, which is really disconnected from the rest of the episode. But there was no San Genaro festival in New York City as a result of the World Trade Center bombing, so we had the opportunity to create that here which is a celebration of life, of beauty and ultimately of God who is everywhere and no matter what we destroy, we can't destroy him.

This final shot was done on a giant crane, the boom probably was over a hundred feet in the air with these dancers dancing on cue, you get to see the entire festival and the question is finally answered: who is Burt Reynolds and where did he go? And as we see, if you look carefully, always, he's everywhere.

The End